On the Trail of American Women in Paris

How often have recent events in the United States borne out William Faulkner’s famous aphorism “The past isn’t dead, it isn’t even past”? I have often reflected on that truth while curating Brilliant Exiles: American Women in Paris, 1900–1939, an exhibition on view at the National Portrait Gallery through February 23, 2025. The women featured in the exhibition grappled with many of the issues that preoccupy us today. By stepping away from their lives in the United States and relocating to Paris, they gained a foretaste of personal freedoms and professional opportunities that were (and perhaps still are) a long way off at home. These talented, independent women not only transformed their lives but also reshaped the cultural map of Paris. As expatriates in an unusually tolerant, cosmopolitan city, they were at liberty to pursue innovative work in a diverse range of fields, including art, literature, dance, music, fashion, and theater.

Around 2018, in the wake of the #MeToo movement, I began mulling ideas for an exhibition that would tap into the long history of women navigating formidable obstacles while gaining a foothold in male-dominated fields. I thought of the harassment and objectification faced by women in early-twentieth-century Modern art circles—women such as the painter Katharine Nash Rhoades, whose artistic strides in Paris were derailed by a New York gallerist’s unwelcome sexual attentions, but who went on to become a major force behind the Smithsonian’s Freer Art Gallery (now the National Museum of Asian Art).

Additional themes took shape as I delved into the personal papers of dozens of extraordinary women in manuscript collections across the country. The painter Loïs Mailou Jones frequently expressed her sense of liberation from the double burden of racism and sexism while in Paris, and other women of color echoed those sentiments in their own writings. That aspect of the exhibition took on deeper resonance during the national conversations about racism that followed the death of George Floyd.

Today, as I write this, controversies over book banning and sexual and gender nonconformity roil debate. Those issues are not new either. More than a century ago in Paris, Sylvia Beach published and sold books that had been banned in the United States and Great Britain, and Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas made a lifelong commitment that was a marriage in all but law. To gain such opportunities, these and many other convention-defying women had to leave the United States and transport themselves to the more accepting and culturally vibrant environment of Paris.

Using portraiture as the vehicle for representing this history created unique opportunities as well as challenges. Opportunities, because so many noteworthy women expressed the new sense of identity they cultivated in Paris through their self-presentation in portraits. In the photographs of Berenice Abbott and the paintings of Loïs Mailou Jones, Margaret Lefranc, and Romaine Brooks, for example, revised self-images come into clear focus. However, challenges resulted from the fact that not every American woman with a significant Parisian history ever had a portrait made, or at least not one that was suitable and available for display. In selecting works for the exhibition, those created by women were prioritized, but in many instances a portrait by a male artist provided the only means of including a woman who would otherwise have been unrepresented.

The layout of Brilliant Exiles was designed to offset some of the gaps and inequities that are endemic to the genre of portraiture. To compensate for the comparative lack of portraits of women of color, for example, the central core of the exhibition is devoted to African American writers, artists, entertainers, and entrepreneurs, with a towering, colorful poster of Josephine Baker as an anchoring image. The personal and professional networks that connected these women are mapped out by the groupings of their portraits.

One of the most gratifying consequences of Brilliant Exiles is that it has brought to light several portraits that have languished in obscurity for a century or more. The exhibition provided the occasion to take these works out of storage and conserve, frame, research, publish, and display them. Nearly sixty percent of the seventy-six exhibition objects come from Smithsonian collections, thirty-two from the Portrait Gallery alone, and others from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Hirshhorn, and Smithsonian Institution Archives. Dozens more are illustrated in the exhibition catalogue, highlighting the Smithsonian’s impressive resources for the study of American women’s history.

Some of my most memorable experiences as a curator occurred while hunting for portraits far and wide. On one occasion, I arrived at a tiny airport in southern Illinois to discover there was no Lyft or Uber service—only a dodgy cab for the hair-raising ride to a university library twenty minutes away. But every inconvenience was forgotten when I opened a box in the special collections department and came face to face with a stunning painting of the avant-garde publisher and arts patron Caresse Crosby. Recently conserved and framed, her portrait is now one of the highlights of the exhibition.

My hopes for Brilliant Exiles are twofold. First, that visitors will learn about several dozen remarkable American women who deserve a larger place in our collective memory. And second, that the exhibition will prompt reflection on some important questions. What compelled these “brilliant exiles” to leave home to pursue their dreams across the Atlantic? How differently would things have turned out for them—and for twentieth-century culture—had there not been a Paris to escape to? How much has changed since then? Have the freedoms and possibilities sought by these pathbreaking American women become realities?

In light of these questions, perhaps Faulkner’s aphorism is less apposite than Shakespeare’s: What’s past is prologue.