Brilliant Exiles: American Women in Paris 1900-1939

Sometimes, but rarely, a museum proves its worth in surprising ways. I never expected to see the current exhibit, named above, at any museum, least of all at the once sleepy Speed Museum in Louisville, Kentucky.

I’ve been twice in the past few days and would go again if my visit here were longer. “Brilliant Exiles” comes from the National Portrait Gallery in Washington and has been shown at only one other regional museum.

I recognized nearly all of the dozens of names of the artists, entrepreneurs, dancers and writers represented by their portraits or other works, but I would not have been able to explain their importance except for Zelda Fitzgerald, represented here by the paper doll book she made for her daughter Scottie and an impressive oil of two ballerinas, naked, muscular, with large feet, the opposite of the daintiness we imagine. I knew she had worked hard in middle age to learn to ballet and had written one remarkable novel, Save Me The Waltz, but I never knew she painted. 

I knew Sylvia Beach had opened and operated Shakespeare and Company, the English language bookstore, for many years in Paris, publishing James Joyce among others, but I had no idea that she would be painted staring out with supreme self-confidence and a hint of bravado in her portrait by Paul Emile Becat. Nor could I have guessed that Berenice Abbott would photograph Beach as she came to her studio in Paris one rainy day, wearing a shiny black nylon raincoat, hand on her hip, eyes averted. 

I was disappointed that so many of these women were photographed or painted by men, which seems to cast a shade on the claim that they formed an interwoven network of support. But of course male artists—then as now—were more well-known than their female counterparts and their portraits would certainly have been shown.

I knew of Edna St. Vincent Millay but not of Djuna Barnes, whose handsome unsmiling portrait photograph, also by Berenice Abbott, stares out from the cover of the big heavy bound exhibition catalog, or that Janet Flanner, who wrote for decades for the New Yorker from Paris, would be photographed wearing a top hat decorated with a black and a white mask, also by Abbott.

And then there are the dancers, Isadora Duncan of course—I now have a new respect for my two paintings of her by Abraham Walkowitz whose work is also shown here—but I’d never heard of Eva Palmer-Sikelianos whose brooding portrait here by Alice Pike Barney shows her transformation from a New York debutante who went to Paris to act after deciding, “Of social services on the one hand, and of hospital services on the other, both of which commanded my sincere respect but could not reach beyond” and gained acclaim for her portrayal of the poet Sappho, or of Winifred de Wolfe, “dancer, art director, fashion designer, spiritualist, archeologist, and crime reporter.”

Many of these women came from big midwestern cities, and some had inherited family fortunes, but most, especially the Black women artists of the Harlem Renaissance, struggled to support themselves in Paris and sometimes went hungry.

Many, but not all, were lesbians, and the admirable shop at the museum carries information about the powerful influence of these and other lesbians on the culture around them both in Paris and in the U.S., perhaps a reason, in addition to ground in misogyny, that it has taken so long for them to receive the recognition that is abundantly their due.

I could go on and on. I hope some of you, at least, will be able to see this exhibition before it closes June 22nd. One of many takeaways is that there is no way “they”—and you know who I mean—can put us down. We have been accomplished and we have persevered for too long.

In Women, Art Louisville