The Club: Where American Women Artists Found Refuge in Belle Époque Paris

Belle Époque Paris was seen by Americans as permissive, temptation-laden, and dangerous, but also, after a disastrous U.S. showing at the 1867 World’s Exposition, as the only place worth going to learn about modern art, according to this evocative account. Dasal (ArtCurious; also the name of her podcast) unearths how the American Girls’ Club, a Parisian boarding house, emerged as an avenue by which ambitious American women could access the city’s cutting-edge arts scene. Free from the squalor and, more significantly, the mingling of the sexes commonplace in Parisian society, the Club helped (mostly wealthy, but some quite poor) young women make the sojourn seem more palatable to concerned families. Dasal begins by profiling philanthropist Elisabeth Mills Reid, who in 1893 founded the Club as a “respectable” alternative to the Latin Quarter’s raucous American “Colony.” Subsequent profiles of the Club’s denizens bring the era to vivid life, enumerating their chance encounters with Gertrude Stein and lessons with Rodin. Dasal’s almost forensic analysis of the students’ trajectories demonstrates how the Club, though largely forgotten today despite having produced notable artists like Marguerite Thompson Zorach and Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, was a significant engine of the era’s artistic creation and also an important landmark in women’s history, as its students were among the earliest American women professionals, with many returning home to work as commercial artists. Readers will be engrossed. (July)