Americans in Paris

Aruna D’Souza

Over one hundred works by expat artists who sought an escape from stateside restrictiveness in postwar France.

Americans in Paris: Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946–1962, installation view. Courtesy Grey Art Museum, New York University. Photo: David Heald. Pictured, far left wall, left to right: Joan Mitchell, Untitled, 1960; Joan Mitchell, Untitled, ca. 1960. Center back wall, left to right: Kimber Smith, Untitled, 1955; Kimber Smith, Harry Truman, 1958. Far right, foreground: Claire Falkenstein, Sun, ca. 1959.

Americans in Paris: Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946–1962, curated by Debra Bricker Balken and Lynn Gumpert, Grey Art Museum, 18 Cooper Square, New York City, through July 20, 2024

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In a 1960 interview, the abstract painter Mark Tobey, after years of living in Paris, where he achieved acclaim from the otherwise relatively chauvinist French critical establishment, nevertheless demurred that he was “an American painter, whatever [that] means.” After securing her position as a major figure in American abstract painting, Joan Mitchell, who spent long periods in France before eventually moving there permanently in 1959, said she hated “to be called an exile or an expatriate”; she was, in the words of poet John Ashbery, an “apatriate”—stateless, more or less. The ambivalence expressed in these comments about what being an American artist actually signified in a post–World War II world, a world of ascending US power on the global stage and of a simultaneous cultural internationalism made increasingly possible by the accessibility of air travel and other forms of congress and communication, is just one of the many threads woven through Americans in Paris: Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946–1962, a show that inaugurates the new home of New York University’s Grey Art Museum (formerly the Grey Art Gallery). Comprising nearly seventy artists—both canonical and woefully under-known—and 130 individual paintings, sculptures, photographs, textiles, and other objects, the exhibition serves to complicate a period in which all eyes were on New York as it transformed, thanks to the advent of Abstract Expressionism, into the capital of modern art in the West.

Americans in Paris: Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946–1962, installation view. Courtesy Grey Art Museum, New York University. Photo: David Heald. Pictured, center of left wall: Norman Bluhm, Bleeding Rain, 1956. Center right wall, left to right: Mark Tobey, Battle of the Lights, 1956; Mark Tobey, Golden Gardens, 1956.

Paris was not the obvious place for aspiring young (or even mid-career) artists to go in the later 1940s. The city was still recovering from the war, and life was grim. It was being argued, by the French no less than others, that the capital had largely lost its aura as the locus of the European avant-garde. It still had its charms, though—the history, the museums, the intellectuals who hung out at Deux Magots and Flore, the fact that the cost of living was cheap, and the easy access to French art schools and private studios run by people like Fernand Léger and Ossip Zadkine, who were happy to have the tuition fees. But artists would have had more access in US museums to works by Picasso, Matisse, and other Modernist giants, as those institutions had begun collecting European Modernism in earnest earlier than most French ones had, and they could have availed themselves of the lessons of European émigrés teaching at US art schools if they had just stayed home.

Americans in Paris: Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946–1962, installation view. Courtesy Grey Art Museum, New York University. Photo: David Heald. Pictured, center back wall: Peter Saul, The Mad Pilot, 1961. Far right: Nancy Spero, Great Mother Birth, 1962.

So why did they come? A number, like Tobey, Peter Saul, Leon Golub and Nancy Spero, Kimber Smith, and James Bishop, wanted to gain distance from the increasingly dogmatic turn toward a pure abstraction obsessed with the flatness of the picture plane that AbEx represented. Paris was also a milieu where more experimental play with media was encouraged, or at least tolerated: Sheila Hicks went on a painting fellowship and ended up making pocket-size sculptures from shoelaces, wire, sisal, and ribbon, eventually moving entirely into textile arts. The Bay Area sculptor Claire Falkenstein, who switched from working in wood and stone to twisting and welding wire into dematerialized, and yet somehow monumental, abstract forms, summed it up nicely when she said that Paris offered her “the time, the freedom, the isolation . . . [to arrive] at a vocabulary for myself.” The distance sometimes had a paradoxical effect: for figures like Norman Bluhm and Al Held, Paris was where their commitment to Abstract Expressionism crystallized and deepened.

Americans in Paris: Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946–1962, installation view. Courtesy Grey Art Museum, New York University. Photo: David Heald. Pictured, back wall, left to right: Ed Clark, Nature Morte (Painting for My Mother), 1952; Ed Clark, The City, 1953; Ed Clark, Untitled, 1954. Center right foreground: Harold Cousins, La Forêt, ca. 1960.

Others were trying to escape oppressions more consequential than mere aesthetic ones: many African American artists, including Ed Clark, shared James Baldwin’s belief that Paris offered a respite from the crushing racism, and, in the case of Baldwin, Beauford Delaney, and others, the homophobia, of their home country. Harold Cousins decamped to France after he was denied a place at the American University in Washington, DC because he was Black; Shinkichi Tajiri, who spent his youth in a Japanese internment camp, only gaining freedom by enlisting, likewise sought distance from a country that had treated him so badly. Tajiri’s 1953 brass and bronze homage to Billie Holiday, another Parisian transplant, is testament to his connection with fellow refugees from American bigotry, as was his role as one of the founders of the expat-centered Galerie Huit, a cooperative enterprise that was remarkably multiracial in its membership.

The show is divided into two sections: the four “Focus” galleries delve into a core of twenty or so artists who spent at least a year in Paris before 1962, most of whom came on the GI Bill or, like Shirley Jaffe, as trailing spouses to ex-servicemen. The second section, the “Salon,” is a single room chockablock with works by both American artists in Paris and some of the French artists they encountered there. Among the former are the Ojibwe abstract painter George Morrison, the Filipino American Abstract Expressionist Alfonso Ossorio, and the truly outstanding polymath Barbara Chase-Riboud, whose bronze Plant Lady (1962)—a crouching figure with an aloe vera plant sprouting from her neck like flames or a rage-filled outburst—is the single best object on view. Among the latter are figures like Jean Dubuffet, Wols, Pierre Soulages, Henri Michaux, Georges Mathieu, and François Morellet.

Americans in Paris: Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946–1962, installation view. Courtesy Grey Art Museum, New York University. Photo: David Heald. Pictured, center foreground: Barbara Chase-Riboud, Plant Lady, 1962.

What is missing, as to be expected in a show that, despite its shift of geography, is still framed around two nations, is the cosmopolitanism of Paris at the time: artists from Africa, South America, and all parts of Asia were in the mix, and it is likely that for someone like Carmen Herrera, her move toward a rigorous hard-edged abstraction was inspired as much by the Latin American painters who were featured at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles as the French ones, which is barely acknowledged here. (This more international frame was profitably explored in a show curated by the art historian Serge Guilbaut at the Museo Reina Sofía in 2018–19, Lost, Loose and Loved: Foreign Artists in Paris 1946–1968, which seems to have laid some important groundwork for the Grey Art Museum effort.)

Carmen Herrera, Réalités Nouvelles, 1948. Acrylic on canvas, 31 × 39 1/4 inches. Courtesy Lisson Gallery. © Estate of Carmen Herrera.

I have been lamenting to friends that it feels like every exhibition I see lately is a spectacle, no matter how much scholarly and curatorial work goes into its making (I’m looking at you, Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism, not to mention the celebrity-centered joints that the Brooklyn Museum seems to be specializing in). As a result, I respond very warmly to those that feel quieter, meatier, and more serious—the current Käthe Kollwitz show at MoMA is one, as is Americans in Paris, despite its flaws. That said, I went to the Grey Art Museum a week before New York University’s administration asked the NYPD to “clear out” peaceful, pro-Palestinian student demonstrations, which has resulted in over 150 arrests of students and faculty as of this writing. The temporal span of Americans in Paris overlaps with the Algerian struggles against French occupation—its end is explicitly pegged to the end of the Algerian War—and yet, despite the stated intention of the curators, it hardly engages this political context. At any other moment, I would have likely framed this failure as a quibble with an otherwise fascinating exhibition, but now, as NYU students bravely protest another deadly occupation, it feels far more problematic. It feels disingenuous in this situation to suggest readers go see it under these circumstances, so I will only say this: I’m glad I saw Americans in Paris before the institution made it impossible for me to do so.

Aruna D’Souza is a writer and critic based in New York. She contributes to the New York Times and 4Columns. Her new book, Imperfect Solidarities, will be published by Floating Opera Press this summer.