By Christophe Jacquet
Published on
7 May 24 at 8:22
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One month before the 80e D-Day, the Caen Memorial (Calvados) inaugurates its exposure river of the year. The Peace Museum opens it to the public this Wednesday, May 8, 2024. Until January 5.
“Don’t talk about June 6, 1944” but about America before
With a strong and assumed bias. While he intends to “commemorate the 80e anniversary of the Landing all year long”, according to its director Kléber Arhoul, “the Memorial has made the choice”, with this exhibition, “to not to talk about June 6, not to return to it at all [son] military history“, more present in the permanent route and, above all, at the new Landing Museum for a year in Arromanches. What will the exhibition show The Dawn of the American Century 1919-1944 – Under the Red, White and Blue ? “ The story of these GI’s who are going to land at 6:30 a.m. in Utah or Omaha Beach and sometimes die at 6:32 a.m., says Kléber Arhoul. “ We’re going to talk about their life before death. Which America do they come from? »
For the first time at the Memorial, visitors enter the exhibition from the entrance hall. “Otherwise, we don’t know that it is temporary,” he explains. “They will return through what is familiar to them. » Namely the cinema, via the reproduction of a room from the 1930s and a vast corridor of film posters, which represents the rise of Hollywood and its studios in the cultural and social history of the United States, going from silent to speaking.
But afterwards, the exhibition retraces the evolution of “a country relatively different from that depicted by the Dream Factory”. From one war to another. It begins with a photo of the grand parade of American soldiers returning from the First World War to Europe in 1919. It ends with another photo, that of GIs embarked in “the armada leaving the East Coast”.
All the faces of America between the wars
Between the two, iconic objects (the jacket of Charlie Chaplin In The dictatorthe president’s microphone Franklin D.Roosevelt in his recreated office at the White House, Tom Blake’s surfboard, Ingrid Bergman’s dress in Casablancaetc), images of Dorothea Lange, unpublished documents, such as Al Capone’s FBI file or the original edition of Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, books, propaganda posters, advertisements, board games, radio recordings, etc. punctuate more than two decades of major changes, from the Roaring Twenties stopped by the crash of 1929 and the Great Depression to the cataclysm of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, through the New Deal.
Four jazz concerts to accompany the exhibition
The Caen Memorial called on the Jazz sous les pommiers festival, in Coutances (Manche), to put together a program of 4 concerts between now and the end of November, in connection with the exhibition. The festival invited American musicians and ensembles to (re)tour pre-war US jazz and blues:
– Friday May 10, 2024, the nonet Future of Jazz, from the Lincoln Center in New York, covers standards by Duke Ellington;
– Friday June 28, blues musician Jerron Paxton performs solo, on harmonica and banjo;
– Friday September 20, with his big band, Oran Etkin pays tribute to Benny Goodman, “the King of Swing”;
– Friday November 22, an exceptional concert in France by the Legendary Count Basie Orchestra, in tribute to Count Basie’s legendary big band.
Practical. Concerts at 8:30 p.m. at the Caen Memorial. Price: €15. Online reservation on the website https://my.weezevent.com or from the Memorial website.
In three large chapters, on two floors, the exhibition exhibits both the colors and the wounds of this “America with many faces”: the advent of literature (John Dos Passos, Francis Scott Fitzgerald) and of painting, of consumption mass and leisure, automobiles, jazz, counter-prosperity of the underworld with Prohibition, racial riots, first anti-communist campaigns, crises in employment, housing, agriculture, etc.
American veterans visiting June 8
For that, the Caen Memorial benefits from “exceptional loans”. Between 60 and 70 rare pieces, most of which have never left the United States, arrived in crates. From museums (Smithsonian Institution, Franklin Delano Roosevelt Presidential Library), major studios in Los Angeles (Warner Bros, Paramount), private collections.
“This exhibition has not even been organized” across the Atlantic, boasts Kléber Arhoul. Americans in particular should appreciate it. On June 6, the Memorial will be closed to welcome the delegations of the 80e D Day.
Two days after, around sixty veteranstransported in a special plane of the airline Delta Air Lines, will be entitled to a private tour. “They will enter the exhibition and we will tell them their history, their youth. »
Practical. Exposure The Dawn of the American Century 1919-1944 – Under the Red, White and Blue, at the Caen Memorial (Calvados) until January 5, 2025, every day, from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. from May to September, from 9:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. from October to January (closed on Wednesdays in November and December). Prices: €10, reduced: €5. Contact: 02 31 06 06 45. On Facebook and Instagram.
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