Exhibition catalogue cover, Americans in Paris: Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946-1962. Shortlisted for American Library in Paris book award 2023. Edited by Lynn Gumpert and Debra Bricker Balken. Munich: Hirmer, 2022. 300 pp.
Lara Cox: Thank you very much for agreeing to this interview. Let’s start at the beginning of the project. Was there a specific inspiration behind the genesis of the exhibition?
Debra Bricker Balken: The genesis of the exhibition came about through a conversation that Lynn and I had on the heels of a show that I worked on, a retrospective exhibition of Mark Tobey, for the Peggy Guggenheim collection and during the course of my research for that project I was telling Lynn that I was just struck by the number of a Americans who had spent time in Paris, post-1945. The Grey, which Lynn can tell you about, had just mounted an exhibition called Inventing Downtown: Artist Run Galleries in New York City, 1952-1965 (Grey Art Gallery, January-April 2017) that had included some of these figures. Concurrently to the Tobey show, I was also working on an intellectual biography of Harold Rosenberg who was the first American correspondent for Les Temps Modernes. Again, through him, I was just overwhelmed by the number of American expat literary figures who were also in Paris at the same time as our visual artists.
LC: You highlight interconnected networks in the exhibition catalogue. The interdisciplinary aspect of the book is striking and not often done.
Lynn Gumpert: As Debra said, […] we had mounted this show, which was called Inventing Downtown, [about] artist-run galleries in New York City between 1952 and 1965. The books [for Inventing Downtown and Americans in Paris] are the same format. [The Inventing Downtown catalogue] was another massive tome with a lot of original research. The books had been proposed to me by a colleague at NYU, Melissa Rachleff Burtt. She had spent time on looking into, [the New York art scene] in the early fifties, particularly after the 1951 drawing show that Leo Castelli had organized in downtown. […] [A]ll of the galleries in the early fifties in New York weren’t really showing contemporary art, except for an exclusive number of artists. Artists took matters into their own hands and opened up these cooperative, artist-run spaces, like the Tanager and the Brata galleries […]. And that was my introduction because I found out that artists like Ed Clark and Al Held had come back from Paris specifically when the Brata gallery opened, because all of a sudden, they had a place to show their work. And then there was Sal Romano and all these other artists. […] As we were walking through [Inventing Downtown], Debra shared with me the results from her research, and there were so many [artists]. [Mark] Tobey was even there for x number of times. And we said, “Well let’s look into this”. […] [W]e were both just completely surprised at the sheer number […] and [the fact that] there hadn’t been any substantive research that had looked at artists coming since World War II. Because there were so many, we very quickly decided that we would focus on those artists who arrived for the first time after WWII. Otherwise, it would open the door to a lot of artists coming in the thirties, and this was such a big topic. Also, [we decided on the post-1945 date] because so many artists always go through Paris.
LC: Regarding the beginning date for the show, do you see a cut-off point or a clear difference between those artists that came pre-1945 and those artists that came post-1945?
- 1 The year of Hitler’s rise to power. Concurrently, the US was in the thick of the Great Depression. (...)
DBB: Yes absolutely. The focus for the past fifty years […] has really been [on those] who gravitated toward the Gertrude Stein circle in Paris in the 1910s and 1920s. After 1933,1 very few American figures travelled to Paris or spent time in Paris. 1945, 1946 really became pivotal dates not only because of the renewed interest on the part of Americans, […] settling in Paris, working in Paris, studying in Paris; but […] the[se] figures countered this very New York-centric view of the rise of American art. These terms like “The Triumph of American art” still linger in the discourse, which was part of the goal of revisiting this situation.
- 2 The GI bill, which was enacted in 1944 and expired in 1956, provided financial aid for returning so (...)
LC: I read in the catalogue for Paris et nulle part ailleurs that there were something like four hundred American artists (Gökalp 12) who came over with the GI bill.2
LG: [T]his is something I’m still curious about. Somewhere early on, Debra and I read four hundred American artists and then I could never find exactly this citation. We started a list and database for our own research of every name we came across on an invitation and we’re up to some two hundred and fifty. So, […] this would be something for future scholars to really determine and I’m not sure how exactly. But, [regarding that four hundred figure] is it the Americans who came on the GI bill in general—the writers, journalists and others? Romare Bearden came but didn’t make work. He was attending classes at the École du Louvre. Larry Rivers comes later but not on the GI bill. I’m just talking about people on the GI bill to begin with.
LC: [I]t’s a process of […] ongoing discovery.
LG: Yes, and we’re continuing to add names. We just discovered that Michelle Stuart who Debra and I respect enormously had spent a year in Paris during this time.
DBB: It turned out four years.
LG: Yes, but she didn’t put it on her résumé! There was no way that we could have possibly known.
LC: How did you discover that then?
LG: She talked to us, she said to Debra, “Why am I not in this show?”.
DBB: She contacted me through Instagram because I had posted a picture of the book and said, “Well that’s a great topic. Why am I not in the show?”. We are hoping to integrate her into the exhibition.
LG: It’s indicative again of how much we don’t know. The GI bill was certainly the impetus for a number to come over but then of course lots followed. Women, or women married to GIs, or women on their own. I remember very clearly […] each of us could rattle off ten names [of artists who had spent substantive time in Paris after WWII] off the top of our head without [having to] thin[k] for one minute […]. People like Joan Mitchell. You know, the usual suspects. Ellsworth Kelly, Jack Youngerman, Leon Golub, Nancy Spero. But nobody had ever put it together. Why? What impact did that have on their art? What impact did that have on American art in general?
- 3 This exhibition focused on US artists coming over during the post-war period who were associated wi (...)
LC: You mention at the beginning of the book that you collaborated initially with the makers of the United States of Abstraction (Musée d’arts de Nantes and Musée Fabre, Montpellier, 2021).3 And you eventually diverged in your paths. I have an inkling of the differences between your approaches, but I’d like to hear your thoughts.
DBB: When we embarked on this project, we were looking for a French partner. Sophie Lévy, the director of [the Musée d’arts de Nantes], has a specific interest in American art of the twentieth century, so we thought that she would be an ideal partner. But it turned out that as our research for the project evolved, we had very different conceptions of the project. Part of that was actually reinforced by a colloquium that we organized with the Terra Foundation in Paris. We invited a number of scholars.
LG: That was 2019, right? Just before the shutdown.
- 4 A Romanian art dealer, Sonnabend would become pivotal in spreading awareness in France about Americ (...)
- 5 Gallerist Jean Fournier declared his support for artists of the “first generation” of American Abst (...)
DBB: Just before the pandemic, yes. [D]uring the colloquium we were sitting around the table talking about the timeframe we initially envisaged ending in 1968 but that’s a very overused date at this point in time. And we thought that 1962 was actually more meaningful for a number of reasons. One of the reasons being that Ileana Sonnabend opens her gallery in Paris in 1962 and it completely changes the reception to American art.4 These figures who had been associated with the mid-century; their work is no longer exhibited. And these new pop artists begin to take over. So that becomes a key difference. The other thing is that air travel becomes extremely cheap around 1962 so American expats were not spending as much time in Paris. But for us a key event of that year was the liberation of Algeria from France […]. [Sophie Lévy] had a different notion of ending her show in 1964 because of the establishment of the Fournier gallery,5 which was not as meaningful to us as these other events.
- 6 Taking place in the Galerie Nina Dausset in 1951, Véhémences confrontées brought together the work (...)
LG: I think she also got very fixed on the Véhémences confrontées show.6 And wanted to focus on abstraction. Hence her title [the United States of Abstraction]. But we were confused. We had sent our list. So, she knew the artists we were focusing on. She wanted to include Leon Golub who is a figurative artist, but not Nancy Spero.
DBB: Or not Ed Clark, an abstract artist.
LG: Who was so important. It just became clear that she had a very specific idea, so we just parted ways. The other thing was we had to change the dates of our exhibition [because the Grey Art Gallery was moving to a larger space]. We had just learned of our move […]. So there was timing, [and] there were ideological differences.
- 7 Michel Tapié was a French art critic. In 1952 he published Un art autre : où il s’agit de nouveaux (...)
LC: What you said about the ideological differences [relates to] the ideological differences I could see. I saw your vision as: the Americans were rooted in a whole culture, [one that] includes literature, painting, but also film, art dealers, gallerists. The United States of Abstraction for me, maybe I got this wrong, focused on [Michel] Tapié.7 You do also […] evoke the importance of him, but you show that it’s much more than [him], in fact.
DBB: Right. Well, Tapié represented only a handful of figures in our project, not the entire spectrum. And he was a key figure but again not a central figure.
LG: The more we looked, the more complex and tangled it got.
LC: Could you talk more about the way you worked together to curate this exhibition and […] the key or unexpected discoveries from your conversations?
LG: I had asked Debra to curate a number of shows before. I’m a big fan of her scholarship and the very nuanced view she brings to looking at American art. And so, we became friends and that’s why we were going through the show together. It became clear when we walked through Inventing Downtown that this was a really rich topic. And as the director of the museum, I’m also the curator but I knew that I would never have the time to do full research. So, I asked Debra to take on the role as lead curator. She did the lion’s share of the research. What was really fun for me, I hope it was fun for Debra as well, was having the dialogue of being able to go back and forth, […] between us to tease out certain aspects of the show. […] [W]e came across figures like Shinkichi Tajiri, who we saw mentioned early on. […] What struck us immediately, and again I think this is a difference with Sophie [Lévy’s] approach, was that there were all kinds of artists in Paris. There was such a big diversity…of figurative artists, of African American artists who were doing genre scenes like Haywood “Bill” Rivers […] [A]fter the [2019 Paris] seminar […] we were able to go visit [Shinkichi Tajiri’s] daughters and his studio in Holland. So that was a really fun aspect of the exhibition, the research.
DBB: I think as well that we discovered these extraordinary figures whose reputations we knew after they had unfolded in New York were present in Paris. Carmen Herrera being a key figure. Claire Falkenstein […] spent almost a decade in Paris before she returns to the United States. Harold Cousins, an underknown figure. I think that both Lynn and I wanted to have a mix of both known and underknown figures in this project.
LG: And that’s why we came up with this format of two sections. You can’t do a good exhibition with fifty artists or a hundred artists. […] So we decided to focus on a representative group of artists that we called the “Focus” section with two or three works by each artist. And then we were so intrigued by the fact that there were so many artists that we created the “Salon” section. So, there’ll be two major sections. The “Salon” is a smaller section but we wanted again to just indicate the diversity of the artists. Including somebody like Louise Bourgeois and Sal Romano, so one really well-known and one not-so-well-known. But they were both there making works.
DBB: In terms of our thesis and thinking about the way in which the mid-century in the United States has focused on a so-called New York school, […] [the term] Abstract Expressionism […] has excluded so many diverse voices. We wanted to show the whole range of [artwork] in Paris as a way again of rethinking the mid-century.
LG: And I must say there is that Studio Museum exhibition in Harlem early on about African American artists that came to Paris. That’s a very important catalogue.
DBB: [The catalogue is entitled] Explorations in the City of Light: African American Artists in Paris, 1945-1965.
LG: This was again just showing the diversity, [although] the curator Valerie Mercer […] included a number of artists who came before WWII. She had a different agenda. But again, it’s so interesting that so many African American artists came [to Paris] when paralleled against the writers who later would come and the jazz players and the jazz scene. We very quickly realized that the jazz scene was so important, and you know one of the artists who hasn’t received as much attention was Herbert Gentry, who came over with his wife and he was a jazz singer. He opened up a club called Chez Honey. This is great stuff. We wanted to be able to include them as well.
Herbert Gentry, Chez Honey, 1949. © Herbert Gentry; Courtesy of the
estate of the artist and RYAN LEE Gallery, New York.
1Part two of the interview will be published in the spring 2024 edition of Miranda.