For people all around the world, Paris represents a cultural center for art, music, theater and marked the birthplace of some of the most influential thinkers and creators in our history.
While traveling to Paris itself would be ideal, Boston's Museum of Fine Arts has brought together some of the most French-influenced art of the late nineteenth century, albeit, all American.
The exhibition, "Americans in Paris: 1860-1900" eloquently portrays the magnetism of Paris just after America's Civil War as the city was searching for its identity, class and culture.
On exhibit until Sept. 24, the show demonstrates the impressive range of techniques acquired by American artists, reflecting their attitudes as foreigners, observers and students, as well as the response of the French art movements to their visitors.
In a city which itself was being revitalized in the late 1800s, the style and subject of painting was changing drastically. The biblical and mythological figures of traditional compositions were replaced by everyday people simply strolling, drinking coffee or attending the theater. Everyday life was depicted without any didactic moral overtones.
American artists like James Whistler were interested in Courbet and Manet's stark realism, with dark, sometimes disturbing compositions, while Mary Cassatt, as the only American to exhibit with the French Impressionists, was attracted to the lighter subjects.
The modernized Paris gave birth to two new classes, both highlighted by the exhibit: the fl??neur, the observant passerby aimlessly strolling the street, and the Bohemian, the starving artist willing to sacrifice creature comforts to fully embrace his craft.
In works like Cassatt's "In the Loge" (1878), a stylishly dressed woman stares out her binoculars who appears to be viewing actors onstage. Yet the man on the opposite balcony, in the same pose, is staring at her, not the play. To this voyeur, the spectacle is not the performers, but the audience. These works break from the mold of portraiture to reflect the fantasies of visiting Americans mesmerized by the self-obsessed modern Parisian.
As a show, "Americans in Paris" encourages viewers to draw their own conclusions about parallels and differences between American and French desires and tastes.
For example, contemporary critics compliment Ellen Day Hale's "Self-Portrait" (1885) for its bold gaze, praising its "native wit and courage." To say her unaffected quality is "native" to America is to overlook the value placed on these qualities in France at the time, perhaps reflecting a Parisian view of women. (The fl??neur was typically a label given to a man.)
American painter May Alcott Nieriker is quoted in the show as saying, "The French live so entirely in the theatres, the cafes, and on the boulevards that a stranger looks in vain for anything corresponding to an English or American home."
This reflects the American expatriates' intense homesickness, overwhelmed by the endless flow of cultural events and intellectualism of innovators like Monet, Courbet, Manet and Degas. These young Americans had their own genius, and while the exhibit highlights their hunger for validation in the world of high art, visitors will admire their artistic courage.
This show brings together some of modern art's most influential masterpieces, and is a singular opportunity to see walls boasting magnificent American art, such as Whistler's "Portrait of the Artist's Mother" (1871), which will only be in the show until Sept.18.
This distinctly American piece, with its Puritanical subject making an antithetical statement to the glittering scenes of afternoon strolls and picnics, makes a vital comment on the conventions of both art and religion.
Though Whistler developed his own personal American style, however, he still sought approval from the French establishment, claiming that the French government's praise was the most important validation of his career.
"Americans in Paris" gives visitors an unusual view of the Paris art scene in the late nineteenth century: a foreigner's perception of a time and place to which we are now distinctly strangers.
