"Americans in Paris Review" | 4Columns, May 3, 2024

Over one hundred works by expat artists who sought an escape from stateside restrictiveness in postwar France.

by Aruna D’Souza

In a 1960 interview, the abstract painter Mark Tobey, after years of living in Paris, where he achieved acclaim from the otherwise relatively chauvinist French critical establishment, nevertheless demurred that he was “an American painter, whatever [that] means.” After securing her position as a major figure in American abstract painting, Joan Mitchell, who spent long periods in France before eventually moving there permanently in 1959, said she hated “to be called an exile or an expatriate”; she was, in the words of poet John Ashbery, an “apatriate”—stateless, more or less.

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