These American Women Stood Out in Paris During Its Modernist Heyday
Artists, writers, and philanthropists who were “not wanderers but seekers.”
Brilliant Exiles: American Women in Paris, 1900–1939
National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.
through February 23, 2025
IN 1900, PARIS DAZZLED. The Exposition universelle was held from April to November that year, and 50 million visitors flocked to see Modernism celebrated in such wondrous exhibits as an escalator of moving steps and “talking pictures.” A “Palace of Electricity” bloomed in a pavilion decorated with thousands of lightbulbs, colored lamps, and multicolored electric flames. The exposition was cheered as “a fairytale spectacle.”
American dancer Loïe Fuller had her own pavilion. She was a star of the Folies Bergère, and brought her innovative performance to the exposition: She used yards of swirling silk and attached bamboo sticks to her sleeves to transform herself into such wonders of nature as a silken butterfly or a bursting flower. Isadora Duncan, then just starting out, came to the exposition expressly to see Fuller, and launched her own career by performing in Fuller’s troupe.
The 1900 Exposition universelle secured Paris as a center for Modernism, and a new exhibition describes how that city became a beacon for American women seeking to break from constrained traditions in the United States in the early twentieth century. Brilliant Exiles at the National Portrait Gallery spotlights fifty-seven of these expatriate women who were involved in art, writing, dance, fashion, music, and theater. As curator Robyn Asleson writes in the catalogue, Paris was a “particularly attractive destination for women who were impatient to move beyond the societal expectations and constraints that limited them in the United States”—restrictions on gender, sexuality, and race. They believed that Paris would help them forge new identities as Modern Women.
Brilliant Exiles seeks to provide “a counter-narrative to the familiar legend of a ‘Lost Generation’ of hard-drinking, fast-living, disillusioned, white heterosexual male writers and artists who flocked to Paris in the 1920s”—that familiar cast of figures like Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Instead, the exhibition focuses on women whom literary icon Sylvia Beach called “literary pilgrims”—that is, as Beach’s biographer Noel Riley Fitch writes, women who “were not wanderers but seekers.” Unique identities were celebrated, and as photographer Berenice Abbott said, “there were no rubber stamps among us.” There were no poor or underprivileged women, either: All of these women were financially self-supporting, and some were rich. Natalie Barney lived in Paris after inheriting a fortune. Expatriates Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and Peggy Guggenheim had, as their auspicious names might suggest, enormous wealth to begin with.
THERE IS A GROWING RECOGNITION today of women’s frequently overlooked contributions to history, art, and culture in the twentieth century. Mary Gabriel’s 2018 book Ninth Street Women helped catalyze this rethinking when she demolished the idea that male artists like Jackson Pollock deserved all the credit for the rise of Abstract Expressionism. Instead, Gabriel proved that AbEx art shimmered with the works of female artists like Elaine de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler.
Curator Robyn Asleson suggests that we take a fresh look at early-twentieth-century Paris through such a feminist lens as well. And if Brilliant Exiles had kept its focus on significant creators, the exhibition could have proved these expatriate women were an important cultural force. But the exhibition’s focus is somewhat hazy. Rather than spotlighting individual significance, Asleson chooses to make one aspect of contemporary feminist ideology her leitmotif: its concern with “otherness” and the hardship of being “other” to a more primary “one.” (The concept is best illustrated in the social construction of gender: Women have historically been imagined—and often subjugated—as an “other” to men.) She describes the essential connecting thread among the “brilliant exiles” as “the freedom to explore what it meant to live authentically,” and she finds that “those whose identities were the most marginalized—African Americans and lesbians—made the most impactful contributions to the modernist milieu of Paris” because “their sense of being ‘other’ catalyzed their innovative thinking.”
The entrance to the exhibition features three of the seven enormous panels of Edward Steichen’s In Exaltation of Flowers (1910–13); the three vast, vividly colored murals portray Katharine Rhoades, Agnes Meyer, and Marion H. Beckett—Steichen’s “Three Graces.” The murals function as a theatrical curtain, beckoning visitors to enter the exhibition beyond.
The “scenes” that follow are organized thematically; visitors may wander freely through “Modern Art and Modern Women,” “Dancer of the Future,” “The Stein Effect,” “Stars of Montmartre Nightlife,” “Literary Modernism,” “Harlem’s Renaissance in Paris,” “Natalie Barney’s Salon,” and “Refashioning Modern Women.”
The exhibition is centrally interested in how particular American women in Paris established “transformative spaces” that generated what National Portrait Gallery Director Kim Sajet describes as “a powerful feminist force . . . of bold imagining.” As their networks and friendships developed, a sense of unique community emerged among these American women abroad. Asleson writes that three women in particular did much to galvanize “modern innovation through connectivity.”
Beginning in 1909, American writer Natalie Barney convened weekly gatherings of writers, artists, and creative “others” like her longtime partner, artist Romaine Brooks. Barney’s salon became the central hub of the “Paris-Lesbos” subculture, and in 1927 she organized an “Académie des femmes (Academy of Women)” to honor and further strengthen connections between women writers of her milieu.
Sylvia Beach opened Shakespeare and Company, her bookshop/lending library, in 1919. She shook the literary world in 1922 by publishing James Joyce’s Ulysses when no other publisher would touch it, and Shakespeare and Company became a major gathering spot for writers and intellectuals in the ’20s and ’30s.
Beach was able to keep the shop open through the fall of Paris, but finally closed the doors at the end of 1941 following a hostile encounter with an occupying Nazi officer. (Fellow American bookseller George Whitman would open his own shop, later renamed Shakespeare and Company in homage to the original, in 1951.) Interned for six months during the war, Beach helped the French Resistance following her release.
Some of the exhibition’s subjects led more politically complicated lives than one might expect from the larger liberatory framework Asleson has created for them. Famous as an art collector and saloniste, Gertrude Stein lived in Paris from 1903 until her death in 1946. But the fame she acquired for her central position in the world of European modernism was complicated by her interest in and support for fascism in the 1930s.
Stein enjoyed the protection of prominent French collaborationists during the war, and she was able to remain safely in Paris, her art collection safely locked away, in part because of her work to translate into English a collection of speeches by Vichy ruler Marshal Philippe Pétain. Her translations, along with an enthusiastic introduction in which she compared the French leader to George Washington, were never published in America, as she had hoped they would be.
The bright and shining stars of the exhibition include performer Josephine Baker, who took Paris by storm in the 1920s with her “Banana Dance” (danse de sauvage) spoofing French colonial stereotypes of Africa. Caricaturist Paul Colin captures her spirit wonderfully in the lithographs Le Tumulte Noir and Folies Bergère. (There is also extant film footage of Baker performing her banana dance in 1927 at the Folies Bergère.)
An extremely popular figure, Baker kept performing during the war, using the connections she gained with high-level Vichy and Nazi functionaries to carry out vital intelligence work for French Resistance forces. After the war, she was awarded the Croix de Guerre.
African-American opera singer Lillian Evanti left America for Europe in 1924, seeking opportunities denied her by racial discrimination in the United States. She became the first African American to perform with grand opera companies in Europe and achieved such renown that the State Department made her a goodwill ambassador in the 1940s and ’50s. Her portrait by Loïs Mailou Jones portrays her in a favorite role, as Rosina in Rossini’s The Barber of Seville.
THE IDEA OF BRILLIANT EXILES was excellent—to show that American women lived significant creative lives in Paris in the formative decades of Modernism. But there are some critical problems. Surprisingly, the 1900 exposition that helped attract these women to Paris is never mentioned—a remarkable oversight, given that event’s centrality in the “prehistory” of the careers and era of the women featured in the exhibition. Secondly, “Brilliant Expatriates” may have been a more apt (if less dramatic) title than “Brilliant Exiles”: These women weren’t booted out of America but left of their own free will. There are also stunning omissions: artist Mary Cassatt, dancer Loïe Fuller, and writer Edith Wharton all lived important lives in Paris in these years, and all are significant enough that their portraits are included in the National Portrait Gallery’s permanent collection, but they are not given individual treatments here. (Fuller’s absence is especially striking, as she is discussed at length in the exhibition catalogue.)
And unfortunately, the exhibition’s idiosyncratic thematic categories make a muddle of the larger historical context for these remarkable lives. The art of storytelling matters, and a strong historical narrative throughout the exhibition would have helped visitors understand how Modernism in its various forms evolved in these decades, and how expat American women cultivated their creative lives by contributing to that evolution along the way. In place of a revisionist history, we are offered a revisionist ambience; the effect is akin to dipping into miscellaneous scrapbooks of undated photos. There is much for the heart to savor, but no real understanding of how the images and subjects relate to one another in time. Their accidental convergence is all we get. For the American women expats, there is one convergence beyond the accident of chance: They’ll always have Paris.
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