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Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe

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Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe | Public Interface | Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe | World Fairs and (Inter)national Exhibitions

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Sight and sound Architecture Dress, design Festivals Racial ethnography, physical anthropology Europe (general) Medieval Court at the 1851 Great Exhibition (1851) Colonial Exhibition in Copenhagen 1905 Plaza de España [Sevilla (ES) 1929] Ground plan of the national pavilions 1900 Paris (FR) Exposition universelle Norwegian pavilion, Paris Universal Exhibition Finnish Pavilion, Paris Universal Exhibition 1889 Paris (FR) Exposition universelle Pavilions of Bosnia-Hercegovina and Hungary at the Paris Universal Exhibition 1900 Paris (FR) Exposition universelle Romanian pavilion 1889 Paris (FR) Exposition universelle Swedish folk costume 1873 Vienna (AT) Weltausstellung Crystal Palace 1851 London (GB) Great Exhibition Storm, Eric

World Fairs were closely connected to nationalism. They were devised as a peaceful contest of nations; from the very start in 1851, the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations offered each participating country its own section in London’s Crystal Palace to show its contribution to human progress. (The focus on industrial products enabled the host country to emphasize its leading position.) Four years later, the Parisian follow-up (the Exposition Universelle) added agriculture and fine arts, thus foregrounding fields in which France excelled. Even so, machinery, agriculture, and fine arts offered scant grounds for distinguishing one country from its neighbours. Therefore, at the next Parisian World Fair, 1867, all participating countries were invited to erect a pavilion in a characteristic national style to exhibit their own “authentic” culture. World Fairs accordingly became a global platform where nations learned how to represent their identity in a favourable light. National pavilions in fact were instrumental for the closer definition of national cultures by showing meaningful archeological finds, important historical artefacts, traditional costumes, and typical artisanal products, while offering characteristic dishes and beverages.

The first Universal Exposition of 1851 had not come out of the blue. Small-scale local, regional, and national exhibitions had already taken place in most parts of Europe since the late 18th century. Improved communications made a World Fair a feasible and tempting project and the Great Exhibition was a huge success. As a consequence dozens of World Fairs were held on all continents. They were visited by millions of people, received extensive coverage in the international press, and had myriad national and regional offshoots. Even in Germany – where no World Fair was held until the year 2000 – a city like Düsseldorf organized eleven large-scale exhibitions between 1811 and 1915, while the privately organized Berlin Industrial Exposition of 1896 covered an area of more than 120 hectares and was only put in the shadow by the French and American universal expositions of the time. Towards the end of the 19th century (inter)national exhibitions had become one of the most influential mass media of the time and their decline would only begin in 1914.

National identities were represented in a number of ways. First of all there were the national pavilions themselves, many of which were copies of well-known historical monuments, such as the Sultan Ahmed Fountain, which represented the Ottoman Empire at the World Fair in Vienna in 1873, or the Transylvanian castle of Vajdahunyad that functioned as the Hungarian pavilion in 1900. Other pavilions were pastiches that incorporated elements of various monuments, such as the Spanish pavilion of 1878 (inspired by the Alhambra and the Mosque of Córdoba), or built in a typical national style, such as Tudor for Great Britain, Dutch Renaissance for the Netherlands, or the Manueline style for Portugal. Scandinavian countries, probably for lack of well-known monuments or a clearly recognizable art-historical style, had a strong preference for vernacular buildings. Thus, at the universal exhibition of 1867 Sweden reconstructed the peasant house in which Gustav Vasa had found refuge in the 1520s before leading the Swedes in their War of Liberation against the Danish king; whereas Norway was represented at the World’s Columbian Exposition of Chicago in 1893 by a medieval stavkirke.

Some countries had, already at the Great Exhibition, used crafts and traditional costumes to evoke their national peculiarities; this trend became more pronounced at later exhibitions, with increased care to render the presentation more lifelike and attractive. At the 1867 Paris World Fair the United Kingdom of Sweden and Norway presented 17 ethnographic groups, consisting of realistic life-size dolls dressed in traditional costumes in front of a painted landscape. Later on, dioramas and reconstructed rooms were added, such as the Hindeloopen room, which visitors could enter at the Dutch section at the Paris Universal Exposition of 1878 to immerse themselves in the domestic scene depicted there.

More total-immersion experiences could be found at small ensembles of peasant houses, which gradually evolved into full-scale ethnographic villages. In 1867 Austria and Russia presented themselves in the form of a village, with various “typical” vernacular buildings. Instead of providing a unified national image, both empires decided to focus on diversity, while implicitly underlining the intimate bond between the peasants and the monarchy. At the next World Fair, held in Vienna in 1873, a separate village was planned to show peasant houses from different nations; in the end only Austria-Hungary, Russia, and the German Empire sent in a few contributions. The primary goal of this section was to propose traditional family homes as models for the future. The houses were inhabited by real peasants, who showed what life in the countryside looked like.

This type of display proved to be popular with the visitors; similar ensembles would rapidly become a prominent feature of all major exhibitions. World Fairs increasingly focused on each other’s specific identity and this could also be done in a historicist mode. Thus, the Old London exhibit, with 25 copies of historic buildings, became one of the highlights of the International Health Exhibition in South Kensington in 1884. The formula was copied in Old Edinburgh (1886), Alt Wien (1892), Oud Antwerpen (1895), Ős-Budavára (1896), Vieux Bruxelles (1897), Gamla Stockholm (1897), Vieux Paris (1900), and Vieux Liège (1905). Alt Berlin, showcased at the Berlin Industrial Exposition of 1896, consisted of several streets with some 120 buildings and contained a chapel, a museum, two historic gates, a medieval tower, a town hall, and various restaurants. Like the other historic cities it was populated by about 500 employees in historical costumes. Even regional exhibitions, such as the one in Dresden in that same year, contained a large scale Alte Stadt. At exhibitions in Amsterdam (1895) and Gent (1913), more comprehensive historical recreations (Old Holland and Old Flanders) were on show, with a focus on urban buildings from the nation/region’s “Golden Age”.

The national character could also be captured in more contemporary ensembles on the model of the Austrian villages. This formula was first applied to exotic or colonial exhibits. The Paris World Fair of 1878 had a Street of Cairo and a Quartier Marocain, and the 1883 International Colonial Exhibition in Amsterdam offered visitors a Javanese village. Ethnographic villages became institutionalized at the World’s Columbian Exposition, held in Chicago in 1893. It had a separate amusement sector, the Midway Plaisance, which included no less than ten villages, among which were a large German village, two Irish villages, and settlements representing Lapland and Turkey. These picturesque recreations were inhabited by natives dressed in traditional costumes, who played typical instruments, and performed traditional dances and crafts, while selling characteristic dishes and beverages. Most of these villages were commercial undertakings, although ethnologists were eager to help make them as “authentic” as possible.

At about the same time, nationalists also adopted this exoticist formula. Characteristic rural buildings representing all the regions of the fatherland now substituted the earlier haphazard assembly of castles, town halls, and farmhouses. At the ambitious Czechoslavic Ethnographic Exhibition (Prague 1895), nationalist intellectuals assembled 21 vernacular constructions from the various regions of Bohemia, Moravia, and Czech Silesia to underscore their claims that the Czechs were a nation in need of recognition. Accordingly, the vernacular heritage of German-speaking Bohemians was deliberately ignored. A similar ethnically inspired village was on display in Bucharest in 1906, when Romania organized a Jubilee Exhibition (celebrating the 40th anniversary of Carol I’s accession to the throne and the arrival of the Romans 1800 years before). It contained vernacular-Romanian constructions from all parts of the country, as well as from Transylvania, the Banat, Bucovina, and Macedonia; only Bessarabia was excluded as a result of the uncooperative stance of the Russian authorities.

Ethnographic villages in East-Central Europe could also be more inclusive. When in 1896 the Hungarian half of the Dual Monarchy celebrated the arrival of the Magyars with a millennial exhibition, the indispensable ethnographic village included buildings representing Bulgarian, Slovak, Romanian, and Danube-German vernacular constructions. At a time when these minorities were strongly encouraged to adopt the Hungarian language and culture, this ethnographic inclusiveness probably evinced a hope that cultural recognition of vernacular diversity would stimulate the assimilation of all inhabitants in the Hungarian frame.

In western and southern Europe, ethnographic villages generally were more straightforward. The 1911 International Exposition in Rome, commemorating the 50th anniversary of Italian unification, contained an impressive ethnographic village with buildings from all parts of the country. Even smaller exhibitions (Lemberg/L’viv 1894, Dresden 1896, Leipzig 1897, and Nancy 1908) now included a regional ethnographic village. Probably the most ambitious attempt to represent national countryside at an exhibition was the Swiss Village. Consisting of 56 vernacular constructions representing all the Swiss cantons, it was assembled first for the Swiss National Exhibition in Geneva in 1896 and then rebuilt at the Parisian World Fair of 1900. The village contained chalets,  shops, a bridge, and a church and was inhabited by over 300 traditionally dressed villagers. Moreover, it had a real lake, a creek, a cascade, and a 40-meter-high artificial mountain. Thus, even national landscapes were (re-)defined and promoted at World Fairs.

While European ethnographic villages now were primarily used to show the rich regional diversity of the nation to a domestic audience – next to the colonial villages which remained fashionable until the 1930s –  some entrepreneurs continued these displays to attract international visitors to World Fairs. This was particularly the case with Irish villages. The two Irish villages in Chicago had been constructed by private entrepreneurs, both of whom sought to stimulate home industries in the Irish countryside; their success was repeated at other international exhibitions. In 1908, at the Franco-British Exhibition in London, the formula was taken over by Brown and Son, a soap company that marketed its products as typically Irish. The firm reconstructed the fictional village of Ballymaclinton at almost every major international exhibition until 1924. It contained a replica of a few well-known monuments and various generic Irish cottages, inhabited by Irish girls in typical, but identical dresses. Instead of representing Ireland’s regional diversity, these villages displayed a homogenized national, rural-idyllic imagery. Other exhibits, such as Merry England or a Tyrolean village, also presented a more generic rural interpretation of a national identity to foreign audiences. Thus, certain regions could function as synecdoches for the nation at large. Nonetheless, even if a nation was shown as a unity in diversity, regions were also essentialized since, generally, they were represented as homogenous units.

Exhibitions played an enormous role in lifting unusual, even outright eccentric material (ancient furniture, decoration, costumes, and buildings) from a specific location into an integral part of a regional or national heritage that had to be preserved. That foreign preferences played a crucial role becomes clear in the case of Spain. During the first half of the 19th century, foreign travellers and artists (Washington Irving, Prosper Mérimée) had discovered the allure of the Moorish remains and the flamenco music of the Andalusian gypsies. In their wake, Andalusia came to count as Spain’s cultural heartland; at the Parisian international exhibition of 1900, a French company mounted a huge “Andalusia in the Times of the Moors” exhibit, which included a replica of Seville’s Giralda tower, donkeys, and gypsy dancers. This exoticism was interiorized within Spain as Andalusian costumbrismo.

In the decades prior to 1914, World Fairs contributed significantly to the broadening and democratization of the heritage of the various European nations. Colourful folklore and unique and marginal vernacular traditions were ideally suited to distinguish a country’s pavilion and exhibits from its neighbours and to attract large numbers of international visitors. They therefore increasingly came to be seen as representive of a nation’s identity or character. Towards the end of the 19th century, vernacular traditions even became an influential source for contemporary architecture and interior decoration. The Arts and Crafts movement had already brought artists and artisans together, and architects now began to join them in order to create buildings that reflected both the Zeitgeist and the Volksgeist. An early example of this new artistic trend – which is known under many different labels, such as regionalism, National Romanticism, or Heimatschutzarchitektur – is the Finnish pavilion at the Parisian World Fair of 1900. A group of innovative painters, sculptors, and architects, led by Eliel Saarinen, Herman Gesellius, and Armas Lindgren, created a truly national Gesamtkunstwerk in which vernacular elements – mostly from Karelia – were harmoniously integrated into a modern building with fashionable Art Nouveau forms. Other countries also adopted the new trend and this resulted, for instance, in the impressive Hungarian pavilion by Móric Pogány and Emil Törey at the 1911 International Exposition of Industrial Art in Turin.

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1.1.2.1/b https://doi.org/10.5117/9789462981188/ngPW8X16bQGLbAcgIQIL5Woz https://e-rn.ie/survey-13