Brilliant Exiles

“I have a thrilling hope that women are going to do something glorious in the arts.  It is my passionate conviction. I am always indignant when women are denied creative power in art.”

The illustrator and women’s rights activist Rose O’Neill became a self-made millionaire thanks to the commercial success of her “Kewpie” cartoon character. In Paris, she found support for more experimental artwork inspired by dreams, imagination, and the  unconscious.

“I was forced to go abroad to achieve the recognition [my] own society was not willing to give. There I was treated with great respect and afforded the privilege of having my paintings judged and exhibited.”

This self-portrait reflects the confidence Loïs Mailou Jones gained in Paris during her first visit in 1937-38. She portrays herself at work in her studio, paintbrushes in hand. The African figurines in the background were key to the artistic identity she developed in France.

“She is coming, the dancer of the future: the free spirit, who will inhabit the body of new women; more glorious than any woman that has yet been; more beautiful than all women in past centuries: The highest intelligence in the freest body.”  

Isadora Duncan arrived in Paris in 1900 and began to fulfill her vision for a revolutionary approach to dance. Her freedom and self-expression laid the groundwork for the international modern dance movement and encouraged bold new experiments in the visual arts as well.

“So Paris was the place that suited those of us that were to create twentieth-century art and literature, naturally enough.”  –Gertrude Stein

After moving to Paris in 1903, Gertrude Stein assembled a pathbreaking modern art collection and developed an experimental form of writing. She further defied convention by committing to a lifelong partnership with Alice B. Toklas, shown with her in this double portrait.

“What a dark age we are living in and what a privilege to behold the spectacle of ignorant men solemnly deciding whether the work of some great writer is suitable for the public to read or not!” 

Sylvia Beach was one of several American women who published radically experimental literature in Paris. Her bookshop and lending library, Shakespeare and Company, became a crucial hub for progressive literature, banned books, and international cultural exchange.    

“Sometimes I have felt that my growth as a writer has been hampered in my own country. And so—but only temporarily—I have fled from it.” 

Jessie Redmon Fauset played a crucial role in the Harlem Renaissance as a novelist and literary editor.  Seeking relief from racial prejudice, she went to France in 1914 and 1924. In her novels, she often drew on her experiences as a Black woman in France.

“What was the good of having the statue without the liberty, the freedom to go where one chose if one was held back by one’s color? No, I preferred the Eiffel Tower, which made no promises.”

At age nineteen, Josephine Baker sailed to France with dreams of fame that were beyond her reach in the United States. Her performance in an all-Black revue took Paris by storm. Her eccentric whimsy, anatomy-defying movements, and supercharged energy left audiences dazzled.

“[I] had to get to Paris…. That need to go to Europe burned in me like the flame in a steel furnace, bright and fiery and harsh and terrible. It consumed me. And I never really let anything stand in my way.”

Eager to advance her career as an opera singer, Lillian Evanti journeyed to Paris in 1924. There, she became the first African American to perform with the grand opera companies of Europe. In this colorful portrait, Evanti wears her costume from Rossini’s The Barber of Seville.

“Paris has always seemed to me the only city in which one can express oneself as one pleases…. In France, thought, food, and love have remained a matter of personal taste and one’s own business.” 

For sixty years, the writer Natalie Barney oversaw a Paris institution: a weekly salon that promoted literature and the arts. She introduced women of different nationalities to each other’s work, and she provided a congenial gathering place for lesbians such as herself.