Americans in Paris
January 15th, 2007 by Katie
I made my way through what I call “Tourists in America,” a.k.a. The Met on a Saturday, as I followed a gaggle of art-appeciators to the last weekend of the “Americans in Paris” exhibit. Upon stepping inside this temple I quickly muted my swagger to focus on the significance of the collections.
The exhibit meandered through several rooms, each with one painted wall outlining the thematic simliarities and periods of the work in standout white type. While know-it-alls walked by these walls without giving them a glance, I read every one, sucking up the nuances of the late 19th century.
Aspiring artists in the room stuck out like sore thumbs as they stared dreamily into the images of artist communities full of young men and women smoking cigarettes in the typical artists’ cliche. It represented the prequel to Warhol’s Factory and Williamsburg circa the nineties. The summer pastorals even reflected the artists’ retreat to the country for inspiration like Manhattanites take to the Hamptons in the summer. The similarities weren’t too shocking, given the two epicenters of art. Sounds like I rediscovered my swagger.
Yet in that time, New York was not at the leading edge of art. Drawn by the hundreds, up-and-coming artists were compelled to take sabbaticals in Paris to become apprentices and attract patronage from U.S. collectors who no longer purchased work domestically. This competition forced American painters to step it up and raise the standards of sophisticate art. As Henry James observed in 1887: “It sounds like a paradox, but it is a very simple truth, that when to-day we look for ‘American art’ we find it mainly in Paris. When we find it out of Paris, we at least find a great deal of Paris in it.”