When the Olympics opened in Paris in 1924, the French capital was already gripped by a ferocious blend of art, literature, cinema, fashion and a wild desire to dance. Sport merged into this culture to become the pinnacle of an extraordinary time, as Mary Miers reveals. One morning in 1919, Fernand Léger, the avant-garde painter of modern Paris, was sitting in a Montparnasse café when Jeanne-Augustine Lohy pedalled past in full bridal dress with billowing veil.
Her bicycle was a wedding present and she’d been unable to resist a spin, but she’d taken the wrong route and was now late for her nuptials. The handsome artist stepped in and assured her all was not lost. ‘Before long,’ recounts Mary McAuliffe in her book When Paris Sizzled , ‘Lohy became Madame Léger.
’ The surreal vignette encapsulates the spirit of Paris on the brink of les années folles , the decade that would see the city’s resurgence as European capital of modernity. Léger was fascinated by machines, as well as by film and graphic design. After returning from the Western Front, he developed his own Futurist version of Cubism that evoked the speed and cacophony of the industrialised metropolis in boldly coloured paintings composed of geometric and cylindrical shapes and dislocated figures.
A key subject was the Eiffel Tower, looming over Paris on its great splayed legs. Erected as a temporary monument for the Universal Exposition in 1889, it was still the predominant emblem of French design .