BUILDING ITALY:
The Italian Pavilion at L’Exposition Universelle d’Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne, Paris 1937
by Sasha Goldman, Northeastern University
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The Italian Pavilion at the Exposition Universelle d’Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne (Paris, 1937) serves as a revealing case study of Italian Fascism’s aesthetic and ideological contradictions. Intended to showcase Fascist Italy’s cultural and technological prowess, the pavilion instead highlighted internal fragmentation and international marginalization.
Drawing on promotional postcards, contemporary accounts, and architectural analysis, this paper examines how the pavilion’s design, blending Rationalist modernism with traditionalist Italianità, reflected Mussolini’s policy of aesthetic diversity while undermining the regime’s effort to define a cohesive Fascist style. France’s strategic placement of the Italian Pavilion—separated from major powers like Germany and the USSR—illustrates an attempt to distance Italy from rising totalitarian alliances. However, visual parallels between the Italian and German pavilions, reinforced by French photographic depictions, revealed shared ideological underpinnings and foreshadowed their growing alignment.
Situated within the broader context of Italy’s participation in earlier Parisian world’s fairs, the pavilion’s neoclassical emphasis underscored a persistent rejection of modernist trends in favor of promoting nostalgic Italian traditions. This presentation argues that the Italian Pavilion epitomized Fascist Italy’s struggle to balance its historical identity with its ambitions for modernity. Its muted reception, overshadowed by the ideological spectacle of Soviet and German contributions, reflects Italy’s diminishing influence and peripheral role in the international order. Ultimately, the pavilion encapsulates the broader dissonance within Italian Fascist cultural production, offering insight into its role in shaping Italy’s fraught position in pre-World War II Europe.
Sasha Goldman is an Assistant Teaching Professor and Director of Supplemental Academic Services at Northeastern University. Her research interests vary from those related to her work in the student support space (graduate education, competencies, and credentialing), and her scholarship in her home discipline of art history (contemporary Italian art and exhibition histories). She is the Managing Editor of the Center for Italian Modern Art’s Italian Art Journal and is currently working on a book entitled PhD in Progress. She received her PhD in the History of Art and Architecture from Boston University.
The Soviet pavilion (right) and the Nazi German pavilion (left) in the Gardens of the Trocadero with the Eiffel Tower in the background. Wikimedia Commons