Brilliant Exiles: American Women in Paris, 1900–1939 (Exhibition Review)
Cheryl Sadowski
Brilliant Exiles: American Women in Paris, 1900–1939 is at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C., through February 23, 2025.
Autumn is here, and on some evenings, I settle down with glass of wine to watch the next episode of X, Y or Z. Yet despite the volume of channels and programs propagated by the industrial entertainment complex, much about streaming media leaves me feeling numb. Apocalyptic storylines, overwrought characters, and channel surfing conspire to induce a weary current of indistinguishable sensibility, like the drone of cicadas.
In a break from such digital malaise, I set out one Sunday afternoon for the sizzle and light of early twentieth century Paris. Brilliant Exiles: American Women in Paris, 1900–1939, at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., is a balm for the eyes and soul — a meander of warmly lit period photography and portraiture narrating the stories of 60 convention-defying women who lived and worked in the cultural milieu of interwar Paris.
Imagine, if you will: It is 1900, and the Exposition Universelle — the largest world’s fair yet — has placed an elegant, scripted coda on the scientific and artistic achievements of the nineteenth century. The golden halo of the Belle Époque continues to shine, while beneath its aura, the traditions of European Continentalism are crumbling. There is restlessness and yearning for new forms of expression and identity. Stymied by the strictures of gender and racial discrimination, independent, career-minded American women are moving to Paris to create, live, and love the way they want. What does such a constellation of talented women artists look and feel like? This is what Brilliant Exiles explores so beautifully in depth and vivid color.
Walking the connected galleries is a temporal stroll through the history of women helping women to transform the boulevards and banks of Paris into interlocking circles of artistic influence and community. Through original art and photography, we see how Modernist Paris was propelled by women whose names and Bohemian lifestyles are well-known to history: salon grand-dames Gertrude Stein and Natalie Clifford Barney; Harlem Renaissance entertainer, Josephine Baker; avant-garde editors and writers, Sylvia Beach, Jane Heap, Anaïs Nin, and May Sarton; artist Romaine Brooks and interior designer Elsie de Wolf; visionary art collector Peggy Guggenheim and fashionista, Helena Rubinstein. Through them and many others, we connect with myriad women entertainers, writers, editors, visual artists and designers, musicians, stage actors, gallery owners and patrons whose names and contributions are perhaps not as well known.
There is Adelaide Hall, hailed as the “queen of Montmartre’s midnight throne,” who performed in all-Black musicals for a nearly a decade before making her debut in the 1929 Paris revival of Blackbirds. In Germain Krull’s photograph of Hall, she wears a sequined chiffon dress and pearls. The elegance of Hall’s attire and her dewy, knowing expression are a notable turn from the hyper-sexualized, racial stereotypes proffered by Paris’s obsession with Black women entertainers.
Not far from her portrait is Ethel Waters, a popular blues singer from Pennsylvania whose decision to eschew Paris’s first all-Black revue paved the way for Josephine Baker. Waters wanted to live in Paris “not as a singer, but as a human being.” Her portrait is among the most striking in the exhibit: The artist Luigi Lucioni portrays Hall in a poppy red dress and mink coat, looking simultaneously pensive and protective.
Nearby, Ada “Bricktop” Smith stares slyly from a streetside café in Paris. Smith ran a cadre of nightclubs bearing her nickname. Paris was by no means color blind, but neither was it legally segregated, and Smith’s entertainment venues attracted a diverse crowd of African Americans and white patrons seeking the latest in music and dance from Harlem.
Portrait of Jessie Redmon Faust, by Laura Wheeler Waring, 1945. Oil on canvas. (National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of the Harmon Foundation).
A quiet painting of novelist and editor Jessie Redmon Fauset suggests the author’s confidence working in Paris, free from the racial discrimination of the United States. “My growth as a writer has been hampered in my own country, and so I have fled it,” she explains.
In the realm of visual art, we meet Nancy Elizabeth Prophet, who endured more than a decade of extreme poverty in an unheated Paris studio honing her physically demanding stone and wood carvings. “A fire burns in me,” she wrote about her art, “a force that compels my obedience. I cannot stop. I must go on.”
There are surprises, too, along the way: a duo of hyper-muscular ballet dancers painted by Zelda Fitzgerald, and a rather stern illustration of Edna St. Vincent Millay, who took a break from poetry to work in Paris as a correspondent for Vanity Fair magazine.
Portrait of Caresse Crosby, by Polia Chentoff, 1927. Oil on canvas. (Special Collections Research Center, Southern Illinois University Carbondale.)
Brilliant Exiles conveys the potent triad of fashion, wealth, and artistic independence that permeated interwar Paris. A recently restored painting of Caresse Crosby, who founded two successful publishing houses, depicts the uber-stylish influencer in matching jade jewelry and a pert 1920s hairstyle. A portrait of Sarah Samuels Stein, Gertrude’s sister-in-law and a devoted art collector in her own right, was painted by Henri Matisse, whose early experimental style (known as Fauvism) Stein supported. Nearby is the heiress, Emily Crane Chadbourne, inspired by Gertrude Stein to become an art collector. Chadbourn is draped in an indigo robe, reclining on a damask sofa with none other than her Siamese cat.
Also woven throughout Brilliant Exiles is the vital role of close friendships and love affairs between women artists from all classes and backgrounds: Loïs Mailou Jones and Lillian Evanti, Djuna Barnes and Janet Flanner, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Natalie Barney and Romaine Brooks.
For those seeking greater understanding of the Transatlantic movements that defined the era, Brilliant Exiles provides ample descriptions of literary and artistic Modernism, the broad influence of the Gertrude “Stein effect,” and the umbrella of sexual liberation of Natalie Barney’s salons. Barney’s oversized portrait is as commanding and magnanimous as the woman herself, as she continues to hold court over the present-day gallery.
Ten years ago, an exhibit about women’s art, identity, and freedom would have stood soundly upon the foundation of its own history. Today, it is impossible to ignore important, current questions. If the United States continues to deny or restrict personal liberties based on gender; if tolerance for differing views and lifestyles continues to diminish even as the diversity of our country continues to grow, where will contemporary women artists find shelter? There is a ghostly undercurrent to Brilliant Exiles urging us to reconcile that it is not only possible, but desirable to live full, creative lives as individuals alongside universal, American values of liberty, pluralism, civility, and dignity.
Circling back to the digital malaise that blessedly propelled me from my TV, I left the exhibit taken by questions of arts and culture at the national level, specifically: What does it say about the character of a nation when it does not support its artists and writers, dramatists and designers? What do we lose when the Humanities are reduced or ignored by colleges and universities? What will our world look and feel like if tactile, human artmaking is subsumed by AI?
Perhaps AI is the avant-garde of the present era. Or perhaps there will be a renaissance of sorts, a return to the humanistic aspects of arts and culture, to long-form reading and philosophy, assuaging the relentless techno-aggrandization of our daily lives. Whatever the answers, Brilliant Exiles is a reminder of the societal conditions that force artistic exodus and the incredible gifts that artists bring us when they are welcome at home.
