The session explores the possibilities presented in modern literary and artistic history while building on previous scholarship cited within this essay. The idea for this session was inspired by two books and one documentary film: Shari Benstock Women of the Left Bank. Paris 1900-1940 (Texas University Press, 1986) and Andrea Weiss Paris was a woman. Portraits from the Left Bank (HarperSanFrancisco, 1995), which in turn produced an eponymous film (Greta Schiller/Andrea Weiss, 1996). These works highlight the community of women artists and writers during the interwar years in Paris. There is scholarship in the area, although most of it is scattered in single monographs, crossing various genres, and various languages, from popular comic strips, to fiction, biographical studies, cultural histories as well as scholarly artistic and literary studies.
Nissa Ren Cannon’s “‘Today in Society’: May Birkhead’s Paris-American Journalism” shows how timely it is to revisit May Birkhead’s little known contribution in the field of journalism as she spent three decades reporting on American high society in Paris for the so-called “Paris American” papers that served the city’s American residents. The presenter examines the role that Birkhead’s daily column played in helping the Chicago Tribune’s Paris edition appeal to readers and calls for further scrutiny of this American woman who has only been an afterthought in scholarship on early 20th century journalism. Cannon covers the role of her daily column for the Paris Herald and Paris Tribune in order to counter the dismissal of her work as ‘simply a society reporter’.
The artistic production of Françoise Gilot is further introduced by Catherine Portuges in “Gilot avant Picasso”; Gilot became an important 20th century painter, critic, and writer whose life was threatened during the second world war. Her trajectory is interwoven with the evolution of modern art in the 20th century, leading a double life, secretly studying art instead of law. Based on personal interviews with the artist undertaken in her studio in the Hotel des Artistes on the upper west side of New York and in her Paris atelier, and accompanied by video clips and stills from her work, the presentation considers her activities and influence during the war years (1939-45), her multidirectional influence in dialogue with other artists working in occupied Paris. Not much research has been conducted on Gilot who later moved to the United States, except for the recent The Woman who says no: Françoise Gilot on her life with and without Picasso. Rebel, Muse, Artist (Malte Erwing, Greystone books, 2016).
In “Doria Shafik, and the Formation of Egypt’s Femme Nouvelle,” Glenn Fetzer develops the Paris chapter of a long-forgotten heroine of women’s empowerment in Egypt. Shafik, an Egyptian poet was an expatriate writer; the Paris chapter is pivotal in shaping not only her intellectual being but also fostering her literary and poetic self. It is only in recent years that details of her life and contributions to women’s rights in Egypt have been recovered (Cynthia Nelson, Doria Shafik, Egyptian feminist: A Woman Apart , University of Florida Press, 1996). Fetzer focuses on her life in Paris during the late 20s and 30s, and its influence on her poetic work. She was for many years an international student, subject to the regulations and direction of the Egyptian Ministry of Education. She formed a community with other international women students who shared her residence. Fetzer draws from some of her Paris poems to reflect on her homeland, and the place of women in intellectual life.
Finally Catherine R. Monfort “Irène Némirovsky (1903-1942), key writer of the interwar period,” addresses one of the lesser known novels by the writer, namely Le Bal (1930) and its 1931 filmic adaptation. Irène Némirovsky is well-known for La suite française published posthumously years after her death at Auschwitz in 1942. Forgotten by the public who had discovered her with David Golder and Le Bal, she has nevertheless written more than 50 books, short stories and biographies. Born in Ukraine, of Jewish parents whose family went into exile because of the Bolshevik revolution, she lived more than half her life in France and considered herself French in spite of the fact she never obtained the French nationality. She wrote in French. Monfort studies the short story Le Bal (1930), and its immediate cinema adaptation by an Austrian cineaste Wilhelm Thiele. She addresses the mother-daughter relationship, the theme of the Jewish roots of Némirovsky and the use of anti-Semitic clichés, her conversion to Catholicism in 1939 and the painting of society at the beginning of talking pictures. Few studies are devoted to her literary production with A. Kershaw, Before Auschwitz: Irène Némirovsky and the Cultural Landscape of Inter-war France (Routledge, 2009), and none have analyzed Le Bal.
The panel adds to the existing scholarship at the root of the session. In fact, all subjects under scrutiny: Birkhead, Gilot, Némirovksy and Shafik are absent from the two volumes on women in Paris. The possibilities to build and expand on these groundbreaking studies (Benstock, Weiss) are multiple. The focus is on a specific cartography of Paris that allowed such artists and writers to flourish. All four papers, ranging from journalism to painting and from poetry to novel and film complement each other. After each presenter finishes his/her presentation limited to 18 minutes each, there should be room for a lively 15 minute debate. The field is further invigorated by recent publications but not necessarily part of the presenters’ focus, such as Mary McAuliffe, Paris on the Brink. The 1930s Paris of Jean Renoir, Salvador Dali, Simone de Beauvoir, André Gide, Sylvia Beach, Léon Blum and their friends (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2018), Michèle Fitoussi, Janet (JC Lattès, 2018).