The 1920s and 30s was a period of intense building in Paris outer districts and in Paris close suburbs. Away from the grand building of Central Paris, buildings in suburbs tend to be a little smaller, with more space around. They are more similar to the ones of Shanghai former French Concession.
As a stopover before flying back to Shanghai, I spent a day in Asni`eres/Seine, a very close suburb to Paris. Asni`ere is familiar for French people, as French standup Fernand Raynaud (1926-19730) mentioned it in one of his most famous pieces, asking for phone number 22 in Asni“eres in the 1950 (see video below).
Like many cities in the Western part of Paris, it was built up before and after WWI, so Art Nouveau and Art Deco are plentiful. Another similar exemple is much more though after Boulogne-Billancourt (see post From Boulogne to Nanjing for more details). Walking around the city, I found a number of nice Art Deco examples.
With such a sunny and hot weather, it felt even more like in Shanghai, surrounded by Art Deco buildings.
“Mr Loo, the novel of an Asia art dealer” is a post I wrote in November 2014 about the book by Géraldine Lenain focused on CT Loo the main Chinese antic dealer in the early to mid 20th century and a colorful character (Follow this link to original post for more details). CT Loo lived three nearly parallel lives in China, France and the USA. His former Paris gallery shaped like a pagoda is probably his most visible creation. Modern pictures of the building are easy to find, but I recently found a much older one.
Amazingly, the building existed before taking this shape in 1925. It was of Louis Philippe style building and surely less visible in Paris landscape. The tour de force of CT Loo and architect Fernand Bloch was to turn it into a classical Chinese style building. Inside was also changed to reflect the outside Chinese style. Interestingly, it seems to be the only noticeable building by Fernand Bloch.
Although there is no date for the picture, people’s dress style and the car visible in the picture make it possible to date it to end of the 1920s or early 1930s. This was probably shot in the months or years after completion. At a time when the only pictures of foreign country were black and white, and people did not really travel, it must have been a real shock for Parisians to see it and a great advertising for CT Loo.
Thanks to a recent business trip, I finally had the chance to view the ” Art Deco, the French-China Connection” exhibition in Hong Kong. Opened in early March, it will last until end of June and is worth seeing for Old Shanghai fans visiting Hong Kong.
The exhibition is the result of a very unique cooperation. It’s origin is the major Art Deco exhibition in Paris that took place in 2014 (see post “1925, when art deco dazzled the World” for more details), with a number of major pieces having been brought from Paris. Had this new exhibition been only a short version of the Paris one, it would already have been really interesting, but there much more to see.
famous “meuble a fards” from Ruhlmann, brought from Paris
One of the major and little known Art Deco link between France and China, is the mausoleum statue of Sun Yat Sen in Nanjing. If the purple mountain based mausoleum and the statue are extremely famous in China, few people know that the statue was created by French sculpture Paul Landowski in Boulogne near Paris, before being shipped to China. Landowski was also the creator of another World famous piece, the Christ statue overlooking Rio de Janeiro. (See post: From Boulogne to Nanjing for more details).
French sculptor Paul Landowski, with his Sun Yat Sen statue.
With a France-China Connection theme, Shanghai art deco was also called in, with the help of major Shanghai based collector including Deke Ehr, Patrick Cranley and Tina Kanagaratnam. The original Paris Art Deco exhibition had shown a few photos of Shanghai Art Deco architecture by Leonard & Vesseyre company. Here, the Shanghai part is much larger with great examples of Shanghai Art Deco furniture, as well as fashion and famous art deco advertising posters. Side by side with the ones from Paris, they highlight the similarities between style and fashion in both cities during the same period.
Shanghai Art Deco furniture, with the backdrop of the Shanghai Bund
Many more of those advertising posters from Hong Kong were on display, but the most important contribution to the exhibition is the whole room full of 1920’s and 30’s compact boxes or “necessaires” as they are called in French. These small boxes for ladies to carry make-up became really trendy in this period, and the collection on display is simply amazing thanks to the Liang Yi Museum.
A few of the Art Deco “necessaires” on display
Although the neighborhood of Kowloon Tong is quite far from the center of Hong Kong, the exhibition is definitely worth the trip for anybody interesting in Art Deco and Shanghai.
It is open until 30th June (10:00 to 19:00, closed on Monday), at CityU Exhibition Gallery, 18/F, Lau Ming Wai Academic Building, City University of Hong Kong, 83 Tat Chee Avenue, Kowloon Tong
With its mix of influence, Old Shanghai had bits of pieces coming from all over the World including Beaux Arts style, Art Deco, Andalusian, Mexican revival, New Normand, German, traditional Japanese to name a few. They all added up and sometimes got inspired by traditional local style or its modern incarnation, neo confusion (sometimes called Republican style). While walking around in Old Shanghai, it’s sometimes surprising to see details that are heavily influenced by another place.
FONCIM D, by LVK (thanks Shanghai kat for the picture)
I have been fascinated by the floor tiling pattern in the picture up, since I discovered it a few years ago. The original picture was taken on the ground floor of the FONCIM D building (1933) at the corner of Jian Guo lu and Gao An lu. The building was designed by the firm Leonard, Vesseyre & Kruze (or LVK) (See post ” Shanghai Art Deco master” for more details or my article, in French, in Lepetitjournal.com Shanghai edition). The firm was highly creative and the building was designed for their largest client, the FONCIM real estate investment firm, so I first assumed it was unique.
Similar floor patter (picture ShanghaiKat)
The only other similar pattern I found was in a villa on Yong Jia Lu, a few hundred meters from the FONCIM building. The area was built by the LVK firm (Leonard and Vesseyre’s personal homes are nearly opposite from this building), including this one, probably from the mid 30’s. The tiling shape is slightly different, with the beige stripe wider, but still very similar. This was the only place were I saw this pattern until a recent trip. A later found a similar pattern with different colors in a building on Hunan Lu (see post more on tile patterns).
The same pattern
Having diner in Paris a few days ago, I realized that the early 1900’s building had been extended by an Art Deco part with the tiling on the picture right. It took a while to retrieve the Shanghai picture, but when confronting both, the similarity was striking. So the Shanghai Art Deco pattern was probably not the invention of LVK, but probably imported from France. Looking for more about this pattern, I received a big help from my friends of the France Art Deco Facebook group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/franceartdeco).
A similar pattern was used for the flooring of the kitchen of flagship cruiser SS Normandie. Launched in 1935, SS Normandie was the largest cruise ship of its time, a floating palace fully designed in Art Deco Style. Because of WW2, it only operated a few years before sinking in New York in 1942, but it is still a legend in term of cruise ships, technological achievement and as an Art Deco masterpiece. Exemple of the ship’s decoration was shown in the Paris Art Deco exhibition in 2014 (see post “1925, when art deco dazzled the World” for more details).
Chef en cuisine on the Normandie
Unfortunately, all pictures of the Normandie are black and white, so it’s impossible to know the original color of the kitchen tiling, but in any case it looked quite similar to the one used by LVK on Jian Guo Lu. As the pattern originated from France and it is so rare in Shanghai, it is likely that the actual tilling was imported from France. Shanghai was a modern city, in touch with the latest fashion in the World… just like it is today.
Last blog post was written about an exhibition of Paris 1930’s art in Shanghai, this blog post is about another exhibition about Art Deco that took place recently in Paris. It is actually long overdue, as the exhibition closed its doors in early March. My long stay in France, gave me the opportunity to see it in Palais de Chaillot (itself an Art Deco master piece) in Paris.
This was the last major exhibition in Paris about Art Deco since 1975, and the 50 years celebration of the “Exposition Internationale des Art Décoratifs” of 1925, from which the Art Deco expression comes. It was designed to commemorate the birth of Art Deco, as well as to show how French Art Deco expended to the World. The new style from the 1920’s, with it’s geometrical and very lean design was a revolution, breaking for the overcrowd of ornaments of the Art Nouveau style. Long before being called Art Deco, it had become the symbol of modernity, celebrating liberation from the madness of WWI. This period is called in French “Les années folles (the crazy years)”, showing the energy and creativity of the period. Being still at that time the World Center for fashion and design, Paris was the center for the creation of this new style before it took off and spread all over the world. Strangely enough, Art Deco style was not considered much valuable for a long time in France, as the country has many much older pieces available. With the years passing, it seems to be in fashion again.
1925 Exhibition Poster
The exhibition was an essential display to understand how this new style invaded all forms of art from architecture and interior design to textile, fragrance, automobile, ships design. In the boiling cultural mix of 1920’s Paris, many people got inspired from it. Ideas and fashion spread fast in the artistic community, with such famous figures as painter Tamara de Lempicka, dancer Josephine Baker, fashion designer Coco Chanel as well as Lalique (whose glass decorations were used for the Cathay Hotel, Peace Hotel today). The new style also greatly influenced the design of large cruse ships, symbol of modernity and travel way before today’s airliners (see post 2 months in rationnaire for details).
I brought back the exhibition catalog (available in French only… how French can that be), but it would be way to large to share here. Searching the internet, I found a nice video about the exhibit that will give the feeling for it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsV5cg2Y19M
The exhibition did not stop at showing Art Deco in France. Although it really does not leave much space for Art Deco in America or in the British Empire (like Art Deco wonders like Napier, New Zealand or Mumbai) the exhibition showed the development of Art Deco in the French colonies. Besides great Art Deco in North Africa and Indochina, I was nicely surprised to find a pavillion dedicated to Shanghai. It mostly focused the work of French architect firm Leonard, Vesseyre and Kruz (more about them soon) forgetting others like Hudec but it was really nice to find a small piece of our city in the exhibition.
Visiting Boulogne’s 1930’s museum 2 years ago was fascinating. Coming from Shanghai Art Deco, the origins of the art movement became so clear by comparing both cities art from the same period. The most amazing discovery was surely to find out that Sun Yat Sen’s mausoleum satute in Nanjing was created by French sculptor Paul Landowski, who also crafted world famous statue of Christ in Rio. (Click here to read the full story, with post “From Boulogne to Nanjing”)
Little did I imagine that the same exhibition would actually come to Shanghai only a year and half later. Thanks to long term Shanghailander Philippe Cinquini, part of the collection was brought to Shanghai including studies for the statue of the father of modern China. The exhibition is displayed in the Shanghai Art Museum (former China pavillon at Shanghai Expo 2010) and has been extended til end of May . For details, follow the link to Shanghai Art Museum exhibition page . (reservation in advance compulsory).
Just like in previous post “Home sweet home“, I used my trip in France to look at French buildings from an old Shanghai point of view. The heart of Paris was mostly built in the mid XIXth century, thanks to the design work of Baron Haussman who redesigned the French capital. Paris new design with large avenues connecting train stations organized in a network gave inspiration to design of cities all over Europe (just like Budapest where I used to live and many others). It also inspired the design of American cities like Chicago in the early XXth century as well as Moscow with its huge avenues … and finally came back to Shanghai as a model for building today’s Pudong.
Built on a ad hoc basis and constantly changing in a bit of architectural anarchy, old Shanghai was never planned in such a way. Although it was called the Paris of the orient, the similarities of town planning only goes so far as Avenue Joffre (today Huai Hai lu), that is indeed far from its model. However, Paris continued to be built in the 1920’s and 30’s at the same time as old Shanghai, here are a few examples of similarities. The first one to catch my attention was the building left that is located near St Sulpice in Paris Rive Gauche area.
Art Deco Building in Montmartre
Although it is not a triangle building like the Normandy building in Shanghai (picture right), they have a lot of similarities with the usage of red brick over 2 floors of stones as buildin g materials. The fist floors are both using large arches and a balcony it circling the top floor.
Willow Cour door frame
The second one is this art deco building in Montmartre. It did not specifically remind me of Shanghai art deco, apart from one important detail at the bottom right of the picture… the entrance door. Its shape is peculiar as it is non rectangular shape, but with cut angles instead. This shape is special enough to be remembered and I have seen it before in Shanghai, in Willow Court on Route de Boissezon (today Fuxing Xi Lu). Small detail, but clear similarity miles away from each other.
