On the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the Normandy landings and in memory of these soldiers, the Caen Memorial has decided to explore the America in which they grew up.
The exhibition outlines the cultural, social, and political history of America and of Americans, from 1919 to 1944, from the soldiers' return from the First World War to the Normandy landings, the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression.
The exhibition brings together unique artifacts on loan from several major American institutions (the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C., the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Presidential Library, the Steinbeck Center in Salinas, California, the Academy Awards as well as the Warner Bros and Paramount Hollywood studios in Los Angeles...) and from public and private collections in Europe (Chaplin’s World in Switzerland, the Great War Museum in Meaux, the Caen Memorial...).
Organized in chronological chapters, the exhibition will bring this era to life with a special focus on cinema, in order to better capture the nuances of light and darkness of a creative and complex America marked by crisis and turmoil.
The exhibition’s subhead, Under the Red, White and Blue, was borrowed from F. Scott Fitzgerald. He initially intended to give this title to his iconic novel, The Great Gatsby, which portrays the tensions that defined this pivotal moment in American history.
Entrance ticket
