Cherchez les Femmes

After seeing “Brilliant Exiles: American Women in Paris, 1900–1939,” at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., I revisited Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast (1964). The memoir, perhaps more than any other single text, is responsible for the romantic myth of the Lost Generation. In Hemingway’s recollections, for a moment in the 1920s, Paris—or at least its Left Bank—was ruled by a band of bright and restless expatriate men. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce made searching art out of the wreckage of World War I and had fun doing it, for though money was scarce, inspiration and booze were abundant. Peek into any café in the Latin Quarter today and you will surely find at least one American study-abroad student, notebook and whiskey in hand, trying to raise their ghosts. 

And yet in this ode to male creative genius, a history of expatriate women—their networks, aspirations, and achievements—lies hiding in plain sight. Gertrude Stein inducts our author into the Paris literary scene; Sylvia Beach, founder of the bookstore Shakespeare & Company, stocks him and his fellow writers with English books; and the New Yorker correspondent Janet Flanner advises them on French literature. Hemingway lived in Paris with his first wife, Hadley; Fitzgerald went abroad with Zelda; Pound brought Dorothy; Joyce came with Nora. 

In “Brilliant Exiles,” the curator Robyn Asleson uses an extensive selection of portraits to draw attention to more than sixty female “cultural influencers,” in the words of the press release, who lived between the US and France in the first half of the twentieth century. Across loosely themed sections focused on different creative fields—from design and painting to literature and performance—the show recovers the contributions that these women made to twentieth-century art and society in the process of reinventing themselves.¹ What would it look like, it asks, to tell the history of transnational modernism from their perspective? 

The women profiled in the exhibition hailed from different parts of the US, from New York to South Dakota, but they were drawn to the French capital for similar reasons. Fin-de-siècle Paris was an oasis of both cultural tradition and iconoclasm, where it was possible to learn from the old masters and then reject their teachings from the bohemian enclaves of Montparnasse or Montmartre (a literal city on a hill). For young American women with artistic dreams and a taste for nonconformity, it was hard to think of a better destination. 

The exhibition opens with a colossal tempera and gold leaf wall panels from Edward Steichen’s cycle In Exaltation of Flowers (1910–1913). Gorgeous examples of the photographer’s work in painting, they depict three figures who epitomized the curious early-twentieth-century New Woman: Marion H. Beckett, Katharine Nash Rhoades, and Mercedes de Cordoba Carles. Beckett and Rhoades, both born into families of means, rejected the debutante’s life to train as painters. They traveled to Paris in the 1910s to learn about post-Impressionism and brought their knowledge back to the US, exhibiting at the influential Armory Show in New York in 1913. Carles was a multi-hyphenate, who worked in Paris as an illustrator and correspondent for Vogue, and also pursued painting, music, and later, acting.

In the panels, commissioned for the Manhattan townhouse of the journalist and art collector Agnes Ernst Meyer—herself an exemplary New Woman—Beckett, Rhoades, and Carles appear at monumental scale in a crisp Art Nouveau style that merges softness with severity, delicacy with grandeur, commemorating the happy times Meyer and her free-spirited circle spent at Steichen’s country house outside of Paris. Each figure is accented by flowers. Carles holds an overflowing vase of lilies and violets, an allusion to the botanical nicknames the women dreamed up for one another. 

Rose O’Neill, too, journeyed to France in search of experimental art. In the early 1900s she had become a millionaire from her nationally syndicated “Kewpie” comics and their spinoff dolls. But on her travels to Paris, where she occasionally dropped in on studio art classes, she met audiences receptive to more challenging, less commercial work. In 1921 the Devambez gallery showed a selection of her drawings and paintings inspired by symbolism and the subconscious, featuring fantastical creatures of a far darker cast than her adorable Kewpies. At the museum, O’Neill appears in a painting by Lilian Fiske Thompson with a mass of unbrushed hair, dressed in a red robe unfastened at the chest—the sitter refused to bend to the norms of bourgeois good taste. O’Neill believed that the fashion industry contributed to gender inequity and insisted that it was hard for women to advance in society when tight dresses and corsets kept them “boxed up.” 

The significance of new clothing to the New Woman recurs across the show. In a gallery focused on women’s influence on modern choreography, Isadora Duncan—who moved to France in the late 1800s and became famous for naturalistic performances that challenged the conventions of balletic expression— appears in a series of beautiful watercolor-and-pencil sketches by Abraham Walkowitz. The artist captured the choreographer in soft, rounded strokes—a rhythmic whirl in her signature stage costume of a Grecian-style tunic and bare feet. 

Duncan’s freeform costumes would have likely appealed to Elizabeth Hawes, the most fascinating character in a gallery dedicated to fashion. In a 1938 photograph by Ralph Steiner, she pushes a pin into a dressmaker’s dummy and presses a typewriter key, a pose reflecting her status as one of the era’s most penetrating fashion writers and designers. Hawes arrived in France in the 1920s to study the techniques and patterns of haute couture but instead became a fierce advocate of ready-to-wear, peppering her New Yorker column—written under the pen name Parisite—with acerbic critiques of the frivolity and impracticality of high French style. Ironically, she found Europe liberating because it revealed the possibilities of home. “There was something decayed about the whole of Paris,” she wrote in Fashion is Spinach (1938). Her disillusionment with French couture empowered her to believe that American designers could make their own sartorial destiny; and after her return to the States, she launched a fashion house 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 women came to Paris seeking more than just creative opportunity. They hoped to unburden themselves of unfulfilling marriages or find queer romance in a country fabled for its libertinism, where homosexuality, though frowned upon, was not officially illegal. For African American women, left entirely out of A Moveable Feast, moving to France was also a way to leave behind Jim Crow and its northern echoes. As Josephine Baker put it in her speech at the March on Washington in 1963, the country was a “fairyland place” to many who went there in the years after World War I.

As sections of the exhibition on literature make clear, many female modernists in Paris—including Beach, Flanner, and Stein—identified as “sapphists” and came to France in search of romantic and creative relationships. They found them in places like Natalie Clifford Barney’s all-female salon, the “Academy of Women” on the rue Jacob in the sixth arrondissement. In paintings of Beach and the artist Romaine Brooks, Barney’s long-term partner, we can see how Paris emboldened queer women to express their gender identity without restraint. In a 1923 self-portrait, Brooks depicts herself as an austere gentleman in a black suit with top hat and gloves to match. Her skin is rendered in a pale, mottled gray, the antithesis of feminine blush, and a perfect complement for the clouded cityscape in the background. Beach, too, opts for masculine attire, 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 short, falling just below her ears.

In a section called “Stars of Montmartre Nightlife,” the exhibition turns to African American music and dance, reminding viewers that French stages were lit up not only by Baker’s exoticized routines, represented in the show by theatrical posters, but also by more demure stars like the soprano Florence Mills, shown in a photograph taken by Steichen in 1924, two years before she captivated French audiences with her Blackbirds revue. In the plaintive lyrics of her signature song, “I’m a Little Blackbird Looking for a Bluebird,” some listeners heard a call for social justice. More encounters with African American music and dance occurred at Chez Bricktop, a Montmartre club named for its founder, Ada “Bricktop” Smith, a performer turned hostess and nightlife entrepreneur. In a photograph from 1934 she poses on the street in front of a poster advertising the wine retailer Nicolas, her head eclipsed by a larger-than-life bottle of champagne. 

A complementary display, “Harlem’s Renaissance in Paris,” profiles Black writers and visual artists such as the painter and art educator Loïs Mailou Jones, who spent a formative year in Paris in 1937. In a self-portrait completed in 1940, she is seated at an easel and grasping her paintbrushes. Behind her she pays tribute to the traditions that inform her frank and expressionistic style with a Cézanne-like still life and two small carved African figurines. In a 1994 interview Jones explained that she was compelled to incorporate aspects of African art into her practice after seeing how comfortably white European modernists appropriated the vocabulary of African masks and statues. “If anybody had the right to use it,” she said, “I had it, it was my heritage.” 

That so many American women found freedom in Paris does not mean that Paris was free. African Americans were shielded from the worst of French racism due to their foreign status, but men and women arriving in Paris from French African and Caribbean colonies were not so heartily welcomed by middle-class society. For French feminists, meanwhile, the 1920s represented a retrenchment in women’s rights. Male politicians and legislators introduced restrictions against contraception and abortion and encouraged women to forget their wartime mobilization and beat a path away from civic life. The Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920; French women, by contrast, were not allowed to vote until after World War II. Progressive, free-thinking communities in quarters like Montmartre were in this respect sanctuaries from the rightward creep of gender politics during the late Third Republic.

The privileges of Americans in Paris are explored to some degree in the galleries and to an even greater extent in the show’s catalog, edited by Asleson. But the exhibition could have done more to acknowledge that the very concept of expatriation is a fabrication—that the “expat” is always defined in opposition to the migrant, the refugee, or the literal exile of the show’s title. We have done away with the male geniuses of the Lost Generation and traded them for “brilliant” cosmopolitan women, who went abroad without friction or obstacle. It is hard to dismantle old myths without creating new ones. 

The exhibition’s understandable emphasis on portraiture, for its part, also risks muffling the force of its point about women’s place in transatlantic modernism. The pieces on view dramatize how women adopted new identities, capturing their provocative and gender-bending styles. But except for a scattering of self-portraits, there are few examples of their creative output. For an uninitiated audience, is evidence of unconventional self-fashioning enough to convey the extent of women’s mark on avant-garde art, design, performance, and literature? Self-expression was necessary for self-liberation; women could hardly make progress if they stayed “boxed up” in uncomfortable clothes and identities. But the women here were not merely “cultural influencers” in the sense we might now understand that phrase. They aimed to do more than build a personal brand, and one longs to see more of the innovative work they made, to encounter their clothing designs, paintings, manuscripts and magazines firsthand. 

Perhaps such loans were excluded because they were hard to come by. According to my rough count, around a third of the portraits included in “Brilliant Exiles” were made by men—stark evidence of the gender imbalance still present in our museum collections. That Asleson needed to rely on art by men to craft her story of brilliant women is the clearest testament to the significance of her curatorial effort. Museums have a long way to go, and “Brilliant Exiles” points the way forward.