Excerpts from “Peripheral Paris”

Abstract

The following are excerpts from the English-language original of the text published as “Paris à la périphérie,” trans. Lydie Echasseriaud, in Claire Lebossé, Sophie Lévy, Maud Marron-Wojewodzki (dir.), United States of Abstraction. Artistes américains en France, 1946-1964, Nantes, Musée d’arts de Nantes, Montpellier, Musée Fabre, Gand, Snoeck, 2021, 91-132. Included here (without the original footnotes) are the essay’s introduction, largely centered on Joan Mitchell; a passage on one of the central figures in the show, the painter Sam Francis; and the entirety of a section focused on Shirley Jaffe, Kimber Smith, and James Bishop, this last having been chosen partly to honor Bishop, who died in February 2021, and partly to coincide with Jaffe’s eagerly awaited retrospective at the Centre Georges Pompidou in the months April-August 2022. Other artists addressed in the full-length version include Norman Bluhm, Simon Hantaï, Beauford Delaney, and Shirley Goldfarb. It is a remarkable fact that many of the Americans included in the exhibition and addressed in its catalogue remain better known in France than in their country of origin. I am grateful to the editors of Miranda for the invitation to share this material with a readership so closely attuned to both the complexities and the pleasures of living and working in a Transatlantic context.

Keywords

• Postwar American Painting ; American Artists in France
• Abstract Expressionism
• Joan Mitchell
• Sam Francis
• Shirley Jaffe
• Kimber Smith