Americans in Paris - by Lynn Gumpert & Debra Bricker Balken (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

The first substantial, scholarly overview of the American creative community living in postwar Paris, featuring never-before-published interviews with Americans and French artists, critics, and dealers.

This book delves into the various circles of artists who lived in France following World War II. Featuring new scholarship and illuminating essays, the groundbreaking volume illustrates many of the paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photos, and films produced between 1946 and 1962. Americans in Paris introduces the story of the American creative community that inhabited the City of Lights following the Second World War. Proposing Paris as decisive for the development of postwar American art, this volume investigates the academies where many of these artists studied, the spaces where their work was exhibited, the aesthetic discourses that animated their conversations, their interactions with European artists, and the overarching issue of what it meant to be an American abroad.

About the Author

Lynn Gumpert is director of the Grey Art Gallery, NYU, where she has overseen more than seventy exhibitions. She previously worked as a writer, consultant, and independent curator, organizing shows in New York, Japan, and France. Debra Bricker Balken is a curator, scholar, and writer who has assembled numerous museum exhibitions relating to American modernism and contemporary art. She is the author of Harold Rosenberg: A Critic's Life, published by the University of Chicago Press, and the volume Arthur Dove: A Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings and Things.