Catalog published in conjunction with the September 4-November 30, 2003 exhibition.

Bailey is an accomplished bibliographer. . . . His annotations document the scintillating Paris of the early 1900s in smooth prose. Contents are arranged in eight broad topical groups, like `Writers and Their Crowds,' with author and subject indexes. . . . Scholars of English and French literatures, American and French history, and 20th-century fine arts will find relevant materials here. Choice Americans in Paris, 1900-1930 concentrates on the influx of artistic Americans who booked passage for the City of Lights during the early twentieth century. Bailey traces the Americans' arrival in Paris to their departure during the Great Depression. The book is divided into eight chapters. The first chapter provides background on Americans in Paris prior to 1900 and on the rise of French bohemia. Newspaper Accounts document the astonishing flow of people and money from America to France. The Expatriation Question studies the problem of Americans speaking out against their homeland. Tourism and Americanization probes America's rapid influence in France. Writers and Their Crowd identifies the serious artists who wrote about their experiences in Paris. Painters, Sculptors, Photographers singles out those Americans who enrolled in Paris art schools and benefited from exposure to an art-rich city. Musician and Other Paris Americans rounds out the diverse gathering of these intriguing people. Creative Literature captures the Paris experience in fiction and speaks more truth than many of the memoirs.

Americans often look back on Paris between the world wars as a charming escape from the enduring inequalities and reactionary politics of the United States. In this bold and original study, Brooke Blower shows that nothing could be further from the truth. She reveals the breadth of American activities in the capital, the lessons visitors drew from their stay, and the passionate responses they elicited from others. For many sojourners-not just for the most famous expatriate artists and writers- Paris served as an important crossroads, a place where Americans reimagined their position in the world and grappled with what it meant to be American in the new century, even as they came up against conflicting interpretations of American power by others. Interwar Paris may have been a capital of the arts, notorious for its pleasures, but it was also smoldering with radical and reactionary plots, suffused with noise, filth, and chaos, teeming with immigrants and refugees, communist rioters, fascism admirers, overzealous police, and obnoxious tourists. Sketching Americans' place in this evocative landscape, Blower shows how arrivals were drawn into the capital's battles, both wittingly and unwittingly. Americans in Paris found themselves on the front lines of an emerging culture of political engagements-a transatlantic matrix of causes and connections, which encompassed debates about "Americanization" and "anti-American" protests during the Sacco-Vanzetti affair as well as a host of other international incidents. Blower carefully depicts how these controversies and a backdrop of polarized European politics honed Americans' political stances and sense of national distinctiveness. A model of urban, transnational history, Becoming Americans in Paris offers a nuanced portrait of how Americans helped to shape the cultural politics of interwar Paris, and, at the same time, how Paris helped to shape modern American political culture.

Paris was the epicenter of art during the latter half of the nineteenth century, luring artists from around the world with its academies, museums, salons, and galleries. Despite the city's cosmopolitanism and its cultural stature, Parisian society remained strikingly conservative, particularly with respect to gender. Nonetheless, many women painters chose to work and study in Paris at this time, overcoming immense obstacles to access the city's resources. 'Women Artists in Paris, 1850-1900' showcases the remarkable artistic production of women during this period of great cultural change, revealing the breadth and strength of their creative achievements. Guest Curator Laurence Madeline (Chief Curator at Musées d'art et d'histoire, Geneva) has selected close to seventy compelling paintings by women of varied nationalities, ranging from well-known artists such as Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, and Rosa Bonheur, to lesser-known figures such as Kitty Kielland, Louise Breslau, and Anna Ancher.

This authoritative catalogue of the Corcoran Gallery of Art's renowned collection of pre-1945 American paintings will greatly enhance scholarly and public understanding of one of the finest and most important collections of historic American art in the world. Composed of more than 600 objects dating from 1740 to 1945.