Shoplifting, murder, acid-throwing, hammer blows, knives, guns, and nearly every kind of threat proliferated in Paris in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
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Yet Paris was called the City of Light. It was home to cultural bastions such as the Louvre and to artists like Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Vincent van Gogh, and Paul Cézanne. Even one or two women artists, such as Mary Cassatt and Berthe Morisot, resided there. But art, like poetry, was considered man’s work.
Aspiring American artists flocked there. It was the place to be — at least for men. American men lived on pensions, but those did not welcome unchaperoned women. Better-known art schools such as the École des Beaux-Arts were off-limits to women, while others charged them double the tuition.
Grace Turnbull, from the Baltimore family with ties to Johns Hopkins University, studied art at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Turnbull went to Paris hoping to register for life-drawing classes. She stayed at the American Girls’ Club. But she wasn’t allowed to take courses that featured nude models. When she complained, her mother said it would kill her father if she took such a course. “Father’s pious Presbyterian upbringing … made him scent danger,” she wrote in her autobiography.
That’s the setting for Jennifer Dasal’s latest book, The Club: Where American Women Artists Found Refuge in Belle Époque Paris. Dasal, curator and host of the ArtCurious podcast, wrote an earlier book that ferreted out unfamiliar incidents in art history. This one digs up mostly forgotten artists and the little-known place where Turnbull and others lived as art students.
The club, as it was painted by Anne Goldthwaite, one of the residents, provides Dasal’s cover illustration. Located at 4 Rue du Cheveuse, it was built in 1750 as a private home. It underwent several incarnations, becoming a porcelain factory, an orthopedic office, a boarding school for boys, and a residence for women art students. Later, it was a Red Cross hospital, a social club, and an academic center.
The property eventually became Reid Hall, named after its founder, Elizabeth Mills Reid. Today, it stands as an extension of Columbia University, including graduate and undergraduate divisions of other American universities.
Dasal’s book weaves details into a first-person narrative. Her writing is lighthearted and sprinkled with colorful anecdotes, but somewhat wordy, which makes her history engaging yet at times difficult to follow.
One of Dasal’s most noteworthy chapters refers to the art historian Linda Nochlin, whose 1971 essay asked why there were no great women artists: “The fault lies not in our stars,” she argues, “but in our institutions and in our education.” Believing that women artists had been neglected, Nochlin started a debate that included everything from the meaning of the word “great” to a discussion about the lack of women chefs.
Dasal’s book continues Nochlin’s argument, focusing on the American Girls’ Club and the women who stayed there. In America, Dasal writes, high-level artistic training was unavailable to women. Females had little access to salons and art exhibitions. Women were told that art should be their hobby, not their passion.
“This manner of thinking,” Dasal says, “was not limited to the visual arts but suffused many professional realms.” As Edith Wharton put it, “On her wedding day [the American woman] ceases in any open, frank, and recognized manner to be an influence in the lives of the men of the community.”
Reid, wife of the U.S. ambassador to Paris, believed that women had the right to study abroad. She understood parental safety concerns as did her friend, Helen Newell, wife of the Presbyterian minister at St. Luke’s Chapel, which abutted 4 Rue du Cheveuse.
The two women created a reading room on the property. They later added dormitories, a library, a chapel, a restaurant, a medical clinic, a painting studio, and an exhibition space.
Opening in 1893 on the Left Bank in Montparnasse, the American Girls’ Club provided artistic support and a home away from home replete with a matron who acted as a maternal stand-in, popping her head in its nightcap out the window when the bell clanged for night-time arrivals, as art student Emma Cranmer recalled. Closing in 1914 because of the outbreak of World War I, the club’s days as an artists’ residence have been partly forgotten. Most of the work of the artists residing there has been lost to history.
Dasal, though, helps to bring their memory alive through quotes from letters and memoirs. “We want to speak to an audience that asks simply,” painter Anne Goldthwaite writes, “‘is it good?’ Not ‘was it done by a woman?’” In a 1910 letter home, Alice Morgan Wright, sounding like today’s typical American child, says, “The work of Matisse is the most screamingly funny stuff that I have ever laid eyeball on.” My favorite quote, though, belongs to Helen Frankenthaler, who says, “…goddam it, I know how to paint just as well as the boys.”
The prevailing notion was that women artists were good as long as they painted like men. This particularly galled several club members and prompted them to become feminists. Ultimately, all were determined to pursue their vocations as artists. They believed that women could be great artists and should be encouraged to paint not like men or women, but like themselves.
Diane Scharper is a regular contributor to the Washington Examiner. She teaches the Memoir Seminar for the Johns Hopkins University Osher program.