Americans in Paris: Exhibition Review
“They Loved Paris, American artists on the move at mid-century”
Art & Antiques, May 1, 2024

by Lilly Wei

There was an epochal transition in the years immediately after World War II as the center of the art world, a position held by Paris for at least a century, pivoted to New York. The shift had begun earlier, as such shifts do, the ravages of two wars on European soil a significant part of the story, as was the city’s four long years of occupation by the Nazis. In “Americans in Paris: Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946–1962,” the thorough and thoroughly engaging survey investigating the period at NYU’s Grey Art Museum, we get a close-up of that baton passing. Formerly known as the Grey Art Gallery, it is the museum’s inaugural exhibition, on display through July 20, in its new facilities at 18 Cooper Square and the tale of the (mostly) young American artists, writers, musicians, and dancers who thronged the fabled French capital, spending a year or longer—some their entire lives—attracted there by countless reasons, not the least of them the city’s unextinguishable, if somewhat tattered, allure.

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