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Brilliant Exiles: American Women in Paris,
1900-1939,
an important
exhibition
that opened
April 26,
2024, at the
Smithsonian
National
Portrait
Gallery in
Washington,
DC, focuses
on women
artists who
flourished
in the City
of Light in
the early
1900’s.
While
curator
Robyn
Asleson
emphasizes
the more
colorful and
flashier
Black
artists like
dancer
Josephine
Baker and
singer/nightclub
owner
Bricktop
Smith,
Gertrude
Stein has a
huge
presence in
this
exhibition.
The Steiny
Road Poet
was awed to
see
Stein’s
Picasso
portrait,
with its
velvet rail
ensuring
viewers not
get too
close, there
in this
exhibition.
It was
allowed to
travel from
its usual
home at New
York’s
Metropolitan
Museum of
Art.
Pablo Picasso began this portrait in 1905 and completed it the following
year. It is considered part of his Rose Period paintings and a foundational
piece leading to his Cubism. This portrait was one of only two paintings
Stein carried with her when she and Alice Toklas fled Paris to the French
countryside during World War II. Days before the operation that would
end her life, she wrote a will that bequeathed this artwork upon her death
to the Metropolitan Museum.
Picasso’s portrait of Stein is flanked by Pavel Tchelitchew’s blue-toned
portrait of Stein’s beloved Alice who has her head bowed and eyes averted
to something in her hands, possibly a handkerchief. On the other side of
the imposing Stein who is leaning forward in a masterful gesture is
Gertrude’s sister-in-law Sarah Stein who stares forth in a frightful gaze
from her portrait by Henri Matisse.
Nearby is a dual portrait of a writerly Gertrude and an embroidering Alice
in a painting by Francis Rose. Next to the Rose portrait is a case containing
a terracotta head of Stein by sculptor Jo Davidson.
There are many familiar women in this display of compelling portraits,
some of whom knew Gertrude Stein such as: novelist Djuna Barnes,
painter Zelda Fitzgerald, diarist Anaïs Nin, bookseller/publisher Sylvia
Beach, writer/journalist Janet Flanner, writer Natalie Clifford Barney, poet
Edna St. Vincent Millay, and publisher Jane Heap.
In an online interview, Curator Asleson quotes Gertrude Stein who said the
men [who came to Paris like Ernest Hemingway] were the lost generation
but Asleson states it was Paris where the women found themselves and
their artistic talents.
Beyond the works related to Stein, the two pieces of art that stays in
memory for the Dresser are the “self-portrait” by Zelda Fitzgerald which
shows two lanky and muscular nude dancers (Fitzgerald trained to be a
ballet dancer) and the larger-than-life poster-style portrait of Josephine
Baker.
 
This is a show to take your daughters and granddaughters to. Brilliant
Exiles continues through February 23, 2025. It moves to the Speed Art
Museum in Louisville, KY from March 29 through June 22, 2025, and
finally to the Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, GA from July 19 through
October 12, 2025.
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