'Sylvia Beach' by Paul-Emile Bécat. Oil on canvas, 1923.
What the American men of the so-called “Lost Generation”–Hemingway, Fitzgerald, that crowd–couldn’t find in early 20th century Paris, their female counterparts did. In abundance.
Purpose. Love. Fulfillment.
Between 1900 and the outbreak of World War II, American women such as Josephine Baker (1906–1975), Gertrude Stein (1874–1946), and Augusta Savage (1892–1962) left the States in pursuit of a more authentic life in the French capital than they could live at home.
Paris changed them. They changed Paris. And when they did return, they changed America.
The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. presents “Brilliant Exiles: American Women in Paris, 1900–1939,” highlighting the myriad ways they contributed to the city’s vibrant modernist milieu. This is the first exhibition to focus on the impact of American women on Paris—and of Paris on American women—during the period.
Through portraiture and biography, the exhibition illuminates the accomplishments of more than 60 convention-defying women who crossed the Atlantic to pursue professional goals and personal autonomy.
“Most of these women didn't want to just get on the traditional path of getting married, having a family; they wanted to have careers, they wanted to have independence, and they felt they could not do that close to family and friends and people who had always known them, they had to go someplace,” exhibition curator Robyn Asleson, curator of prints and drawings at the National Portrait Gallery, told Forbes.com. “They didn't have to do what was expected of American women in the United States and they didn't have to do as expected or French women in Paris, they were something different.”
Many went in pursuit of sexual freedom.
“They were interested in relationships with other women, and Paris being a very tolerant place, they being foreigners, they could do what they wanted,” Asleson added. “A lot of them found their life partners in Paris, we all know about Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas (1877–1967), but there were many other women who entered into these lifelong relationships in Paris with other American women or French women and lived very happily away from the stigma that would have attached to them in the States.”
Pablo Picasso’s famed portrait of Gertrude Stein (1905-6) from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is included in the show along with nearly 80 other artworks by Loïs Mailou Jones, Henri Matisse, Isamu Noguchi, Man Ray, Savage, Alfred Stieglitz, and Marguerite Zorach.
Jones’ (1905–1998) archive at Howard University proved invaluable in Asleson’s research. The artist kept meticulous accounts of her time in France.
“She had lots of photographs of herself painting on street corners with white men clustered around looking respectfully at what she was doing. I thought, ‘wow, that must have been so, so different from what she experienced in the United States’ where she talked about facing a lot of discrimination and not being able to move her career forward,” Asleson said. “In Paris, (Jones) said, ‘I finally had an opportunity to exhibit my works. People respected me. They went out of their way to help me,’ and it changed her life.”
She wasn’t the only one.
“Josephine Baker was writing about how ‘I became Josephine Baker in Paris. Paris made me.’ She went there as a very little known 19-year-old chorus girl and overnight, literally, became the toast of Paris,” Asleson explained.
For Jones, Baker, Savage, and the other African American women who journeyed to Paris, remember, this period is peak Jim Crow in America. Peak lynching. Peak Ku Klux Klan.
'Self-Portrait' by Lois Mailou Jones. Casein on board, 1940 Smithsonian American Art Museum, Bequest ... [+]
The “Brilliant Exiles” went to escape America’s stifling societal expectations. They went to escape America’s puritanical sexual norms. They went to escape America’s racial terror. They went to explore professional opportunities unavailable to them.
Freed from these constraints, upon arriving in Paris, they were willing to take risks.
“That's why so many of these American women became some of the first collectors of art so avant garde people hardly recognized it as art at the time,” Asleson said referencing Peggy Guggenheim (1898–1979), Stein, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875–1942), and others. “Or they were the ones pushing the envelope on literature and writing often about women’s’ experience in a surprisingly candid way people weren't expecting.”
It was as if all of their creative energy, passion, curiosity, and intellect kept under wraps in America burst forth in a hundred directions all at once upon arriving in Paris.
“Women talked about how it was a transformative experience. It wasn't just a place to hang out and take advantage of a favorable exchange rate and a lack of prohibition,” Asleson said. “It was more than that. It was a time and a place that allowed them to figure out who they were, and they could be anybody.”
Today it’s called living your best life.
“These women really found themselves in Paris, they found careers they were able to excel in, they found opportunities to publish, to exhibit, to design fashion, or whatever they were interested in,” Asleson continued. “They found the love they had been looking for.”
Lost And Found
'Self-Portrait' by Anne Estelle Rice. Oil on canvas c. 1909-10. Private collection.
Ironically, Gertrude Stein coined the term “Lost Generation” to describe the American men swirling around Paris who she saw as having lost their way after World War I, disillusioned, unsure of who they were. War can do that.
World War I was a butcher shop for human beings. Poison gas. Trenches. Artillery. Nineteenth century tactics meeting 20th century killing technology.
But the American male writers of the “Lost Generation” didn’t all see action. They must shoulder the blame for being unable to find themselves in Paris, unable to find what the women did.
“It was almost an extractive culture for the men; they enjoyed being able to go to these cafes and drink and meet each other and talk and see the art. It was very, ‘what can Paris give me,’” Asleson explains. The women engaged more deeply in the culture, they learned French, they became close friends with French people. “The women really put down roots and affected the way art, literature, design, fashion, dance, all these things were pursued in Paris.”
They did so through their own painting and writing and dance and sculpture, but also through hosting and introductions and entrepreneurship.
Gertrude Stein’s famed Saturday evening apartment salons. She introduced Picasso to Matisse. Georges Braque, Juan Gris, Ray, Jacques Lipchitz, TS Eliot, Hemingway, Thornton Wilder, Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis. All were regulars and a score more cultural icons. Stein lived in Paris from 1903 through 1938 bringing a staggering constellation of creatives into her home and orbit.
Sarah Samuel Stein and Natalie Barney held salons, too.
Shakespeare and Company English language bookstore–the original–was opened by Sylvia Beach (1887–1962) in 1919.
“These places were hubs for modernist activity these American women created and sustained,” Asleson said. “They were institutions that shaped the way things were made and the ideas that were percolating and the connections people were making.”
Modern. New. Fresh. Owing nothing to the past. Forward looking. These women couldn’t be considered of their time, they were in advance of it. Futurists. Rebels. Trend-setters. Tastemakers, even if they didn’t know it then.
“Sylvia Beach’s bookstore, a lot of the books that were not available in the United States because they were banned, she disseminated in Paris, influenced American writers; Hemingway learned to write, basically, from the books she lent him and recommended that he read,” Asleson said. “Gertrude Stein advised him on his writing style; it supposedly was based on the writing style of Ellen La Mott (1873–1961), another American woman in Paris, who wrote ‘The Backwash of War’ (1916) in a very terse kind of style.”
Also in contrast to the men, the women collaborated, pursued community, supported each other, shared ideas, introduced artists to collectors, introduced authors to publishers.
“This whole notion of the lone genius who does it all themselves, women we're not about that,” Asleson said. “They realized its connection, connectivity, networks, that's what pushed modern culture forward, and all those great writers and artists needed to continually be connected to people and it was mostly the women who were doing that work.”
The Party’s Over
'Theresa Helburn' by Marion H. Beckett. Oil on canvas, 1922. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian ... [+]
The good times ended for good with the coming of the Nazis. Paris cleared out, New York would become the center of the arts world, but what the “Brilliant Exiles” had created in Paris, the relationships they made, the freedom they experienced, they would take with them back to America.
Progress was achingly slow, but personally and professionally, women in the States had more opportunity and autonomy in the wake of the liberation their countrywomen experienced in Paris.
“Brilliant Exiles” remains on view at the National Portrait Gallery through February 23, 2025, then heads to the Speed Art Museum in Louisville (March 29, 2025, to June 22, 2025) and the Georgia Museum of Art at the University of Georgia in Athens (July 19, 2025, to November 2, 2025).
A worthwhile postscript to “Brilliant Exiles” can be found at the Grey Art Museum at New York University through July 20, 2024. “Americans in Paris: Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946–1962” represents the first scholarly overview of the expatriate art scene in Paris after World War II–men and women.
Excellent examples from Beauford Delaney, Carmen Herrera, Ellsworth Kelly, Joan Mitchell, Jack Youngerman, and others demonstrate the lively, modernist painting trends of the period.
