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

by Sophie Lévy, Editor
University of California Press, Berkeley, 2004
264 pp., illus. 45 b/w; 200 col. Paper, $39.95
ISBN 0-520-24207-6.

Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
Saginaw Valley State University, University Center MI 48710 USA

mosher@svsu.edu

Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and others have written memorably of American ex-pats living it up in Paris in the years following the first World War, among whom were many notable artists.  In this century, the Musée d'Art Americain Giverny organized many of these American artists in an exhibition that crossed the Atlantic to Chicago and Tacoma, accompanied by this book.

Stuart Davis came of age in Paris, painting simplified streetscapes and a progressively abstracted egg-beater that limbered him up for a long productive life of paintings.  Man Ray painted and created his Dada sculptural objects there, though was celebrated by his contemporaries for his photographs and rich portrait photography.  Berenice Abbott also took portraits of many celebrated creatives in their circle.

Charles Demuth's early precisionist works are in this book, paintings whose style he successfully applied to agricultural and industrial imagery in the United States.  Gerald Murphy and his wife Sara spent several pleasurable but melancholy years in France entertaining everyone between caring for their own sick children, and nearly all of his few but powerful paintings are reproduced here.  The abovementioned artists are all welcome, but their underheralded contemporaries Charles Biederman, Patrick Henry Bruce, John Ferren, Gertrude Greene, Charles Shaw, and Jean Xceron surprise the reader with interesting Cubist or Cubist-derived works.

This is an immensely pleasurable book, a big paperback full of color.  Its various essays are mostly short and on individual artists, specific exhibitions, small magazines, and the collector/patron Albert Gallatin.  We have all heard the old saw that a work of art cannot be accomplished by a committee, yet a transatlantic committee of academics and curators have produced an exemplary art book.