BRILLIANT EXILES :  AMERICAN WOMEN IN PARIS 1900-1939

Robyn Asleson

Yale University Press. 278 pages. £45. ISBN 978-0-300-27358-8

Reviewed by Jim Burns

Looking along my book shelves I can see memoirs of what it meant to be an American or Canadian expatriate in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. Most of them are by men: Malcolm Cowley, Harold Stearns, Ernest Hemingway, Morley Callaghan, Harold Loeb, Samuel Putnam, John Glassco. Where are the women? I have books by and about Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, Kay Boyle, Janet Flanner, but with the exception, perhaps, of Boyle, they don’t seem to have gone in for autobiographical accounts of what they did, who they met, and so on. Boyle, when she edited a re-issue of Robert McAlmon’s Being Geniuses Together in the 1960s, inserted chapters of her own reminiscences of the period in between his. And Boyle, like a few other women, wrote fiction set during the expatriate experience. Her Monday Night and Year Before Last might be relevant in this connection, as might be Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood. And, though it’s something of a satirical fantasy, Barnes’s The Ladies Almanack, published in 1928, can be recommended for its links to the activities of American women in Paris.  But, looking at the list of authors in the 1932 anthology, Americans Abroad, I count fifty-two names, only thirteen of which are women.

I’ve only referred to writers, and the point about Brilliant Exiles is that it doesn’t only relate to them. Nor does it limit its range to the 1920s and 1930s, though it could be argued that those years were, on the whole, the key ones in terms of establishing a narrative of adventurous American women in Paris. Robyn Asleson points to “a long line of talented, ambitious American women who crossed the Atlantic during the first four decades of the twentieth century in search of freedom and opportunities denied to them at home”. Asleson goes on to refer to, “acceptance of bohemian nonconformity” and “the mythic stature of Paris as the epicentre of modern innovation, personal liberty, and cosmopolitan diversity” as aspects of what pulled women to Paris.

The possibility of finding the “freedom and opportunities denied to them” in America was particularly applicable to black women. There is a photograph of Lois Mailou Jones painting outside a café in 1938 while watched by a crowd of men: “The half dozen men clustered behind her tilt their heads in rapt attention, all eyes fixed on Jones’s canvas”.  As Asleson says, while acknowledging that France was by no means “devoid of sexism or racism”, it’s hard to imagine a similar “encounter between a Black woman and a group of white men…..in the United States at that time”. I think Jones must have had some financial support, of one kind or another, for her Paris sojourn. There is a photograph of her in her studio and it looks fairly spacious. There was clearly a difference between Jones’s time in the French capital, and that of Nancy Elizabeth Prophet, a black sculptor who “endured twelve years of extreme poverty in Paris while pursuing physically demanding stone and wood carving……Prophet began a struggle for survival in shabby, unheated studios, often without food or human contact for weeks on end”. There is a striking and possibly revealing photograph, taken at some point between 1922 and 1929, which shows an unsmiling Prophet staring directly at the camera.

If the black artists were escaping racial prejudice, and the neglect of their work that went with it, a white painter like Anne Goldthwaite had her own reasons for believing that Paris had something to offer. She remarked of her early years in Montgomery, Alabama, “There seemed nothing to do but grow up and be a ‘young lady’…..I was brought up to believe that matrimony was the desired end  of a woman’s life and a woman’s career”. Luckily, a sympathetic uncle provided the money for her to move to New York in 1898 to study painting and etching at the National Academy of Design. She headed for Paris in 1906, and met Getrude Stein, and through her was introduced to the work of Cezanne, Matisse, and Picasso. A self-portrait, painted after she got there, shows a benign, confident-looking Goldthwaite. Asleson suggests that “Her vibrant technique resembles the methods of Cezanne and his successors, the so-called Fauves (wild beasts)”.  But if Goldthwaite was being influenced by radical ideas in art, she didn’t carry them into her private life. She did go to popular meeting places with friends (there is a sketch by her of “New Year’s Night at the Café Versaille”), but “found little satisfaction in attempting to sit with young men at restaurants”, and had no inclination to “play that I was living in Bohemia”.  It’s of interest to note that Goldthwaite was represented in the famous International Exhibition of Modern Art (the Armory Show) in New York in 1913.

Anne Estelle Rice lived in Paris from 1905 to 1913, and “became a key figure in a circle of Anglo-American artists developing a modern aesthetic based on the concept of rhythm”. Rice, like Goldthwaite, had “disappointed her family’s traditional expectations of marriage and motherhood by embarking on a career as an illustrator”. She arrived in France on an assignment to “illustrate Paris fashions for a Philadelphia newspaper”, and “just in time to witness the furore over revolutionary works of art displayed at the Salon d’automne”. She was so impressed by the work of Matisse and Derain that she “took up painting and quickly found success”. Her self-portrait is dated 1909-1910 and indicates how the colour blendings of the Fauves had influenced her. Rice was the model for John Duncan Fergusson’s “The Spotted Scarf”, painted around 1908 and well in the style of the “Scottish Colourists”. Rice had formed a relationship with Fergusson which lasted for several years. In contrast to Goldthwaite, she took to the unconventional, exploring “the Latin Quarter’s bohemian haunts, visiting a brothel to see works by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, attending risque events such as the Bal Bullier, and frequenting the Café d’Harcourt”. She never returned to the United States. In 1913 she married the English art and theatre critic, Raymond Drey, and moved to London, where she died in 1959.

There were other women artists, such as Agnes Ernst Meyer (see the photograph of her by Edward Steichen), and Katherine Nash Rhoades, whose self-portrait can be compared to the impressive photo of her by Alfred Stieglitz. She looks somewhat aloof in the self-portrait, whereas the photo suggests a more-relaxed and open person. Asleson says that, back in America, “Rhoades helped to establish and operate the Freer Gallery of Art (now the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Asian Art) working closely with Agnes Ernst Meyer, a friend she had met through Stieglitz”.

Not only writers and artists arrived in Paris. Several black entertainers found a ready audience there, one of the most famous being Josephine Baker whose flamboyant dancing intrigued the French and the affluent, white night club patrons who liked to be seen with her, at least while they were in Paris. One of the clubs they frequented was Bricktop’s, named for its owner, Ada ‘Bricktop’ Smith and her red hair. Bricktop didn’t just run a night club. She “served as both anchor and magnet for an expatriate community of African American women”. Asleson mentions that when Josephine Baker “rocketed to stardom in 1925, Bricktop took the unworldly nineteen-year old under her wing”. And “She was waiting at the train station when Florence Mills and the Blackbirds troupe arrived in May 1926”. She extended a warm welcome to Nora Holt, Ethel Waters, and many others. There is, incidentally, a splendid portrait of Waters by Luigi Lucioni in the book, along with a photo of another black singer, Adelaide Hall, who was popular in Paris.

I opened this review with some observations about American women writers in Paris, and it seems useful to take it towards its ending with a few more comments. Zelda Fitzgerald was always overshadowed by her more-famous husband, Scott Fitzgerald, but I’ve always thought her novel, Save Me the Waltz, and her short stories, well worth reading. Asleson is of the opinion that the novel “offers glimmers of a strikingly individual, experimental prose style”. Fitzgerald had nursed ambitions to be a ballet dancer, and her semi-autobiographical book “dwelled on the brutal toil that enabled the beautiful illusion”. It’s also worth mentioning her short-story, “A Couple of Nuts”, which has these evocative opening lines : “The summer of 1924 shrivelled the trees in the Champs-Elysee to a misty blue till they swayed before your eyes as if they were about to go down under the gasoline fumes. Before July was out, dead leaves floated over the square of St Sulpice like paper ashes from a bonfire”.

Caresse Crosby came to Paris with her husband, Harry Crosby, after she had shocked her family by divorcing her first husband : “Rebelling against their ‘puritanical’ upbringing they pursued a hedonistic lifestyle devoted to parties, promiscuity, and poetry”. But they also launched Black Sun Press which published work by Hart Crane, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and many others. Later, after Harry’s death in 1929, Caresse continued with Black Sun Press, and additionally started the cheaper Crosby Continental Editions to bring the work of contemporary authors to a wider audience. A book from this series that I have and prize is Robert McAlmon’s The Indefinite Huntress and Other Stories, published in 1932. Caresse Crosby’s The Passionate Years 1925-1939 tells the story of her adventures in France. There is a portrait of her by the Belarusian artist, Polia Chentoff, which, to my mind, does not capture the spirit of the energetic and imaginative woman Caresse must have been. Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that Chentoff had an affair with Harry Crosby. Asleson quotes the French poet Saint John Perse, who said that he had “never seen the distaste of one woman for another so skilfully and subtly portrayed”.

There is much more to Brilliant Exiles than I have been able to convey in my review. I have overlooked some of the better-known women, such as Sylvia Beach, owner of the famous bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, and Getrude Stein, who has had books written about her and her partner, Alice B.Toklas. But what of the writer, Mercedes de Acosta, “now remembered less for her literary accomplishments than for her remarkable life…..In 1921 she began a passionate affair with the actor Eve Le Gallienne, for whom she wrote two plays. The most ambitious of these works, Jehanne d’Arc, debuted in Paris in 1925 – the first instance of an American play performed on French soil by an American actress speaking in French”. De Acosta was productive, and “wrote nearly a dozen plays in which women struggle with ‘unhappy marriages, divorce, sexual desire, identity, and self-recognition’ “. Abram Poole painted an imposing portrait of de Acosta. Poole was a “wealthy society portraitist”, and de Acosta had agreed to marry him “on the condition that she retain her maiden name and freedom to live an independent life”.

There is, too, the fascinating Belle de Costa Greene, who could “pass” for white, as a splendid chalk on paper portrait of her by Paul Hellas indicates. She was “one of America’s most influential and well-known librarians”, and travelled to Paris on behalf of the financier, J.P. Morgan. She spent forty-three years at the Morgan Library and Museum, and when she retired the New York Times said that “Much that this remarkable institution today represents can be attributed to the earnest scholarship of Miss Greene. Her wide-ranging interest in cultural treasures is reflected in the library’s fine paintings, its unusual collection of illuminated manuscripts, its rare volumes and letters, its etchings, stained glass, and pottery”.  Reading this, one might get the idea that Greene was a prim intellectual, but it’s noted that when she first arrived in Paris in 1910 she was “hungry for an arts education and eager to meet her lover, the art critic Bernard Berenson”.

With its wide range of photographs and painted portraits, and its accompanying informative text, Brilliant Exiles is not only the catalogue for the exhibition which opened at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington in April 2024, but also a totally satisfying book in its own right. I have quoted Robyn Asleson more than once in my review, but it should be noted that there are, in addition to her contributions, four essays by other academics with a specialised interest in the subject of how American women functioned, and how they often related to each other, in the Paris of the period concerned.