Countenances that Countenanced

The Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery celebrates the brilliant American women at the cultural heart of Paris during the early 20" century

- James D. Balestrieri

Paris. From the turn of the 19th century to the 20th, through the tragedy of the First World War, through the “Lost Generation” between that war and the Second World War and the Nazi occupation of the “City of Light,” Paris was the cultural heart of the world, a haven and destination for artists, freethinkers and “free livers” of every stripe. And yet, the public imagination has, for the most part, been dominated by men—mostly white men—like Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí, like F. Scott Fitzgerald and, of course, Ernest Hemingway. Women—other than Gertrude Stein, whose salons fomented the broth of ideas that bubbled in Paris—were seen as ancillary to the art and anxieties of famous men. In this mythology, women are muses, helpmeets, models, lovers and sparring partners. In truth, as Brilliant Exiles: American Women in Paris, 1900–1939, now on view at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery shows, women of Paris from the early 20th century were on their own trajectory, challenging social and cultural norms and creating bodies of work whose contribution to the modernist project we are only now beginning to appreciate and understand.

A look at a partial list of the portraits of women in the exhibition gives a sense of the role of women in the shaping of the Paris of the time: Sylvia Beach, Josephine Baker, Natalie Clifford Barney, Elsie de Wolfe, Isadora Duncan, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Zelda Fitzgerald, Janet Flanner, Peggy Guggenheim, Theresa Helburn, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Florence Mills, Anaïs Nin, Rose O’Neill, Gertrude Stein, Sarah Samuels Stein, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, Anna May Wong. In this short list alone, you can pick out American women, European women, Black women, Asian women, LGBTQ women, writers, painters, actors, dancers, designers, patrons. Sometimes a single name from the list belongs in half a dozen of these categories.