Volume 9, Number 10 · December 7, 1967
Expo 1900
By Francis Haskell
Paris 1900: The Great World's Fair
by Richard D. Mandell
University of Toronto, 208 pp., $8.50
Dreams they were often called at the time, and like dreams the great European exhibitions of the nineteenth century have long awaited the enterprising psychoanalyst to probe beneath the exalted hopes, the exotic fantasies, and uncover for us the buried fears and sordid anxieties whose existence we have been taught to suspect whenever caprice becomes too willful or too extravagant. Eighteen-fifty-one, 1855, 1862, 1867, 1878, 1889, 1900—these dates at least (and there are many more) have long been familiar to anyone interested in the period, and most of them summon up some dominating visual image; the Crystal Palace, one-man exhibitions by Courbet and Manet, the Eiffel Tower—real achievements that have left indelible impressions on our culture. But much of the rest has sunk into oblivion, leaving behind little more than nostalgia-inducing wood engravings in old illustrated journals, evoked usually to make some point about historicism and bad taste before we are hurried on to the Pioneers of the Modern Movement.
Review, 969 words
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