Americans In Paris

New Exhibit Explores The Coming Of Age Of American Artists In Paris

(CBS) 
Indeed, in the wake of the Civil War, thousands of American men and women flocked to Paris to enroll at prestigious art schools.

And from the Champs Elysees to an afternoon performance at the Theatre Francais, the whole city was, as Boston painter May Alcott described it, "one art studio." John Singer Sargent, for example, illustrated amusements, from an orchestra rehearsal to an evening stroll in the Luxembourg Gardens.

Artistic reputations were made in Paris, sometimes in surprising ways when it came to works submitted for the highly selective "Salon," the annual art exhibition sponsored by the French government.

For an American artist to have a painting featured in the Salon was a "huge success," Gopnik says. "It was like winning the prize at the Cannes film festival."

Even artists whose works were rejected enjoyed success. "Being rejected by the Salon was the best thing that could happen to a young painter," Gopnik says.

A painter, for instance, like James McNeill Whistler. Born in Lowell, Mass., he came to Paris in 1855. He was only 28 when he painted a portrait of his model and mistress, Joanna Hiffernan.

"No woman would show up in public with their hair down like that during this period unless she was a fallen woman. And Whistler sort of enhances that idea by having the falling bouquets on the ground," Hirshler explains.

The painting immediately became controversial.

"It was shown in a one-year exhibition. It was called the 'Salon des Refuses,' the Salon of the Refused, which was a one-time show of everything that the Salon had rejected," Hirshler says. "One of the chief French critics, a man named Paul Mantz, wrote that this was the chief piece in the heretics salon. And then a friend of Whistler's, a French artist named Henri Fantin-Latour wrote to Whistler and said, 'Now you are famous.'

It was a major turning for American art, setting the stage for a younger generation of American artists in Paris, artists like John Singer Sargent.

Born in 1856 in Florence, Italy to American parents, he became the most celebrated portrait painter in Paris. One of his most complex and mysterious paintings was a study of the Boit daughters, who belonged to a wealthy Boston family living Paris.

"It's not just a great painting but almost like a great novella," Gopnik says. Henry James could have written that picture — this was just a commission to paint children in an apartment. But something about those girls, that moment for that painter, for Sargent, was so intense. I think in part because Sargent was the greatest painter of women of his time."

Women like Daisy White, the wife of an American diplomat, painted in Paris in 1883. But it was a portrait of "Madame X," painted the same year, that nearly ruined Sargent.

Her name is Virginie Avegno Gautreau, a Louisiana-born society belle who set out to be the most glamorous woman in Paris.

The painting features Gautreau in a provocative dress.

"When it was first painted and first exhibited one of her straps was down. You can still see a little bit of a shadow across her upper arm so that her diamond strap slipped off her shoulder," Hirshler explains.

Sargent, eventually, had to alter the painting.

"It's my feeling that people said about the portrait what they wouldn't say to Madame Gautreu. They said she looked like a corpse with her makeup on or that she looked like the dress was almost going to fall off," Hirshler says.

The hostile reception "Madame X" received when it was shown at the 1884 Salon marked the end of Sargent's career in Paris.

If anyone took on the French and succeeded, though, it was Mary Cassatt. A native of Pennsylvania, she settled in Paris in 1874.

She delighted in scenes of every day life: a mother and child, a little girl in an armchair, women drinking tea.

"She had incredible intuition that the most exciting stuff that was going on was the work of this very controversial avant-garde group, the Impressionists, and she is the only American painter of her time who is totally accepted by avant-garde, advanced French circles," Gopnik says.

By the 1890s, as many artists returned home, they applied what they learned in Paris, creating a distinctly American style: from Winslow Homer's "A Summer Night" along a Maine beach and Edmund Tarbell's "Three Sisters" in a New England garden to Thomas Eakins' "Starting Out After Rail" on the Cohansey River in New Jersey.

"The crucial thing to understand is that the influence of Paris on American painters wasn't to make them more French. It was to make them more American and that was fundamental," Gopnik says.