American Artists in Paris, 1918 - 1939: A Transatlantic Avant-Garde

Afterimage, Nov-Dec, 2003 by Jill Conner

"American Artists in Paris, 1918 - 1939: A Transatlantic Avant-Garde"

Museum of American Art,

99 rue Claude Monet - 27620

Giverny, France - 33 (0) 2 32 51 94 65

August 31, 2003 - November 30, 2003

Transcending national differences, the Museum of American Art in Giverny was founded by Daniel Terra, an honorary ambassador to President Reagan, with a mission to focus on the transatlantic relationship that has existed between French and American artists throughout the Modern era. The current exhibition centers around work made by American artists who shared ideas with members of the French avant-garde between the two World Wars, before bringing their ideas back to the United States. Photographs by Berenice Abbott, Eugene Atget, Constantin Brancusi, Lee Miller, Man Ray and Edward Steichen collectively reflect the documentation of some of the most influential intellectuals from this time period while setting these historical memories within an expressive artistic context.

Eugene Atget's inner-city photographs of Paris reflect cluttered yet serene scenes. Two pictures, depicting an antique store and a street corner, for example, capture a bounty of used objects alluding to the remnants of a successful bourgeois economy. Contributing to the notion of cosmopolitanism, these images by Atget seek to project the essence of daily life within the new Industrial century.

Drawing from this precedent, Man Ray used the everyday object and human figure as his subject matter, placing each within separate settings. The Woman, from 1920, for example, portrays a pair of egg beaters yet the artist's misrepresentation of the object within the title reflects a play on form and linguistic meaning that sought to open up new avenues to artistic creativity and interpretation. In subsequent pieces, the artist's use of the rayograph pushes photography closer to geometric abstraction since it transforms the background into a dark monotony while the whiteness of each object abandons detailed representation for something more general.

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Lee Miller also toyed with visual illusion in "Exploding Hand" where a small sheen upon a glass surface visually fragments an individual's hand as it reaches to grasp a door handle. Unlike Ray who also created many close-up portraits of artists such as Marcel Duchamp and James Joyce, Miller sought to imbue modern metaphors within her work. "Joseph Cornell," for instance, reflects a profile of the artist almost hidden behind a small nautical model of a ship, perhaps signifying the frequent transmission of ideas that he exchanged with the Surrealists in France.

The photographs displayed in this show reveal the impact of Dada and Surrealism upon a small group of Americans who also strove to liberate art from what were then considered traditional modes of artistic production--grounded firmly within the relationship of figure-to-ground when placed inside a three-dimensional setting. The artists' analysis of individual perception, desire and the serendipitous meanings that words bear in connection to daily objects, cause the picture plane to break down into a collage of abstractions. While some created multiples and assemblages, others reflected a deep interest in the study of geometric forms. This exhibition's subsequent travels to Tacoma and Illinois scheduled for later this year and early next, will allow American viewers to see the exchange that took place among artists in the early 20th-century.

JILL CONNER is an art critic based in New York City.