The exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Nantes is remarkably designed, it shows superb works and allows for discoveries. It is therefore worth a visit, but it should nevertheless be noted that those who expect to admire numerous works that once decorated these great liners which have now disappeared will be a little disappointed. We can certainly see lacquer panels by Dunand, a verre églomisé from Champigneulle on a cardboard by Jean Dupas, or a panel with a complex preparatory technique for a lacquer work by Gaston Priou (ill. 1), but the essential is elsewhere. It is more of an exhibition on the representation of ships and Atlantic crossings, mainly through posters, paintings and photographs, than an exhibition on their decoration.
- 1. Gaston Priou (1881-1965)
Study for a decorative lacquer work for an apartment
luxury liner Normandy, around 1930
Plaster, cement, water-based paint, bronzine, plywood – 155.5 x 225.5 cm
Saint-Nazaire, Saint-Nazaire Agglomération Tourism-Ecomusée collection
Photo : Didier Rykner
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See the image on his page
This being said, the visitor will learn a lot of things. And firstly, perhaps a little in opposition to the curators’ speech, that the border between Art Deco and so-called “modern” art is particularly blurred. In reality, even Fernand Léger, whose beautiful painting The Great Tugboat (ill. 2) is exhibited, can be considered as an Art Deco work as well as an avant-garde work. What we see on the walls has even less connection with the abstraction that is also invoked. Everything is figurative, almost everything is stylized, and everything evokes the 1930s, even when it comes to later works from the 1940s. Art Deco continued well beyond these dates and into the 1950s, artists active in previous decades continued to produce works relating…
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