Selected Black Women Artists in Paris, Past And Present

 

Elizabeth Catlett, Augusta Savage, Lois Mailou Jones, Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, Edmonia Lewis, and Faith Ringgold featured in Les Cafe des Artistes: The French Collection Part II, #11 (close up), Faith Ringgold, mixed media painting on quilt, 1998. Credit: Janyce Denise Glasper at Musée Picasso.

In her 1970 paper, “The Unglamorous But Worthwhile Duties of the Black Revolutionary Artist,” Alice Walker said, “much lip service has been given the role of the revolutionary Black writer but now the words must be turned into work” (Walker 132).

The quote can be applied to the treatment of past and present Black visual artists as well, especially Black women artists continuously overshadowed by both race and gender. Thus, while revisiting Paris—a city on the cusp of progress for Black women artists— I reflect on womanism— a term coined by Alice Walker, two Harlem Renaissance artists that briefly lived abroad— Augusta Savage (1892-1962) and Lois Mailou Jones (1905-1998), and the timely exhibitions of Faith Ringgold,** Christa David, and Deborah Roberts.

Womanism means a true intersectionality, extending grace to all individuals who were not fully supported under umbrella terms such as racism, sexism, and even feminism. This inclusive branch is why I can leave the country and receive stamps from places like France. Long ago, such opportunities were not given to the most talented of people for the most criminal of reasons. My passport— and the passport of many Black artists— holds meaningful weight that cannot be taken lightly.


Augusta Savage and Lois Mailou Jones during twentieth century Paris

In 1923, a blind competition gifted figurative sculptress Augusta Savage— a native of Green Cove Springs, Florida who received a scholarship to attend Cooper Union in New York City— a phenomenal opportunity to study for a summer at École des Beaux-Arts at Fontainebleau in Paris. Although Savage won fair and square, the reward was quickly taken back due to American racism— women did not want to share ship cabin space with Savage. Letters were written as far as to the President Calvin Coolidge, but the committee remained stout in ruling against Savage going overseas.

 

Figure 1: Mourning Victory, Augusta Savage, ca. 1930, clay, dimensions and location unknown. Credit: Fisk University Library.

Six years later in 1929, at age thirty-seven, Savage’s Paris dreams came true. 

Thanks to generous contributions from the Urban League, Carnegie Foundation, the Rosenwald Foundation, and countless supportive friends, Savage attended Académie de la Grande Chaumière, staying at 5 Rue de Bagneaux Street in the Montparnasse neighborhood— a two hour train ride from the Louvre— and studied in the studio of French sculptor Félix Benneteau-Desgrois (Hirschke 158).

Of her experience, Savage wrote: 

“I have lately been trying to develop an original technique ...but I find that the masters are not in sympathy as they all have their own definite ideas and usually wish their pupils to follow their particular method, so I have been working alone for the past three or four months only calling in a critic for suggestions which I have found better for me if I am to develop along the line that I have decided on for myself” (Hirschke 158).

 

Unfortunately, Savage’s documented sculptures have estimated dates with locations unknown. In the lost clay sculpture Mourning Victory (Fig. 1), a nude woman with distinctive African features stands over a male head, her stance powerful and provocative. Her downturned face stares in tortured dismay over a death much different from Italian Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi’s portraying Judith’s violent beheading of Holofernes. Savage— exhibiting expressive depth in three-dimensional skill that rivals that of classical masters— shows a regretful aftermath. As both the creator of the artwork and the one who knows its subject the best, Savage demonstrates that blackness and Black creativity have a place originally denied her by her own country. 

During her two years abroad, Savage won awards and showed at the infamous Paris Salon and the Exposition and visited Belgium and Germany.

In 1937, representational and abstract painter Lois Mailou Jones— a Boston native who grew up in the affluent Oaks Bluff sector of Martha’s Vineyard and graduated from School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University— won a fellowship to Académie Juliann. Jones debuted at the Société des Artists Français with two paintings. Sculptor Meta Vaux Fuller (along with Harry Burleigh, the first Black composer of American music) originally advised Jones to go to Paris to study, as France was much more open to artists of all colors (Hirschke 188).

Figure 2: Dans un Café à Paris (Leigh Whipper), Lois Mailou Jones, oil on canvas, 36” × 29,” 1939. Credit: Brooklyn Museum.

In Dans un Café à Paris (Leigh Whipper) (Fig. 2), Jones renders a contemplative sienna-skinned man dressed in an elaborate gray suit and top hat, a liquor bottle, half filled glass, and two hefty sandwiches on a plate. The style is akin to Paul Cezanne and Vincent Van Gogh’s application techniques, recognizable brushstrokes that repeated shapes operating within the work, the ability to utilize color in an energetic, revitalizing palette, and an emphasis on observing her subject matter. Like many other artists, Jones mastered the classic mannerisms of painting whilst putting her own signature mark— differentiating between sharp and soft edges that have a mask like quality (keen in the man’s face and pasty’s of his suit jacket), a nod to her interest in African sculptures and relics. 

Of her travels, Jones said: 

“France gave me my stability, and it gave me the assurance that I was talented… that I should have a successful career. I had the most wonderful studio. The American University found it for me… it looked out over the city towards the Tour Eiffel. It had a loft and it had a roof garden. It was really paradise working in that studio of my dreams” (Rowell).

In 1962– the year that Savage passed away and my own late mother was born—Jones launched the first ever France tour for her Howard University students at Académie de la Grande Chaumière, showing them that there was a country willing to support their artistic pursuits if they wished for a lengthier accommodation. This encouraging act is a blessing similar to my first time visiting Paris in 2009— my first time flying in general— during my undergraduate studies. I remember an eagerness to explore every nook and cranny, overstaying in the Louvre because to depart too soon would be educational robbery. How can young impressionable artists and thinkers not want to take a little piece of the irresistible city and leave a bit of themselves in return?

Maybe Augusta Savage and Lois Mailou Jones— having found solace in Paris— desired to cement their legacies here too. However, they are not among the mainly white canon preserved at the prominent museums and galleries despite their artistic excellence. The Musée D’orsay houses paintings by Henry Ossawa Tanner, an African American and Mary Cassatt, an American woman— a demonstration of the exclusionary practice womanism is against. This is not to suggest that any eventual collected Black woman artist must be from America. Whether they have exhibited in this historically prevalent city or not, Black women artists exist across the world and deserve to be recognized in what’s still considered to be an important art capital outside of New York City.


Paris in the present

My steps trail behind ghosts along the cobbled streets, posing endless questions into the universe. Did Savage or Jones frequent the favorite cafes of the Impressionists? Were they collected and admired in this country? If yes, did curators, collectors, and art enthusiasts have hidden sculptures and paintings up in an attic or down in a basement, unknown and unsigned? I cannot resist imagining Savage hocking clay and chisel tools from Rougier & Plé, one of Paris’s oldest art supply stores or Jones purchasing fine pastels at Sennelier and carrying canvases up and down busy streets like the infamous Ninth Street women of New York— Lee Krasner and Elaine de Kooning.

Faith Ringgold, Christa David, and Deborah Roberts promise a nice change, this eclectic triad of American Black women artists in various stages of their careers. They would make Augusta Savage, Lois Mailou Jones, and others (many not as thoroughly researched) in this ancestral art lineage proud. 

“I know that a lot of the Americans that are over there [in Paris],” Ringgold said. “There's this constant thing where they're saying, ‘Oh, don't do that. The French don't like that.’ I don't care what the French like. African Americans and white Americans, too, feel put up against the wall when they go to Europe because we don't have this strong, recognizable cultural base. But that's why everybody emulates us, for our persistent vulgarity” (Graulich and Witzling 16). 

Ringgold discloses other Black women artists enjoying Paris life— Barbara Chase-Riboud and Jones— a subject of Ringgold’s early art writing.

My itinerary usually includes Marie-Guillemine Benoist’s commendable Portrait of Madeleine (formerly Portrait of a Negress) as a “woman painting a woman” consolation prize. Almost one hundred years before Savage and Jones were born, Benoist painted a commendable, sophisticated portrait capturing Madeleine’s face in a most harrowing light, having her stark white turban match the partly undone gown that bares her dark brown flesh. Yet, the question arises: why is Benoist’s rendering of a Black body collected above Savage, Jones, and other Black women artists classically trained in similar skill sets? So, only certain artists can depict blackness, but not those of African ancestry?

Four years ago, Benoist’s famous portrait was shown in Black Models: From Géricault to Matisse, the Musée D’Orsay companion of curator Denise Murrell’s Posing Modernity: The Black Model From Manet to Matisse to Today at Wallach Art Gallery— based on her postdoctoral research of Black models in art from French Impressionism to the contemporary.

Faith Ringgold at Musée Picasso

During Augusta Savage’s and Lois Mailou Jones’s eras, Faith Ringgold was thirty-two in 1962 and sixty-eight in 1998 respectively.

Ringgold stated: 

“Lois had a show in New York in nineteen sixty something. And I went running down there. That's what would happen. I'd read in the paper that someone was having a show. Romare Bearden had his show in '64 and Jones had her show. It was hard to find these things out. There weren't all that many opportunities to discover these people. And so it was nice to go and see if you could meet them. So I've actually known her since then. Romie Bearden I never did get to know…. I see [Clarissa Sligh, a book artist and photographer and Jones] as pre-women's identity. I don't emulate their work. I emulate them. I think that their spirit is wonderful, that they were able to do what they did was wonderful, but I'm much more inspired by the younger women today who are doing art out of being a woman” (Graulich and Witzling 15-16).

Faith Ringgold’s luminous career spans over six decades. Her Black Is Beautiful retrospective previously dominated four floors of the New Museum confronting the history and consequences of racism and sexism. Across the Atlantic Ocean, consolidated into a single floor at the Musée Picasso, selected paintings, mixed media quilts, and sculpture liven up the smooth, flat beige walls and floors with rich, animated colors, patterns, and words. Ringgold’s works entail the intersectional philosophies that the Guerilla Girls adopt— a crash course manifesto on museum/gallery’s disproportionate representation of the past/present art world. Globally, white male artists remain prominent in endless gatekeeping collections with girls and women ironically being their primary subjects. Ringgold’s French Collection series incites an undeniable desire to be seen and included in Paris and challenges a role that has traditionally been directed by the patriarchal gaze (and a few privileged women artists such as Benoist).

Figure 3: Picasso’s Studio: The French Collection Part I, #7, Faith Ringgold b. 1930, mixed media painting on quilt, 1998. Credit: Janyce Denise Glasper at Musée Picasso. 

In Picasso’s Studio: The French Collection Part I, #7 (Fig. 3)— which gravitates in severe and satirical territories— Ringgold disrupts the Les Demoiselles d'Avignon imposed behind her as her alter ego Willia Marie Simone. She poses for semi-nude Pablo Picasso, hands up in her hair, her nude body propped on decorative fabrics. His cubism style— and its obvious ties to African influence— surrounds them. As the defiant African artifacts swarm around the composition as a crucial reminder of where his Cubism period influence hails, Picasso’s paintbrush is ready to work on the blank canvas. Willia displays her breasts while demurely crossing her legs, divided between provocation and modesty. Her body gestures mimic the geometric figures in one of Picasso’s most famous works. The frank, honest picture shows an assertive woman who’s very aware of this man’s global power over art history yet flexes her own, undeniable strength.

Figure 4: Les Cafe des Artistes: The French Collection Part II, #11 (close up), Faith Ringgold, mixed media painting on quilt, 1998. Credit: Janyce Denise Glasper at Musée Picasso. 

The Harlem Renaissance and Impressionism form a blissful menagerie of great artists in Les Cafe des Artistes: The French Collection Part II, #11 (Fig. 4). A smiling Willia—dressed in a taupe and cream dress with white flowers in her hair— is among Vincent Van Gogh and Henry Ossawa Tanner. Lois Mailou Jones (in brown and white pinstripes) sits at the end of the third table beside bespectacled Elizabeth Catlett with Augusta Savage (blue patterned dress) leaning right behind her. Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, Edmonia Lewis, and Ringgold occupy the last table. This fictitious collective ties several components together— unforgotten Savage and Jones immersed around artists who were either their predecessors or contemporaries, Ringgold’s desire to juxtapose Black legacies with prestigious Parisian icons, and further proving that womanism can coexist beside the other isms. 

Christa David at 193 Gallery

Figure 5: Holy and ravished but still here; Deep waters, muddy and troubled here; and The weight of ravished worlds, selah, Christa David b. 1979, collage, paper, 29.9” × 22 × 0.8” each. Credit: Janyce Denise Glasper at 193 Gallery. 

193 Gallery is a twelve minute walk from Musée Picasso.

Christa David’s I’m Here To Save Myself presents experimental collages that entail the psychological, mental, and emotional effects of living in isolation during the COVID pandemic. Various repetitions involve the Black woman sitting on her knees, pointing outward, or stretching her hand, the differing backgrounds encouraging mixed responses. In the lower level, gridded photographs repurpose a singular figure in moments of spiritual reflection. She acts as a modest, serene picture sequestered in an appeasing, carefully crafted symmetry, her voluptuous body donning a simple white chemise/slip dress with its thick straps lying on her exposed upper arms. Her hair is either in fairy tale length box braids or a short, coily Afro.

Holy and ravished but still here (Fig. 5) utilizes the same cutout body as Deep waters, muddy and troubled here and The weight of ravished worlds, selah. The back is turned, box braids unbound, standing centered, to the far right, and to the far left respectively. The arch of her back and the position of her hands— one lying at her side and the other sassily perched on her hip— evoke a personality drawn in both confidence and uncertainty. Deep waters, muddy and troubled here and The weight of ravished worlds, selah are yin and yang immersed in thick, pillowy clouds, their bodies would touch if not for the stark separation between them. This private woman inhabits a strange Earth, seemingly calling on surrealist René Magritte’s penchant for the unexpected.

Other works further evoke religious metaphor, the notion of innocence, girlhood, duality, and passion. Fire, fabric, earth, and moon exist in these evocative images of girls and women with splendid free-flowing Afros, instilling feelings of sentimentality and familiarity. In the upstairs gallery, larger works are displayed alongside David’s poem, A Whole New World For One:


“…I name things

every day

from sun up to sundown

one by one

room by room

I drift in and out of focus touching

everything that wants to be touched

even me…”

David— who lives between Atlanta, Georgia and New York City, New York— is the youngest of the individual artists seen. Her exquisite range in integrating collage, text, and poetry would be a perfect addition to the avant garde Centres Pompidou, an eighteen minute walk away.

 

Deborah Roberts at Galerie Mitterrand

It took another twelve minutes to reach Galerie Mitterrand (eight minutes from Musée Picasso). In conversation with the late Nike Saint Phalle, born in the prominent year of 1962, Texas based artist Deborah Roberts shows playful and vulnerable mixed media works entitled Période Nègre: The Conversation Continues. The title refers to Picasso, Roberts saying that the focus is to “continue this conversation fifty years after his death by exploring the patterns, textures and history of the African people who inspired Picasso” (Roberts).

Figure 6: Let Your Root Feed Your Crown, (close up), Deborah Roberts, mixed media on canvas, 70” x 70,” 2023. Credit: Janyce Denise Glasper at Galerie Mitterrand.

Roberts is a vivid storyteller assembling various components together. Torn sources— a sad eye here or an opened mouth there— combine with painting and drawing techniques create altered Black children. These compositions are not, however, a frightening concept that would make anyone think of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Roberts approaches the idea in a scientific purity, her evolving style encouraging found exaggerated features to share space with softer counterparts. The opposing eyes do not seem cohesive or the nose is too small or the lips are too wide— but a pleasing unity somehow exists. Through this multifaceted process of reinvention and investigating beauty, Roberts makes a safer space for Black children to exist as children, that they are not automatically grown, fast, or any other negative stereotype thrown callously to young ears. Photographic facial fragments evoke reactions and parallel the hand-drawn elements. 

Let Your Root Feed Your Crown (Fig. 6) presents a Black girl with her face composed of images from three sources. With her hair styled in two Afro puff pigtails, she wears an argyle tank top and jeans— an outfit that seems almost outdated— but the warm pink and purple triangles make it pop in a modern way. Her interactive hands— stitched onto the rendered counterparts— are situated at her forehead and chin, forming a frame within the square composition. She activates the white negative space by her simple gesture and her eyes looking off the canvas— invested and engaged.

In these works of nuanced theatrics and using parts to create whole new people, Roberts lures the viewer into childlike curiosities, imploring us to investigate her subjects and in turn, delve deeper within our own psyches. Who were we as youngsters? How many personalities did we put on for our families, our friends? What did we project into the world and what did the world give back?

Leaving Paris’s future up to interpretation

A place can prove its progressiveness by the people it chooses to honor and collect. By shifting beyond an outdated expectation and opening doors that remain unopened, Paris, France must evolve past the lip service Alice Walker addressed— allow womanism entry. 

While Augusta Savage and Lois Mailou Jones did not receive posthumous rewards in the city’s highly regarded museums, the triad of Faith Ringgold, Christa David, and Deborah Roberts shifts the perspective in a beguiling new direction— that direction being a collaged tapestry involving Black women artists. Mariane Ibrahim— the Black woman owned Paris gallery which opened in 2021– shows artists such as Lina Iris Viktor, M. Florine Démosthène, and Zohra Opoku. May this vital encouragement influence historical institutions to offer Black women artists a true, inclusive permanence here in the city of lights.














Works Cited


Graulich, Melody and Witzling, Mara, “The Freedom to Say What She Pleases: A Conversation with Faith Ringgold,” The National Women's Studies Association (NWSA) Journal, Vol. 6, No.1, 1994, pg. 15-16.

Hirschke, Amy Helene, editor. Women Artists of Harlem. Augusta Savage’s Daring Sculptures of Women by Leininger-Miller, Theresa. University of Mississippi Press, MS, 2014, pg. 158, 164.

 
Hirschke, Amy Helene, editor. Women Artists of Harlem. The Wide-Ranging Significance of Lois Mailou Jones by Earle, Susan. University of Mississippi Press, MS, 2014, pg. 188.

Roberts, Deborah. “The Conversation Continues.” https://dailyartfair.com/events/download_press_release/16205, 2023. Press Release.

Rowell, Charles H. “An Interview With Lois Mailou Jones.” Callaloo Journal, Vol. 12, No. 2, 1989.

Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: CA, 1983, pg. 132.

             

**essay penned last summer with edits. Faith Ringgold passed away April 13, 2024.