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Paris is an island

During this period when the power balance of the Western geography of live art was being strongly called into question, Paris and France continued to offer to artists an invaluable distillation of access to history, art and an often imagined bohemian lifestyle, without embodying the weight of a nation. Whatever their gender, geographical or social origin, skin colour or sexual orientation, France – and Paris in particular – offered them a prime location to create art. A country of solitude and freedom, sufficiently removed from the constraints or pressures represented by the weight of the rising New York School, families, New York galleries and critics, and sufficiently detached from contemporary French artists to form – for a number of years or a lifetime – a refuge, an island of art.

These artists included the group of friends formed around Sam Francis and Jean-Paul Riopelle, Joan Mitchell, Shirley Jaffe, Norman Bluhm, Kimber Smith, Paul Jenkins and his partner Alice Baber who crossed paths with the young Hungarian Simon Hantaï, etc. Figures such as Georges Duthuit, an art critic and specialist in the work of Henri Matisse, the gallery owner Jean Fournier, or the cultural attaché at the United States embassy Darthea Speyer, who oversaw the programming of the American Cultural Center from 1957, were their loyal champions and presented their work together in several group exhibitions.

In this foreign artistic island, the works gathered here do not form a single style but freely move between movements – Abstract Expressionism, Lyrical Abstraction, “Abstract Impressionism” – and worlds, with the following watchwords as their sole guide: abstraction, colour, large sizes, deep or floating spaces, thick or indistinct materials.

The Huit Gallery

An example of American self-management in Paris

The Huit gallery, active between 1950 and 1954, is emblematic of the mutual aid that existed within the American artistic community in Paris, whose work was still not shown much in the exhibitions and salons of the time. The gallery, located at 8, rue Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre in the Ve arrondissement, initially brought together a dozen veterans benefiting from the G.I. Bill. It was self-managed by the artists and showed extremely eclectic works without taking style or school into account. Reginald Murray Pollack and Shinkichi Tajiri were among the founding members of the gallery, which aimed to promote their compatriots’ work, only opening up to non-American artists at a later stage. In particular, Simon Hantaï, who came from Hungary in 1948, was an English speaker and close to the American community (he met Joan Mitchell on his arrival in Paris), took part in one of the exhibitions. Joe Downing, an American artist, held his first solo show there in 1952, before being supported by the Arnaud gallery, which was also co-founded by an American artist.

Shinkichi Tajiri, Prisoner, 1950-1951

American born of Japanese parents, Shinkichi Tajiri was 18 when placed with his family in a detention camp after the attack on Pearl Harbor. In order to get out, he enrolled in the 442nd Regiment, the Japanese American Volunteer Unit, which distinguished itself for its fighting in Europe. He was himself injured during the Italian campaign. Several of his welded iron sculptures have, like this one, an autobiographical connotation, allowing him to exorcise the sufferings of war.

The scrap wires aggressively draw a silhouette whose humanity has disappeared in the geometric shapes and spiky tips. The work violently reinterprets surrealist sculptures, especially those of Pablo Picasso. Arrived in Paris in 1948, Tajiri joined forces with the CoBrA group and then took part in numerous group exhibitions. He was one of the co-founders of the Galerie Huit. In 1956, he moved to Amsterdam.

Reginald Murray Pollack, Blue Landscape, 1957-1960

Purchased, with funds from the Friends of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Inv. 59.12 The tripartite composition gives a glimpse of a dark background, occupied by geometric shapes on which gesture and color are exercised freely. Each additional layer becomes more intangible and gives precedence to the bursting of colors.

Reginald Murray Pollack benefited from the G.I. Bill which permitted him to come to Paris in 1948. He enrolled at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and settled into accommodations for artists in Montparnasse, Impasse Ronin, near the sculptor Constantin Brancusi. He divided his twelve years spent in France between Paris and Provence. He was one of the American artists who founded the Galerie Huit. Profoundly marked by his years of war in the Pacific, his metaphysical vision of existence nourished a painting that oscillates between abstraction and a figuration marked by surrealism.

Shinkichi Tajiri, Samurai, 1954

“In 1950 I started my Junk series. I collected scrap metal and machines, which I welded and reworked into a new entity.” This Samurai, halfway between abstraction and figuration, is part of this series. The geometric reconstruction of a human figure in pieces and shreds is a reference more to the relentless reality of war. It is also an homage by the artist to his ancestors: his maternal grandfather descended from an illustrious lineage of samurai. After his training at the Art Institute of Chicago, Tajiri’s departure to Paris, conceived as a self-imposed exile, allowed him to escape the hostility towards the Japanese community, susceptible to prejudice in postwar America. The artist continued to nourish his work with this multicultural heritage.

Joe Downing, Puis rouge alors [So Red Then], 1959

In this blue monochrome that takes a contrary title, the surface is animated with traces and signs, often circular or oval, similar to shadows.

“One would think that under the canvases of Joe Downing, in the underlying layers to the one that appears to us, sleep other canvases,” wrote his friend Marguerite Duras in 1958. A young veteran of the landing in Normandy, Downing returned to France six years later after studying at the Art Institute of Chicago. He settled here permanently, dividing his life between Paris and Vaucluse. A great colorist, he developed an abstract language, swarming with colors, lights, sometimes working in an experimental fashion on recycled surfaces. His taste for nature like his practice of poetry nourished his inspiration.

Sam Francis, Blue Balls, Circa 1961-1962

The Blue Balls series began in 1960, during a painful relapse of bone tuberculosis from which Sam Francis suffered. It was for him a cathartic path as much as a radical turning point in his art. Biomorphic blue shapes float in a white space, linked by a natural rhythm, tempo of the first moments of a vital world. The artist worked the canvas horizontally, letting the forms radiate beyond themselves through projections or drips. Pure color gives way to illusions of dilution and transparency, while empty space, surrounding the forms of silences, creates a contemplative dimension. “I live in a paradise of evil blue balls – which float, which float, everything floats – where I pursue this unique mathematics of my imagination through the succession of days towards a nameless tomorrow,” wrote the artist in 1961.

Sam Francis, The Whiteness of the Whale, 1957

Spots, traces, and splashes of bright colors break the purity of a white background.

In 1957, Sam Francis undertook a long stay in Japan which brought about a radical evolution in his work. The paintings he produced whilst there bears witness to a vehement craftsmanship and an exploration of the empty field inspired by Eastern philosophies. It was during this same period that blue began to play a fundamental role: “saturated blue is the matrix liquid,” he wrote. The title of this work refers to a chapter in the famous novel Moby Dick by the American Herman Melville, devoted to “the whiteness of the whale,” a whiteness “so mystical and well nigh ineffable was it, that I almost despair of putting it in a comprehensible form.” The fascination with white and the anguish of nothingness that it can arouse form a dual theme that the artist explores in his works from this period.

Shirley Jaffe, Crazy Jane at Appomattox, 1956-1957

This painting shows a gestural energy and a search for spontaneity in the sphere of influence of abstract expressionism. The many brushstrokes are grouped together to form floating shapes in intense colors. The title echoes American history: the city of Appomattox, where the surrender of the Confederate armies was signed in 1865, symbolizes the end of the Civil War, while the mysterious “Crazy Jane” could evoke the famous adventurer Calamity Jane.

In 1949, the American painter Shirley Jaffe left for France with her husband, the journalist and poet Irving Jaffe, recipient of the G.I. Bill scholarship. In Paris, she befriended expatriate artists grouped around Jean Paul Riopelle and Sam Francis, joined by Joan Mitchell and Kimber Smith. Her works are notably exhibited at the Nina Dausset Gallery (1952) and at the American Cultural Center (1958).

Norman Bluhm, Unknown Nature, 1956

Under the apparent monochrome veil, a lively play of colors is revealed. The artist proceeded in successive layers, lining the background with spots of brilliant blue, yellow, and red before covering them with a green layer, itself enhanced with touches of speckled black. The drips create a frame of vertical lines counterpointing the round shapes of the spots.

Norman Bluhm, a former US Air Force pilot during the war, moved to Paris from 1947 to 1956. Close to Paul Jenkins and Sam Francis, he participated with them in the exhibition Peintres américains en France [American Painters in France] at the Craven Gallery in 1953, piquing the interest of Michel Tapié.

That same year, the reopening of the Musée de l’Orangerie, which had been damaged during the war, showcased the great Water Lilies cycle by Claude Monet to these young American artists, and with it a new appreciation in the light of abstraction.

Harold Cousins, La Fôret [The Forest], Circa 1960

Although resolutely abstract, Harold Cousins’ sculptures often refer to elements of nature. Among his Forests, this one is made of thin metal rods welded to a base by almost invisible points. Rising in curved accents to bristle at the top, the stems form a vegetal lace in the air and play with their own drop shadows. The stem-tree, as a repeating motif, evokes the art of taking flight and creates a feeling of volume, of growth. The whole thing, compact from a distance, becomes thinner and lighter the closer one approaches.

Cousins moved to Paris in 1949 thanks to his war veteran benefits. Having trained with Ossip Zadkine, he developed at the start of the 1950s an abstract sculpture style by assembling welded metal plates or rods. Well-established in abstraction circles, he lived between Paris and Normandy until his permanent settlement in Brussels in 1967.

Thomas Erma, Red, Green, Blue, 1963

Starting in 1960, Thomas Erma created painting-collages that combine construction and destruction.

The first step in this methodical technique is the creation of an abstract gestural painting on paper, which Erma then destroyed by cutting it up into pieces. He then reconfigured and reassembled the fragments into a new work. This approach is reminiscent of the cut-out gouaches of the painter Henri Matisse, an essential figure for many American artists in France during this period, but also certain works by Sam Francis and Simon Hantaï.

Of Estonian origin, the painter Thomas Erma emigrated as a child to the United States. In 1957, having become an American citizen, he went to France to study at the Sorbonne and then at the Académie Julian. From 1959, he participated in group exhibitions and benefited from a solo exhibition at the Karl Flinker Gallery in 1962.

“Celestial painting”

Used by the critic James Jones with regard to Alice Baber, the idea of “celestial painting” was particularly pertinent to stylistically express the art of certain Americans in Paris. The works created by this group include a set of canvases in which the evanescent, transparent and extremely luminous painting material develops across the entire surface of the painting. Sam Francis was indisputably the pivotal artist of this type of art. In his canvases from different periods between 1950 and 1960, an increasingly large space was given to emptiness, whether between the layers that let air flow in the translucent depth of the colour, or between the forms that seem to float in a gaseous or liquid space. While these artists’ work does display the distinct characteristics of American painting of this period (colour field, all-over), the notion of “abstract landscape painting” is more specifically associated with them, highlighting Claude Monet’s influence on these painters, who discovered Water Lilies kept in the Orangerie in Paris. In this respect, Shirley Goldfarb wrote: “I saw Monet in France for the first time, and I mixed it with Tachisme, the aggressiveness that I had picked up in America. I really loved Monet’s colours, the Impressionist colours in the Parisian sky, and a kind of American aggressiveness in me, all that had come together.”

Alice Baber, Before Songs, 1962

Colorful, transparent, and fluid shapes invade the canvas and lightly dissolve, playing with the intensity of colors in a restricted palette around blues and greens. As is often the case with Alice Baber, the title refers to a universe of sound. Coming to abstraction through the practice of watercolor, the artist developed a lyrical style made of luminous fluid forms, where oil paint is worked in effects of transparency.

Trained in the arts in Indiana, Baber made her first trip to France in the summer of 1951. On the ocean liner back to New York, she met the writer and art critic Colette Roberts who introduced her to the world of galleries. It was in New York that she met Paul Jenkins, whom she joined in Paris in 1958 and married in 1964. Until 1970, she split her life between Paris and New York, and maintained a correspondence with Sonia Delaunay.

Paul Jenkins, Phenomena Yellow Ribbon, 1964

Evanescent colored veils stand out against the background of the canvas and bear witness to the research on color and the light spectrum carried out by Paul Jenkins.

Poured onto the horizontal support, Jenkins guided the paint flow by manipulating the canvas and using various tools. The word phenomena, used by the artist in his titles from 1960, refers to the philosophical theories of Emmanuel Kant.

After traveling around Europe, Jenkins settled in Paris in 1953. There he met Jean Dubuffet, Henri Michaux, and Wols through Tapié. Jenkins guided the latter on his trip to the United States in 1956 and translated his book into English. He also maintained friendships with other North American expatriate artists. He benefited from his first solo exhibition at the Paul Facchetti studio in 1954. Alice Baber, whom he met in New York, followed him to Paris and married him in 1964.

Beauford Delaney Untitled, 1961

In oil or gouache and watercolor, Beauford Delaney completely covered the canvas or paper with superimposed layers of pigment giving the sensation of saturation of color and light. Like other African-American artists and writers, Delaney left New York, where he lived between Greenwich Village and Harlem, for Paris in 1953. He was then 52 years old. A portrait painter in his youth in Boston, he painted serial street scenes in New York City before turning to abstraction just before his departure for Paris. There, he explored this type of painting, remaining faithful to the color and the light that already marked his figurative paintings. Come to Europe for a few months, the man nicknamed “the dean of expatriate African-American painters” and a great friend of the writer James Baldwin, spent the rest of his life in Paris, where he died in 1979.

Shirley Goldfarbn Summertime, 1960

This canvas is born from a juxtaposition of small colored fields, in a multiplicity of parallel or divergent touches saturating the space of colors. The variations in impasto as well as in colors give the ensemble great density and explosive energy.

Trained in New York, Shirley Goldfarb arrived in Paris in 1954 where she settled permanently. Her discovery of Claude Monet led her to soften her style which, initially marked by the action painting of Jackson Pollock, evolved into a more lyrical and luminous abstraction. She then adopted a more monochrome and rigorous technique.

Goldfarb exhibited several times at the Facchetti Gallery. While she was close to several artists from the American community, she distanced herself from them to get closer to the French circles of Saint-Germain-des-Prés.

Joan Mitchell and France

Having moved to Paris in the late 1950s, Joan Mitchell was one of the major artists in the American group in France. Following an initial stay in Paris in 1948, she returned regularly to France in the summer, working in the studio loaned to her by Paul Jenkins. Having moved to rue Frémicourt with her partner Jean-Paul Riopelle, her painting took a new direction at the very beginning of the 1960s, moving from a clear penchant for all-over painting to tighter compositions forming dense and lively clusters. During these years, Mitchell distanced herself from American Abstract Expressionism and chose her own path in Paris, also moving away from the artistic life of the capital, particularly the European scene. Nonetheless, she took part in the Antagonismes exhibition held at the Museum of Decorative Arts in 1961 and enjoyed a first solo show at the Neufville gallery in 1962, before being represented by Jean Fournier. Paying little attention to the contemporary French scene, she was more interested in the work of Vincent Van Gogh and Claude Monet, as demonstrated by her 1968 installation in Vétheuil (Val d’Oise), where the Impressionist painter had lived.

Jean Paul Riopelle, Untitled, 1964

This work bears witness to the new research carried out by Jean Paul Riopelle on the choice of both the medium and the format. The paper, divided into two parts, contrasts the cold blue background on one side with the warmer orange background on the other. Above it, black ink lines starting from the center pervade almost the entire work. The artist here moves away from his Mosaic period to return to a freer and more dynamic gesture on an imposing format. Jean Fournier dedicated a solo exhibition to him, just one year after the opening of his gallery on Rue du Bac: Beyond the 120, showcasing some twenty works on paper, some of which have monumental dimensions, going beyond 120 cm. A defender of American artists in Paris, Jean Fournier also exhibited Riopelle’s friends: Joan Mitchell, Shirley Jaffe, and Norman Bluhm.

Joan Mitchell, Untitled (La Fontaine), 1957

Energetic brushstrokes in intense colors stand out against a luminous background. They come together in a floating shape, evoking the outlines of old Parisian fountains. On the canvas is the handwritten inscription, “The Plowman and his children, La Fontaine!!,” referring to the fable by Jean de la Fontaine. The poem, whose moral is “Work is a treasure,” is also cited by Vincent Van Gogh, one of Joan Mitchell’s major sources of inspiration. When producing this painting, Mitchell was splitting her life between Paris in the summer (in the studio loaned to her by Paul Jenkins) and New York in the winter, before settling permanently in France in 1959. She visited often with expatriated North American artists gathered around Jean Paul Riopelle and Sam Francis, notably Norman Bluhm, Shirley Jaffe, and Paul Jenkins.

Jean Fournier’s Circle

In the 1950s, in the small Kléber bookshop turned into a gallery, the dealer Jean Fournier championed the most remarkable American artists established in Paris. While – thanks to Simon Hantaï – he knew the paintings of Sam Francis and Jean-Paul Riopelle, which he exhibited from 1957, Fournier came across the work of Shirley Jaffe and Kimber Smith at the American Cultural Center in Paris the following year. The former would join the group of painters regularly represented by the gallery, while Kimber Smith would only be exhibited during his lifetime as part of group shows. However, after the artist’s death, the gallery owner organised a homage exhibition gathering together his “Paris friends”. At the Salon de Mai in 1961, Fournier subsequently discovered the work of Joan Mitchell, which made a profound impression on him, a few years before setting up his new gallery on rue du Bac in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés neighbourhood. After the inaugural exhibition, Fournier turned to Riopelle to fill his walls. Joan Mitchell’s arrival in his gallery, following in the footsteps of Shirley Jaffe and James Bishop, clearly demonstrated Fournier’s determination to support this new community formed in the post-war period by American expatriates, with whom he shared an attraction to dense and vibrant colours.

Simon Hantaï, MMIII, 1964

MMIII belongs to the Panses series: for Simon Hantaï, the “Panse” is a “multiple folding of the same ovoid shape, covered with colors until the blanks created by the repeated folds are masked.”

The canvas, tied at the four angles, is painted and folded several times then stretched. A visceral form appears, made of a mosaic of recurring areas of color, floating in a space left raw. The artist, who exhibited the Panses in 1967 at the Fournier Gallery, made the folding process his main means of pictorial exploration.

Arriving in Paris in the fall of 1948, Hantaï established friendships with expatriate American artists, notably Joan Mitchell, Sam Francis, and Jean Paul Riopelle, who introduced him to Jean Fournier. A real companionship then begins with the gallery owner, which lasts until the latter’s death in 2006.

James Bishop, Untitled, 1964

The white form occupying most of the composition almost reminisces the square format of the canvas. As a counterpoint, three dense bands of color respond to this immaterial form. From 1962, Bishop gradually adopted a geometric structure and an explicit emphasis on the chassis, thereafter inspiring his flat colors in horizontal and vertical stripes. He developed a system favoring the square format – the ideal neutral form – where the color is deposited on the canvas placed on the ground, then spread by lifting one edge of the canvas: the pattern is born less from the line than from the meeting of colored surfaces. Bishop had his first solo exhibition at the Lucien Durand Gallery in 1963. He was exhibited at Jean Fournier’s from 1966.

James Bishop, Water, 1961

Colored fields converse with muted tones in a restricted palette. After training at Black Mountain College, an experimental art school where the great names of American abstraction taught, James Bishop left for Europe and settled in Paris in 1958. There, he re-examined American abstract expressionism, moving away in particular from its gigantism as well as its exacerbated gesture and colorism. He developed a sensitive abstract painting, inscribed in a reduced palette, seeking the interaction between form and color in a dynamic balance here, but which later evolved towards a more rigorous geometry.

Shirley Jaffe, Pale Triangle, 1964

During the 1960s, Shirley Jaffe’s painting evolved from a purely gestural practice towards a search for structure and rhythms. If the touch remains visible and the colors, although more vivid, retain their luminous transparency, the canvas is now built around obliques and a central triangular shape which gives the painting its title.

In 1963, Shirley Jaffe won a Ford Foundation grant for a one-year residency in West Berlin. This stay brought her newfound material comfort and a distancing from the Parisian context which allowed her to rethink her painting. She attended contemporary music concerts and was inspired by the creations of composers Elliot Carter and Iannis Xenakis, also Foundation grant holders.