Past Exhibitions

This exhibition delves into the various circles of American artists who made France their home during the post-World War II era, and investigates the academies where many studied, the spaces where their work was exhibited, their interactions with European artists, and the overarching issue of what it meant to be an American abroad.

An American artist, publisher, collector, and gallerist, William N. Copley worked in Paris is the decades following World War II, where he developed his signature style of narrative painting infused with eroticism, symbolism, social satire, and political humor. In response to the increasingly nationalistic Cold War-era geopolitical climate the early 1960s, Copley designed an fabricated his ‘Imaginary Flags,’ which have been installed in the Addison’s stairwell, adjacent to Americans in Paris.

Organized by the Museum of Fine Art, Houston, this exhibition presents photographs that Robert Frank and Todd Webb created separately during their 1955 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowships. Though the men had no knowledge of each other at the time, their strikingly similar images revealed popular cultural trends and shared ideologies that challenged the idealistic purity of the “American Roadtrip.”