For the All Saints’ festivities, Nantes proposes a crossing of the Atlantic with a modest carbon footprint: just go to the city’s Museum of Arts, which can be accessed from the station by crossing the Vegetable Garden, dyed in gold and red in early autumn. On the two floors of the building, splendidly renovated and expanded in 2017, the establishment presents an exhibition that takes us back to the trips made, in the interwar period, in floating buildings, from Europe to America; At that time, there was no concern about its impact on the environment.
Titled “Transatlantics 1913-1942. A transatlantic aesthetic”, co-produced with two museums in Saint-Nazaire (Loire-Atlantique) and the André Malraux Museum of Modern Art in Le Havre (Seine-Maritime) – MuMa –, which will host it from April 5, 2025. strives to show how, with their refined silhouette and geometric lines, their latest generation machinery, these ships, the only ones that ensure connections between the two continents, fascinated the artistic avant-garde: futurists, cubists, constructivists, etc. – and contributed to the development of an international modernist aesthetic.
The curators chose to place their presentation between two key dates: 1913, the year of the Armory Show, the first major international exhibition of modern art on American soil that introduced American artists and the public to the European avant-garde, and 1942, the date of the disappearance, in New York Harbor, of the French naval engineering flagship, the Normandysunk after being partially destroyed by fire.
geometric dominant
The visit begins with advertising posters, in an elegant, predominantly geometric scenography, in harmony with the theme, and which has the merit of staying on track, without dispersing. In the 1920s and 1930s, competition was fierce to attract luxury customers curious to discover America, and companies turned to renowned graphic designers. On a poster signed by the artist Cassandre (1901-1968), the black, conical bow of the Normandywhich establishes the Le Havre-New York connection, represented from the front, occupies three-quarters of the image; The flight of seagulls resembling commas gives the measure of the gigantism of the building. For Holland America Line and its New statusCassandre himself continues in his geometric vein but this time he focuses his attention on the windsocks, these large periscope-like tubes erected on the deck and used for ventilation.
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