Exposition Internationale Des Arts Et Techniques Dans La Vie Moderne - Exhibitions

Exhibitions

At first the center piece of the exposition was to be a 2,300-foot (700 m) tower which had a spiraling road to a parking garage located at the top and a hotel and restaurant located above that. The idea was abandoned as far too expensive.

The Canadian pavilion included Joseph-Émile Brunet' 28-foot sculpture of a buffalo (1937). Paintings by Joseph-Émile Brunet, panels on the outside of the structure, and a show inside the Canadian pavilion depicted aspects of Canadian culture.

The Spanish pavilion attracted attention as the exposition took place during the Spanish Civil War. The Spanish pavilion was built by the Spanish architect Josep Lluis Sert. The pavilion, set up by the Republican government, included Pablo Picasso's famous painting Guernica, a depiction of the horrors of war, Alexander Calder's sculpture Mercury Fountain and Joan Miro's painting Catalan peasant.

Two of the other notable pavilions were those of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. The organization of the world exhibition had placed the German and the Soviet pavilions directly across each other. Hitler had desired to withdraw from participation, but his architect Albert Speer convinced him to participate after all, showing Hitler his plans for the German pavilion. Speer later revealed in his autobiographies that he had had a clandestine look at the plans for the Soviet pavilion, and had designed the German pavilion to represent a bulwark against Communism.

Plagued by delay, at the opening day of the exhibition, only the German and the Soviet pavilions were completed. This, as well as the fact that the two pavilions faced each other, turned the exhibition into a competition between the two great ideological rivals.

Speer's pavilion was completed by a tall tower crowned with the symbols of the Nazi state: an eagle and the swastika. The pavilion was conceived as a monument to "German pride and achievement". It was to broadcast to the world that a new and powerful Germany had a restored sense of national pride. At night, the pavilion was illuminated by floodlights. Josef Thorak's Comradeship stood outside the pavilion, depicting two enormous nude males, clasping hands and standing defiantly side by side, in a pose of defense and racial camaraderie.

Vera Mukhina designed the large figurative sculpture on the Soviet pavilion for the exhibition, whose architect was Boris Iofan. The grand building was topped with Worker and Kolkhoz Woman, a large momentum-exerting statue, of a male worker and a female peasant, their hands thrusting a hammer and a sickle together, in a symbol of worker union.