‘Brilliant Exiles’ at the Portrait Gallery
By • June 6, 2024 0 271
Both the Paris Métro and the world’s tallest Ferris wheel made their debut at the Exposition Universelle of 1900. With the fair as its starting point, the National Portrait Gallery’s “Brilliant Exiles: American Women in Paris, 1900-1939,” curated by the NPG’s Robyn Asleson, is something of a Ferris wheel itself.
One encounters some 60 fascinating “exiles,” only a few household names. (As self-exiles, they would typically be labeled “expatriates.”) It is a bit dizzying, also due to the pairings and cross-linkages. Despite the frequency of same-sex relationships, men are glimpsed in the background: as fathers, brothers, lovers, husbands, mentors, colleagues, disciples and, naturally, portraitists.
Left: “Ethel Waters,” 1991 cast of c. 1930 original. Antonio Salemme. Right: “Ethel Waters,” 1939. Luigi Luciano. Photo by Richard Selden.
Inspired by British Museum antiquities and the “serpentine” dancing of fellow expatriate Loïe Fuller at the Paris Exposition, Isadora Duncan donned a Greek tunic and took off her slippers. Abraham Walkowitz, who met Duncan in sculptor Auguste Rodin’s studio in 1906, began capturing the curved lines of her naturalistic dancing in thousands of watercolors, one of which is on view.
Reflecting the Art Nouveau style of the Exposition and Gustav Klimt’s glittering portraits, the showpiece of “Brilliant Exiles” is a triptych of 10-foot-high murals, three of the seven Edward Steichen painted between 1910 and 1913 for the New York residence of newlyweds Agnes Ernst and Eugene Meyer. (Steichen, who soon gave up painting to focus on photography, was to become MoMA’s first director of photography.)
Each of the “In Exaltation of Flowers” murals pairs a visitor to Steichen’s villa in Voulangis, east of Paris, with flowering plants: painter Katharine Nash Rhodes with “Rose-Geranium,” painter Marion H. Beckett (likely Steichen’s lover) with “Petunia-Caladium-Budleya” and Spanish singer Mercedes de Cordoba Carles, who had recently married painter Arthur B. Carles, with “Golden-Banded Lily-Violets.” A 1909 Steichen photograph of Agnes Meyer and a 1915 Alfred Stieglitz photograph of Rhodes are nearby.
Nicknamed “The Three Graces” by Charles Lang Freer, an older member of the Steichen-Stieglitz circle, Rhodes, Beckett and Meyer (who had met Steichen while studying at the Sorbonne) came from affluent families. Meyer and her husband became Asian art collectors and close associates of Freer, as was Katharine Rhodes. The Meyers, who bought the Washington Post in 1933, named one of their four daughters after Rhodes; we know her as Katharine Graham.
Perhaps the most famous “brilliant exile” is modernist author Gertrude Stein. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has lent Picasso’s 1905-6 portrait of Stein, which hints at the Cubism to come. The work presides over the section The Stein Effect as La Grande Gertrude presided over the art-filled salon she hosted with Alice B. Toklas in their rue de Fleurus home. Also on view: a terracotta bust of Stein from 1922-23 by Jo Davidson.
Next to the Stein bust is a 1915-16 painting by Anne Goldthwaite of another American woman essential to modernist art history, painter and abstract art impresario Katherine S. Dreier, who founded the Société Anonyme with Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp in 1920 (its collection went to Yale). Elsewhere in the exhibition is Howard Gardiner Cushing’s stylized portrait of 1911-12, “Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney in Bakst Costume with Fleurs du Mal,” connecting the heiress who founded the Whitney Museum of American Art to Ballets Russes designer Léon Bakst and, with giant exotic blooms, to poet Paul Verlaine’s Symbolist masterpiece.
Like Stein a lesbian writer with family money, Natalie Barney, raised in Washington, D.C., started up her long-running Paris salon in 1909. Lesbianism, known in France as Saphisme (Greek poet Sappho was from the island of Lesbos), had something of a golden age before and after 1900.
“Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney in Bakst Costume with Fleurs du Mal,” 1911-12. Howard Gardiner Cushing. Photo by Richard Selden.
Two striking paintings by Romaine Brooks — “Chasseresse” of 1920, a portrait of Art Deco furniture designer Eyre de Lanux (born Elizabeth Eyre), and Brooks’s 1923 self-portrait — are on view; both de Lanux and Brooks were among Barney’s lovers. In 1927, Barney expanded her promotion of women writers, notably “brilliant exile” Djuna Barnes, by launching an Académie des femmes. Technically American, erotica writer Anaïs Nin, born in France to Cuban parents, also appears in the literary-themed section, daring us to judge her in Natashia Troubetskoia’s textured painting of c. 1932.
Duncan remained a center of attention into the 1920s, the “Années folles” or “Crazy Years.” Not long before Duncan’s accidental death in Nice in 1927, yet another “brilliant exile,” the New Yorker’s Paris correspondent, Janet Flanner (“Genêt” in the magazine), wrote of the dancer and choreographer: “After the war her Sunday night suppers in the Rue de Pompe were banquets where guests strolled in, strolled out, and from low divans supped principally on champagne and strawberry tarts, while Isadora, barely clad in chiffon robes, rose when the spirit moved her to dance exquisitely.”
In the Refashioning Modern Women section, we find Peggy Guggenheim in a 1924 photograph by Man Ray and a 1926 painting by Alfred Courmes. The niece of Solomon, founder of the New York museum, Guggenheim was the patron of, among many others, Barnes and photographer Berenice Abbott, Man Ray’s former darkroom assistant. (Abbott is represented by a c. 1932 self-portrait and a 1929 bronze bust by Isamu Noguchi.)
In the photograph, Guggenheim, dressed in a gold lamé gown, a gold headdress and Egyptian earrings, poses with a long cigarette holder. Also in that section: a 1941 painting by Roberto Montenegro of Helena Rubinstein, wearing a museum-piece silver necklace and encircled by a swath of blood-red fabric. Rubinstein opened her Paris beauty salon in 1909.
The 1920s and the 1930s, the decade of the Great Depression, were also the years of what the exhibition calls Harlem’s Renaissance in Paris. Black American women (and men, such as Langston Hughes) had another reason to self-exile: to live in a society where they weren’t second-class citizens.
According to scarcely-clothed stage sensation Josephine Baker: “I just couldn’t stand America and I was one of the first colored Americans to move to Paris. Oh yes, Bricktop was there as well. Me and her were the only two, and we had a marvelous time.” Bricktop was singer, dancer and vaudevillian Ada Smith, who performed in and ran Paris nightclubs, including her own, Chez Bricktop, starting in the 1920s.
Along with two photos of Baker is a glorious 1936 lithograph by Michel Gyarmathy, “Josephine Baker est aux Folies-Bergère,” in which the Nefertiti of Paris appears in flamingo feathers. Also in that section are a small bronze figure by Augusta Savage from 1930, “La Citadelle – Freedom,” and two unexpectedly reserved portraits of vaudeville and Broadway star Ethel Waters: a 1939 painting by Luigi Lucioni and a bust by Antonio Salemme, a later bronze cast of a c. 1930 original.
In a signature song, “J’ai deux amours” — written in 1930 by Vincent Scotto, with lyrics by Géo Koger and Henri Varna — Baker sings (in English translation): “I have two loves, my country and Paris.” Though many of the “brilliant exiles,” including Baker, who became a French citizen in 1937, felt little love for a country that held them back, most would endorse Ernest Hemingway’s description of the French capital as a “moveable feast.”
“Brilliant Exiles: American Women in Paris, 1900-1939”
Through Feb. 23, 2025
National Portrait Gallery
8th and G Streets NW
npg.si.edu
202-633-8300
