A taste for triumph. - Painting American: The Rise of American Artists, Paris 1867-New York 1948, by Annie Cohen-Solal - book review

Art in America, May, 2002 by Michelle C. Cone

Painting American: The Rise of American Artists, Paris 1867-New York 1948, by Annie Cohen-Solal, trans, by the author with Laurie Hurwitz-Attias, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2001; 439 pages, $30.

Two venues for art, the 1867 Paris Exposition Universelle and the 1948 Venice Biennale, mark the chronological boundaries of Annie Cohen-Solal's recent study Painting American. At the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1867, even the best in then-current American art, Hudson River School painting, stood no chance of success in an international context. In contrast, the presence of six paintings by Jackson Pollock at the 1948 Venice Biennale marks the finale of a grand effort by Americans not only to "paint American" but to reach global prominence free of European influences.

In the interval, there was a lot of traveling between New York and. Paris by several generations of artists, curators, gallery owners, wealthy private patrons and works of art. Much American money was spent assembling spectacular private collections of modern art on this side of the Atlantic, and a covey of museums of modern art sprang up on these shores, helping to displace Paris as the center of the art world. On the basis of such sociocultural factors, Cohen-Solal sees the artistic decline of Europe starting much earlier than is generally believed. In fact, she has a revisionist agenda: to demonstrate that the shift of the center of the art market from Paris to New York predates World War II by one war. Her thesis thus implicitly rebuts the theory that New York "stole the idea of modern art" (as expressed in the title of a 1983 book by Serge Guilbaut) in the context of an artistic Cold War waged by the CIA against the Soviet Union after World War II.

The story told by Cohen-Solal, who previously wrote Sartre: A Life (1985) and now teaches at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, introduces hundreds of art-world figures and offers many anecdotes. Incidents range from Mary Cassatt's convincing her father and his friends to buy French Impressionist works to Thomas Eakins's run-ins with the Pennsylvania Academy for teaching art from live nudes, from the stir caused in Paris by the sexy portrait of Madame Gautreau (Madame X, 1884) by John Singer Sargent to the 33 percent tax imposed on French paintings by the U.S. government during the 1880s and `90s, and the French retaliation--a 33 percent import duty on pork. Also noted are Edward Steichen's trips to Paris to find French artists for Alfred Stieglitz's art gallery; Robert Henri's displeasure with the success of French artists at the 1913 Armory Show in New York; Alfred Barr's long negotiations to purchase Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon, as it passed through the hands of Jacques Doucet's widow to the Seligmann Gallery in New York; Matisse's quip to Andre Masson, "some day they [the Americans] will have painters" (the title of Cohen-Solal's book in its original French version), and details concerning Pollock's troubled life.

Despite the author's press-release disclaimer that her book is not simply about art--"it cannot be considered strictly as an old-fashioned art book"--much of the material covered in Painting American certainly has art as its subject, along with the mechanics of the transatlantic art system. In Part I, titled "The Argonauts and the Golden Fleece, 1855-1900," the theme is how 19th-century American artists began to catch up with French art by studying the work of their French contemporaries in situ and occasionally exhibiting with them at Salons. Part II, "The Return of the Prodigal Sons, 1870-1913," deals with the import of French artistic know-how to America starting at the turn of the 20th century. Part III, "From Notre Dame de Paris to the Brooklyn Bridge, 1913-1948," traces the rise of an international market for modern American art.

In the early chapters, we read about the number of American groups that formed not only in Paris at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the Academie Julian, but at artists' colonies in French villages where the Barbizon group, the Impressionists and the Nabis also painted. Friendships were occasionially forged, and the Americans fared well in French academic circles, but they were not universally liked, particularly at Pont-Aven in Brittany. Cohen-Solal diplomatically elides this fact by saying that "little is known of the relations between Gauguin and the American painters in Pont-Aven." But another source suggests that Gauguin became so upset over the invasion of his favorite haunts by foreigners, among them Americans, that he often left Pont-Aven for nearby Le Pouldu. (1)

In Part II, the author describes the return of expatriate American artists to their native land, and shows them founding artists' colonies in the United States "that resembled those at Pont-Aven, Concarneau, Grez-sur-Loing, and Giverny." Cos Cob, Old Lyme, Woodstock, East Hampton, Shinnecock Hills, Annisquam and Ogunquit were favorite locales along the East Coast for the returning American Impressionists, but New Mexico attracted former exiles as well. Cohen-Solal quotes Birge Harrison, a veteran of Pont-Aven, exulting in 1885 about the beautiful New Mexico landscape, and she describes Joseph Henry Sharp urging fellow art students at the Academie Julian in 1895 "to go see for themselves the pictorial possibilities afforded by the Indians in Taos." Ernest Blumenstein and Bert Phillips apparently followed Sharp's advice and, joined by Sharp and a few others, founded the Taos Society of Artists in 1915. Not only did American artists open art schools in the U.S., but the American Impressionists eventually succeeded in showing their works at the Durand Ruel gallery outpost in New York next to their French counterparts.