Guided tour: Exhibition La Belle Époque des jeux

Games are probably almost as old as humanity itself and have therefore always accompanied the life of human groups. Associated with entertainment and its regime of reality, they are often confiscated in a form of social invisibility that this exhibition proposes to question.
Over a very long period of time - between the 1820s and 1914 - board games experienced an exceptional creative abundance, a veritable golden age that embraced a modernity panicked by technical progress and speed, which renewed the pleasure of immersing oneself in new universes and of existing with greater intensity: bicycles, automobiles, aeroplanes, cinema, photography, and distant travels.... They constituted a fabulous adventure ground that decompartmentalised knowledge, an initiatory journey that re-enchanted the world and proposed a reading of it.
The shift of games to the children's sphere consecrates the advent of youth as an object of adult attention and a commercial target that reflects the evolution of morals, the change in the place of the child in society and the consideration of its specific needs. In the repetition of the days, the times of holidays and festivals, of holidays of the spirit, of carefree and leisure time are used to practise board games, games of skill and outdoor games, for adults as well as for children, and many games are already offered on the occasion of Christmas presents.
The oldest games - dominoes, chess, checkers, tric-trac - were not abandoned and retained their expressive power throughout this period. From the 19th century onwards, games were rich in artistic imprints and in osmosis during the 1890-1914 period with the research of poster artists and the Art Nouveau movement, whose decorative vocabulary they took up: simplified forms that brought the motif to the surface, frank and opposing colours, enlarged planes, sinuous lines, etc. The manufacturers employed well-known engravers and illustrators who created sumptuous images. The variety of games was so great at the time that they were the land of the never-ending!
A sumptuous discovery, an assured change of scenery in an intoxicating universe where imagination, discoveries, light-hearted madness and the intensity of life come together.

A must-see!