Jean Fournier: the dealer who championed American artists living in post-war Paris

In the winter of 1949, a small column appeared in the New York Herald Tribune titled Paris After Dark. Humorous and informative, it detailed the misadventures of Art Buchwald, a former GI who had taken advantage of the very generous benefits given to ex-servicemen after the Second World War to move to Paris for an education.

Amid reports of beatnik jitterbugs and sightings of Orson Welles at Jimmy’s bar in Montparnasse, Buchwald caricatured the American expats in his orbit: eager young men lured to the City of Light by the low cost of living. ‘There was no telling how much wine, women and song you could purchase with your government cheque,’ he wrote.

Some were escaping the dreary prospect of a dead-end job back home; others, such as Ed Clark and Romare Bearden, found the city more hospitable to Black artists; while those with left-wing sympathies rightly judged that the anti-communist atmosphere in the US would be detrimental to their careers.

The city’s pre-war reputation as the centre of the avant-garde (‘when every day was like a sparkling holiday,’ said one society hostess) attracted would-be artists, writers and musicians hoping for some of the grit and glitz that had willed the likes of Henry Miller, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein and Man Ray into existence. ‘I think anybody who had spent four years in the military had some sort of illusions or dreams they wanted,’ said the painter Norman Bluhm.

The sentiment is charmingly, if extravagantly, captured in Vincente Minnelli’s An American in Paris, starring Gene Kelly as an ex-serviceman. ‘I’m a painter, and all my life that’s all I’ve ever wanted to do,’ he declares. ‘And for a painter, the Mecca of the world for study, for inspiration and for living is here on this star called Paris!’

Setting off from New York with stories of wild nights at Le Grand Ecart and Ernest Hemingway welcoming the Allies with champagne in the Ritz bar, these ambitious young men arrived to find a city riven by four years of German occupation, rationing and poor plumbing. ‘Paris right after the war was a myth, the great myth,’ said the dealer Jean-Robert Arnaud, ‘and the myth lasted about seven or eight years.’

Determined to make the most of it, the former GIs settled for a dissolute bohemianism in the cheap hotels around Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Vernissage of American Artists is a captivating slice-of-life by the experimental filmmaker Carmen D’Avino which documents these serious-minded aspirants: they rented studios, enrolled in courses at the Beaux-Arts and the Sorbonne, founded ad hoc galleries and poetry collectives, and spent their evenings frequenting jazz bars on the Left Bank where Juliette Gréco’s deep voice could be heard over the haunting sound of Miles Davis’s trumpet. If they didn’t have Surrealist poets declaring free love in the streets, then they had existentialists in the terrace cafés expounding their belief in authenticity, independence and free will.

Living in Paris was not so easy for young American women. Without the support of the GI benefits bill, those who came were either the product of wealthy parents, such as Joan Mitchell and Ruth Francken, or married to former soldiers, as were Shirley Jaffe and Shirley Goldfarb.

Mitchell had parted company with New York’s testosterone-fuelled art scene and its overlord, Clement Greenberg, when he dismissed her paintings as ‘gestural horror’. In Paris she found other refugees from the critic’s scorn: Sam Francis, Kimber Smith, Bluhm, Al Held, James Bishop and the Canadian Jean-Paul Riopelle.

Living close by Mitchell’s studio, on Rue Daguerre, was Jaffe, a young painter raised in Brooklyn and looking for perspective. She found she liked being an outsider, happy to ‘live between two worlds’ — something her fellow New Yorker, the poet Harry Mathews, described as ‘the honourable position’.

In the late 1950s, this close-knit group of painters caught the attention of Jean Fournier, a book dealer on Avenue Kléber who began exhibiting paintings in his shop after meeting the Hungarian émigré artist Simon Hantaï. In 1957 he offered the rising star Riopelle an exhibition. Riopelle, in turn, introduced the dealer to his friends.

By 1964, Fournier had his own gallery on Rue du Bac, where he tirelessly advocated the artists’ lyrical abstractions. If Paris gave the painters ‘conception and style’, said Jaffe, Fournier saw how they filtered their urban North American palette through a Mediterranean dazzle.

Colour was to become the art dealer’s founding principle, and it remained so until his death in 2006. Fournier’s artists had their own methods and goals, but they were united, he said, by the question of how colour cuts through the space on the canvas.

On 12 December 2024 at Christie’s in Paris, Vivre la couleur: Hommage à Jean Fournier will feature 35 paintings by the artists Fournier championed during his time as one of Paris’s leading contemporary art dealers. The sale focuses particularly on artists who lived in Paris from the 1950s to the 1970s.

Among the works for sale is F’s Picture (1968), a painting dedicated to Fournier by Jaffe, which marks a key transition in the artist’s practice from gestural abstraction to simple geometric forms. It was shown at her retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in 2022. The curator Frédéric Paul wrote that it took the artist 30 years to recover from the audacity of this painting, using it as a benchmark for her later experimentations.

Also on offer are three works by Mitchell, which echo the poet John Ashbery’s description of her paintings as resembling ‘long-scrawled letters to someone’. There are luminous patches of bold colour by the painters Kimber Smith and James Bishop, and Jaffe’s friend Sam Francis is represented by canvases that convey his deep connection with Paris’s existential philosophy: exuberant splashes of rich paint against a vast, unknowable whiteness. The art historian Georges Duthuit wrote that they were like ‘shrouds of mist’.

Duthuit was an important champion of the expats’ art. As the son-in-law of Henri Matisse, he embraced their vibrant palettes, declaring that their North American optimism was instrumental in re-energising the School of Paris. He was echoed by the critic José Pierre, who wrote that their art ‘opens onto the great jungles of poetry and the marvellous, illegitimate daughter of the unexpected lovemaking of surrealism and abstraction’.

Offered at Christie’s in Paris on 12 December 2024, Vivre la couleur: Hommage à Jean Fournier features 35 works by artists whom the Parisian gallerist passionately supported. The pre-sale exhibition takes place from 6 to 12 December