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Brilliant Exiles, which opened April 26, comprises nearly eighty artworks depicting sixty American cultural influencers who went to Paris between the turn of the twentieth century and the eve of World War II. In doing so, these women defied the conventions of the time and constraints of their American upbringing to forge their identities, realize personal and professional ambitions, and shape numerous arts and culture spheres. 

The exhibit’s portraits and rich accompanying biographical material highlight how Paris provided a refuge from the sexism, racism, homophobia, and parochialism that these women faced in America. The city’s artistically enriching milieu fostered these women’s creativity, thereby shifting culture across a range of disciplines while permitting them to achieve an unprecedented level of personal freedom and self-expression.

“The women in this exhibition did not go to Paris on a lark,” said Robyn Asleson, the curator of prints and drawings at the National Portrait Gallery who put together Brilliant Exiles. “They went for a transformative experience. They transformed their lives, they transformed the 20th century, and they transformed the cultural map of Paris.”

The inclusive time-place-nationality framing of Brilliant Exiles allows it to encompass fine artists and performers, curators and collectors, writers and publishers, salon hostesses, and fashionistas. The styles and mediums of the portraits—paintings, drawings, sculptures, photographs, even a bronze bas-relief—are as diverse as the subjects themselves.

The 60 women Asleson selected and organized into nine clusters (with titles such as “Refashioning Modern Women” and “Dancer of the Future”) include instantly recognizable names like Josephine Baker, Zelda Fitzgerald, Isadora Duncan, and Gertrude Stein. But also present are lesser-known though equally influential figures in their own right like Baltimore-born Sylvia Beach, whose Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris became a hub of transatlantic literary modernism; and DC-raised Lillian Evanti, the first African American to perform professionally with the grand opera companies of Europe. 

The exhibit provides substantial representation of Black American women’s expatriate experience like Evanti’s in its “Stars of Montmartre Nightlife” and “Harlem’s Renaissance in Paris” sections. In Paris, Josephine Baker scholar Dr. Terri Francis explained in an email interview, many of these women would indeed have “found a city where they could move freely and pursue their interests as individuals while exploring the world.” Documenting their presence and accomplishments is a useful corrective to a common historical narrative that tends to focus on the time Black American male artists—think Richard Wright and James Baldwin—spent in France. 

The value of concerted attention to Black women’s creative contributions is apparent when contrasting Brilliant Exiles to The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism, the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art’s current show that traverses some of the same time period. A back of the envelope calculation of that exhibition catalog suggests that only about a quarter of its featured artists are women.

Brilliant Exiles also deliberately offers, Asleson noted, an overdue counter-narrative to the recounting of American history (and that of modernism) that privileged the so-called “Lost Generation” archetype of white, heterosexual men from the interwar period, à la Ernest Hemingway. 

According to Asleson, the genesis of the show was the emerging #MeToo movement in 2017, which sparked her to draw a parallel to the cohort of women who went to Paris in the first decades of the 1900s and, she said, were similarly “trying to get a foothold in a modern world that was dominated by powerful men.” Her conceptualization of the exhibit was further informed by the subsequent racial reckoning following George Floyd’s murder, the rise of book banning, and the backlash on LGBTQ+ movements toward equal rights. It was clear that many of the factors that spurred expatriation then—prejudices around race, class, gender, and sexual orientation, and the quest for authentic self-realization—remained as relevant now.  

The choice and placement of images throughout Brilliant Exiles stimulates further reflections on the unorthodox lives of the selected women, who were charting their own emancipatory journeys in the face of bias and marginalization, and the complexities of representing them multi-dimensionally.

For example, an exuberant 1936 advertisement for Josephine Baker’s appearance in the cabaret music hall Folies Bergère solely occupies a large wall in the middle of the gallery. The more than ten-foot-tall lithograph speaks to Baker’s all-eyes-on-her charisma and towering status among expatriate peers. It also underscores, though, how often Baker’s image was commodified—portraiture functioning as promotion and projection of external expectations more so than as “an image that reveals [Baker’s] character, context, or inner life,” observed Dr. Francis, whose book Josephine Baker’s Cinematic Prism is a study on the intricacies of Baker’s representation.

In other instances, the portraits are arranged in a dialogue with each other. The “An Academy of Women” section features several portraits of the lesbian writer Natalie Clifford Barney, whose decades-long salon in Paris fostered a community of women devoted to modern literature, music, and dance. A graphite and watercolor on paper composed of a few brushstrokes of Barney’s face with half-closed eyes and bared breasts, by her lover Eyre de Lanux, hangs within eyesight of a heavily applied oil painting of Barney as a regal young beauty in a red velvet gown seated on a throne-like chair, done by her mother, the prominent DC socialite Alice Pike Barney. One image as intimate and languid as the other is posed and commanding, together they highlight how much an artist’s relationship to her subject affects the resulting portraiture.

The sumptuous exhibition catalogue is a must-have accompaniment to an in-person visit. It contains expanded biographies and additional images of (or by) the exhibit’s trailblazing portrait-sitters, as well as essays by curator Asleson and other scholars. The exhibit’s podcast, featuring a conversation between the Gallery’s Director Kim Sajet and Asleson, delves deeper on a few noteworthy pieces, including the standout self-portrait of Romaine Brooks.  

After an unstable childhood and hardscrabble early life as an artist, Brooks eventually received an inheritance that allowed her to pursue her art in Paris and to defy gender and sexual norms of the time by dressing androgynously and pursuing a 50-year relationship with Natalie Barney. In 1923, Brooks painted herself in masculine attire, her face somewhat concealed by a hat brim and mask-like white powder, against a hazy backdrop of what could be the ruins of a city.

In the podcast, Asleson describes Brooks’s self-depiction, rendered mostly in grays and blacks aside from a slash of red lipstick, as “almost like a phoenix rising from this world that’s destroyed. She’s a survivor. She’s still here, and she’s very self-protective but also very flamboyant.” 

On the exhibit’s opening weekend, a trio of middle-aged women stood silently in front of this painting. Finally, after several minutes, one pronounced her assessment of Brooks, as obvious now as it was a hundred years ago when the artist put brush to canvas for this formidable act of self-creation: “She’s a badass.”

Brilliant Exiles: American Women in Paris, 1900-1939 is free and on view at the National Portrait Gallery through February 23, 2025, with related public education events including a May 19 curator-led tour by Robyn Asleson and a June 27 panel on Josephine Baker’s surprising career as a US spy during World War II.

Header Image: Self-Portrait, Romaine Brooks (1 May 1874 – 7 Dec 1970)1923, oil on canvas. Smithsonian American Art Museum, gift of the artist.