Foreign Artists and the École de Paris: Critical and Institutional Ambivalence between the Wars

In 1925 André Warnod declared in Comœdia that: “The École de Paris exists. Later art historians will be able […] to define its character and study its makeup but we can still today affirm […] its power of attraction which brings to us artists from around the world.” As Warnod then set forth, the École de Paris denoted a loosely affiliated network of independent artists, both French and foreign-born, whose collective talents offered an alternative and preferred ‘School’ to the obsolete academic model. More remarkably, he insisted upon the contribution artists born outside France working in Paris made to the “prodigious richness” of contemporary French art. As a label, the École de Paris soon narrowed in contemporary writing to distinguish the work of foreign artists vis-à-vis that of French counterparts; at the most conservative, reactionary end of the critical spectrum it signified all that was the antithesis of and a threat to true French tradition (the École française). Yet the École de Paris never entirely lost its impetus as a means of laying claim to foreign artists whose art and success was perceived to reflect, first and foremost, the city in which they had chosen to live and work. This was to become all the more apparent during the 1930s when, having lost momentum as a critical term indicating a practising group of artists, the École de Paris developed as an art-historical and museological category in which national origins were subordinated to the project of identifying Paris as the locus of modern art.status: publishe