Americans in Paris Show Moves to New York and the Times

I recently saw a wonderful exhibit, “Americans in Paris: 1860-1900” at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. I see that it has now moved to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The New York Times has a nice review, Back When America’s Art School Was Paris. It puts the show in historical context, “not so long ago the United States was a buyer rather than a seller of cultural influence, and that’s what we’re looking at here.”

I highly recommend this show. The exhibit site writes, “This landmark exhibition features some 100 oil paintings by 37 Americans whose accomplishments proclaim the truth of what Henry James observed in 1887: "It sounds like a paradox, but it is a very simple truth, that when to-day we look for ‘American art’ we find it mainly in Paris. When we find it out of Paris, we at least find a great deal of Paris in it."

Times have changed but Paris remains a source of beauty and art as I recently rediscovered in September.