An Interview with Debra Bricker Balken and Lynn Gumpert, curators of Americans in Paris: Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946-1962 (Grey Art Gallery, 2024)—Part Two

Abstract

The exhibition Americans in Paris: Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946-1962, running between March and July 2024, examines the art of US expats in Paris following World War II. The following is the second of a two-part interview with the show’s curators, Debra Bricker Balken and Lynn Gumpert. In this second part, the curators discuss the title of their show, which constitutes a reference to Vincente Minnelli’s famous film An American in Paris (1951, starring Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron). Their choice to pluralize “American” reveals much about their conceptual approach. They also discuss the inter-influence but also tensions between French and US artists of the post-war period. They evoke the idea of dialogue between New York and Paris, a notion that has been eclipsed by assumptions about the ascendancy of the New York art scene over the Parisian counterpart in the postwar period (for example, Guilbaut 1983). The curators turn us towards the idea of other forms of globalism, and other forms of modernism, that do not center the New York school. The interview concludes with a brief connection of this exhibit to the “post-global” moment in curatorial world (O’Neill 2019) and the wider society.