Cherchez les Femmes | Hannah Stamler

After seeing “Brilliant Exiles: American Women in Paris, 1900–1939,” on the Nationwide Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., I revisited Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast (1964). The memoir, maybe greater than every other single textual content, is chargeable for the romantic delusion of the Misplaced Technology. In Hemingway’s recollections, for a second within the Twenties, Paris—or no less than its Left Financial institution—was dominated by a band of vibrant and stressed expatriate males. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce made looking artwork out of the wreckage of World Battle I and had enjoyable doing it, for although cash was scarce, inspiration and booze had been considerable. Peek into any café within the Latin Quarter right now and you’ll certainly discover no less than one American study-abroad pupil, pocket book and whiskey in hand, making an attempt to lift their ghosts. 

And but on this ode to male artistic genius, a historical past of expatriate girls—their networks, aspirations, and achievements—lies hiding in plain sight. Gertrude Stein inducts our writer into the Paris literary scene; Sylvia Seashore, founding father of the bookstore Shakespeare & Firm, shares him and his fellow writers with English books; and the New Yorker correspondent Janet Flanner advises them on French literature. Hemingway lived in Paris along with his first spouse, Hadley; Fitzgerald went overseas with Zelda; Pound introduced Dorothy; Joyce got here with Nora. 

In “Brilliant Exiles,” the curator Robyn Asleson makes use of an in depth collection of portraits to attract consideration to greater than sixty feminine “cultural influencers,” within the phrases of the press launch, who lived between the US and France within the first half of the 20th century. Throughout loosely themed sections targeted on totally different artistic fields—from design and portray to literature and efficiency—the present recovers the contributions that these girls made to twentieth-century artwork and society within the technique of reinventing themselves.¹ What wouldn’t it seem like, it asks, to inform the historical past of transnational modernism from their perspective? 

The ladies profiled within the exhibition hailed from totally different elements of the US, from New York to South Dakota, however they had been drawn to the French capital for related causes. Fin-de-siècle Paris was an oasis of each cultural custom and iconoclasm, the place it was attainable to be taught from the outdated masters after which reject their teachings from the bohemian enclaves of Montparnasse or Montmartre (a literal metropolis on a hill). For younger American girls with inventive desires and a style for nonconformity, it was arduous to consider a greater vacation spot. 

The exhibition opens with a colossal tempera and gold leaf wall panels from Edward Steichen’s cycle In Exaltation of Flowers (1910–1913). Beautiful examples of the photographer’s work in portray, they depict three figures who epitomized the curious early-twentieth-century New Lady: Marion H. Beckett, Katharine Nash Rhoades, and Mercedes de Cordoba Carles. Beckett and Rhoades, each born into households of means, rejected the debutante’s life to coach as painters. They traveled to Paris within the 1910s to find out about post-Impressionism and introduced their data again to the US, exhibiting on the influential Armory Present in New York in 1913. Carles was a multi-hyphenate, who labored in Paris as an illustrator and correspondent for Vogue, and likewise pursued portray, music, and later, appearing.

Within the panels, commissioned for the Manhattan townhouse of the journalist and artwork collector Agnes Ernst Meyer—herself an exemplary New Lady—Beckett, Rhoades, and Carles seem at monumental scale in a crisp Artwork Nouveau fashion that merges softness with severity, delicacy with grandeur, commemorating the pleased occasions Meyer and her free-spirited circle spent at Steichen’s nation home exterior of Paris. Every determine is accented by flowers. Carles holds an overflowing vase of lilies and violets, an allusion to the botanical nicknames the ladies dreamed up for each other. 

Rose O’Neill, too, journeyed to France searching for experimental artwork. Within the early 1900s she had grow to be a millionaire from her nationally syndicated “Kewpie” comics and their spinoff dolls. However on her travels to Paris, the place she often dropped in on studio artwork courses, she met audiences receptive to more difficult, much less business work. In 1921 the Devambez gallery confirmed a collection of her drawings and work impressed by symbolism and the unconscious, that includes fantastical creatures of a far darker solid than her lovely Kewpies. On the museum, O’Neill seems in a portray by Lilian Fiske Thompson with a mass of unbrushed hair, wearing a purple gown unfastened on the chest—the sitter refused to bend to the norms of bourgeois good style. O’Neill believed that the style trade contributed to gender inequity and insisted that it was arduous for girls to advance in society when tight clothes and corsets saved them “boxed up.” 

The importance of latest clothes to the New Lady recurs throughout the present. In a gallery targeted on girls’s affect on fashionable choreography, Isadora Duncan—who moved to France within the late 1800s and have become well-known for naturalistic performances that challenged the conventions of balletic expression— seems in a collection of gorgeous watercolor-and-pencil sketches by Abraham Walkowitz. The artist captured the choreographer in comfortable, rounded strokes—a rhythmic whirl in her signature stage costume of a Grecian-style tunic and naked ft. 

Duncan’s freeform costumes would have doubtless appealed to Elizabeth Hawes, essentially the most fascinating character in a gallery devoted to style. In a 1938 {photograph} by Ralph Steiner, she pushes a pin right into a dressmaker’s dummy and presses a typewriter key, a pose reflecting her standing as one of many period’s most penetrating style writers and designers. Hawes arrived in France within the Twenties to review the methods and patterns of high fashion however as an alternative turned a fierce advocate of ready-to-wear, peppering her New Yorker column—written beneath the pen title Parisite—with acerbic critiques of the frivolity and impracticality of excessive French fashion. Paradoxically, she discovered Europe liberating as a result of it revealed the probabilities of dwelling. “There was something decayed about the whole of Paris,” she wrote in Style is Spinach (1938). Her disillusionment with French couture empowered her to consider that American designers may make their very own sartorial future; and after her return to the States, she launched a style home in Manhattan. “I couldn’t hope nor did I want to set up business under the old French system, she wrote. “It creaked.”

Some American girls got here to Paris looking for extra than simply artistic alternative. They hoped to unburden themselves of unfulfilling marriages or discover queer romance in a rustic fabled for its libertinism, the place homosexuality, although frowned upon, was not formally unlawful. For African American girls, left solely out of A Moveable Feast, shifting to France was additionally a option to go away behind Jim Crow and its northern echoes. As Josephine Baker put it in her speech on the March on Washington in 1963, the nation was a “fairyland place” to many who went there within the years after World Battle I.

As sections of the exhibition on literature clarify, many feminine modernists in Paris—together with Seashore, Flanner, and Stein—recognized as “sapphists” and got here to France searching for romantic and inventive relationships. They discovered them in locations like Natalie Clifford Barney’s all-female salon, the “Academy of Women” on the rue Jacob within the sixth arrondissement. In work of Seashore and the artist Romaine Brooks, Barney’s long-term associate, we will see how Paris emboldened queer girls to precise their gender id with out restraint. In a 1923 self-portrait, Brooks depicts herself as an austere gentleman in a black go well with with high hat and gloves to match. Her pores and skin is rendered in a pale, mottled grey, the antithesis of female blush, and an ideal complement for the clouded cityscape within the background. Seashore, too, opts for masculine apparel, sitting for the painter Paul-Émile Bécat in a collared shirt and striped bowtie, a pocket watch dangling from her breast pocket. Her curly hair is cropped brief, falling just under her ears.

In a bit known as “Stars of Montmartre Nightlife,” the exhibition turns to African American music and dance, reminding viewers that French phases had been lit up not solely by Baker’s exoticized routines, represented within the present by theatrical posters, but additionally by extra demure stars just like the soprano Florence Mills, proven in {a photograph} taken by Steichen in 1924, two years earlier than she captivated French audiences together with her Blackbirds revue. Within the plaintive lyrics of her signature tune, “I’m a Little Blackbird Looking for a Bluebird,” some listeners heard a name for social justice. Extra encounters with African American music and dance occurred at Chez Bricktop, a Montmartre membership named for its founder, Ada “Bricktop” Smith, a performer turned hostess and nightlife entrepreneur. In {a photograph} from 1934 she poses on the road in entrance of a poster promoting the wine retailer Nicolas, her head eclipsed by a larger-than-life bottle of champagne. 

A complementary show, “Harlem’s Renaissance in Paris,” profiles Black writers and visible artists such because the painter and artwork educator Loïs Mailou Jones, who spent a formative yr in Paris in 1937. In a self-portrait accomplished in 1940, she is seated at an easel and greedy her paintbrushes. Behind her she pays tribute to the traditions that inform her frank and expressionistic fashion with a Cézanne-like nonetheless life and two small carved African collectible figurines. In a 1994 interview Jones defined that she was compelled to include features of African artwork into her observe after seeing how comfortably white European modernists appropriated the vocabulary of African masks and statues. “If anybody had the right to use it,” she stated, “I had it, it was my heritage.” 

That so many American girls discovered freedom in Paris doesn’t imply that Paris was free. African People had been shielded from the worst of French racism attributable to their international standing, however women and men arriving in Paris from French African and Caribbean colonies weren’t so heartily welcomed by middle-class society. For French feminists, in the meantime, the Twenties represented a retrenchment in girls’s rights. Male politicians and legislators launched restrictions in opposition to contraception and abortion and inspired girls to neglect their wartime mobilization and beat a path away from civic life. The Nineteenth Modification was ratified in 1920; French girls, against this, weren’t allowed to vote till after World Battle II. Progressive, free-thinking communities in quarters like Montmartre had been on this respect sanctuaries from the rightward creep of gender politics in the course of the late Third Republic.

The privileges of People in Paris are explored to a point within the galleries and to a good larger extent within the present’s catalog, edited by Asleson. However the exhibition may have executed extra to acknowledge that the very idea of expatriation is a fabrication—that the “expat” is at all times outlined in opposition to the migrant, the refugee, or the literal exile of the present’s title. We’ve executed away with the male geniuses of the Misplaced Technology and traded them for “brilliant” cosmopolitan girls, who went overseas with out friction or impediment. It’s arduous to dismantle outdated myths with out creating new ones. 

The exhibition’s comprehensible emphasis on portraiture, for its half, additionally dangers muffling the drive of its level about girls’s place in transatlantic modernism. The items on view dramatize how girls adopted new identities, capturing their provocative and gender-bending types. However aside from a scattering of self-portraits, there are few examples of their artistic output. For an uninitiated viewers, is proof of unconventional self-fashioning sufficient to convey the extent of girls’s mark on avant-garde artwork, design, efficiency, and literature? Self-expression was vital for self-liberation; girls may hardly make progress in the event that they stayed “boxed up” in uncomfortable garments and identities. However the girls right here weren’t merely “cultural influencers” within the sense we’d now perceive that phrase. They aimed to do greater than construct a private model, and one longs to see extra of the progressive work they made, to come across their clothes designs, work, manuscripts and magazines firsthand. 

Maybe such loans had been excluded as a result of they had been arduous to come back by. In response to my tough rely, round a 3rd of the portraits included in “Brilliant Exiles” had been made by males—stark proof of the gender imbalance nonetheless current in our museum collections. That Asleson wanted to depend on artwork by males to craft her story of sensible girls is the clearest testomony to the importance of her curatorial effort. Museums have an extended option to go, and “Brilliant Exiles” factors the way in which ahead.