Thoughts on the "Brilliant Exiles" Show
Art abounds in Washington DC, and while everyone seems to be talking about The Impressionists, here are a few words that might sell you a different, perhaps even more special (I think) show. I’m talking about “Brilliant Exiles: American Women in Paris, 1900–1939” currently showing at the National Portrait Gallery.
This is an exhibition about 60 or so American women, all artists of different kinds, who emigrated to Paris in the first half of the twentieth century to be able to live and work in the way they wished. They were painters, performers, writers, and fashion designers, who faced such limitations from prejudice in the US, in the form of racism, sexism, and other stigmas, that they sought a new home in Paris; somewhere that welcomed them openly, and offered a world of freedom and community with each other.
Paris during the early 1900s was exploding with art, and it became the most inspiring place for any artist to be at that time. Bohemia ruled, with new and experimental lifestyles that were accepted there, as well as people of different races and sexual orientations, and this paved the way forward for all kinds of art.
However, while we might usually associate this artistic liberation with the key holders of the Montmartre, including Picasso, Hemingway, James Joyce, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Brilliant Exiles chooses only to feature pictures of the women of this era and their work, who may be less known. In this exhibition, we meet Natalie Clifford Barney, Loïs Mailou Jones, Helena Rubenstein, Peggy Guggenheim, and others with whom we might be more familiar, such as Zelda Fitzgerald, Josephine Baker, and Gertrude Stein. This is a show where the subject of each portrait is the focus, not the artist, although several portraits are also artistically interesting, like the famous Picasso portrait of Stein.
One of my favourite pictures in the show was this tiny photograph of Sylvia Beach by Berenice Abbott.
Beach became an exceptionally influential character in modern literature after she founded an English language lending library and bookshop in Paris called Shakespeare and Company. Committed to supporting and publishing avant-garde, groundbreaking literature by previously unheard-of authors, she was the first publisher to accept Joyce’s Ulysses. She saw the project through even though he was rewriting whole sections of the book as it was being sent to the printing press!
Another favourite was this drawing of Edna St. Vincent Millay by William Zorach. She was the first woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1923) for her poem, “The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver”, written in 1921. I was actually really hoping that a trip to the museum gift shop afterward would present with me copies of the particular works of these women that were mentioned in the exhibition, such as Millay’s poem, perhaps some of Stein’s writing, a unique edition of Ulysses, or even prints of some of the paintings that these women created. Alas, this section of the shop was quite bare; a missed opportunity, I think.
I left the gallery with two more lasting impressions. First, it was quite striking how many of these women fostered community with each other, and how important this was to them. Some established or belonged to weekly salons, only for female artists, where they were able to share their work and support one another. Several artists in the show were also subjects of portraits in the show; these women inspired each other, painted each other, worked together, and were sometimes romantically involved as well. Moreover, many of these women were art collectors as well as artists; collecting and supporting other artists was just as central to their lives and careers as creating their own art. As mentioned in the gallery text, it’s quite interesting that ‘Contrary to the myth of the “lone male genius,” they formed collaborative, transnational networks’.
Secondly, and perhaps I felt this more poignantly as a young woman and a musician, there was almost no mention of the children and families (or lack thereof) of these women. In fact, the only instance where I can remember this theme cropping up at all was in relation to the work of Alice Pike Barney and her daughters, Natalie and Laura, all of whose art is featured here. I often feel as if I live in a world where the women around me are defined by these choices, whether to have children and how to juggle this with their work, so it was a refreshing experience to leave this question for once unaddressed.
These were incredibly talented and courageous female artists, and radical thinkers, each in their own completely individual ways. Unprepared to accept the rules of the dismissive society back home in the States, they sought other opportunities and alternative lives, building new worlds for themselves. They were not following in the footsteps of the celebrated men around them, but instead trailblazing new paths for artists, and especially women, everywhere, regardless of racial, social, sexual, religious, or political backgrounds.
Now showing until February 23rd, 2025, this is one you mustn’t miss.
