Foreign Artists and Communities in Modern Paris, 1870–1914: Strangers in Paradise ed. by Karen L. Carter, Susan Waller (review)

This volume opens with an incisive Introduction which grapples with the entanglement of economic, artistic, and political factors that combined to establish Paris as a beacon for artists in search of training, as well as a market and visibility, but who were also often in flight from repression or isolation in their countries of birth. It touches on the factors at play in globalization, on the role of technological change, and on the extension of imperial structures of governance; in so doing it deals too with the varying designations of foreigners (migrant, exile, expatriate, sojourner), suggesting that the frontiers between them are necessarily fluid. All this is important, and points towards a more probing and multi-directional approach to the types of human and cultural mobility that made Paris the capital of the nineteenth century than has thus far been pursued. After this extensive approach — although the Introduction is efficiently succinct — the chapters that follow contribute a series of keyholes, and the reader is left to extrapolate back to the bigger picture. This is certainly possible: many of the chapters reveal a balancing act for foreign artists working in Paris that appears to be relatively similar whatever the national origin and however long the stay in the city, which is perhaps one of the surprises that emerges from the book. Thus Emily C. Burns’s judgement that Americans in Paris in the late nineteenth century ‘both wittingly and unconsciously cultivated a separatist cultural character’ (p. 100) is echoed both by Ewa Bobrowska on Polish artists (she notes a ‘sort of “intellectual ghetto” or refuge’, p. 93) and Nicholas Sawicki on Czech artists. Yet Polish artists were numerically more significant than the Czechs, and stayed much longer as a rule than the Americans, who were often only in the city for a prescribed period of study. In this respect, what also becomes apparent is the strength of the Parisian artistic milieu, that is, its capacity to absorb foreigners within its ambit while preserving its own prestige, despite the dispersal of the latter across a range of institutions (both private, such as art journals, and public, as in the cases of the écoles and the salons). The book deals well with the declining influence of state apparatuses, with a particularly interesting piece by Karen L. Carter on the private Académie Julian, which saw artists from all over the world pass through its studios. Italian artists are an interestingly diverse case, and, significantly, they form the focus of a number of chapters. While the highly successful Giuseppe De Nittis never forgot he was a foreigner in the ‘paradise’ of the new Republic, his compatriots Federico Zandomeneghi, Medardo Rosso, and Gino Severini lived their status as outsiders more abrasively or ostentatiously, suffering from isolation, performing their foreignness, and in the process, the book suggests, opening up new horizons for art in Paris.