ArtMuse ArtTalks: Host Grace Anna Interviews Author & Podcaster Jennifer Dasal

As part of our "ArtMuse ArtTalks" series, host Grace Anna interviews author and podcaster Jennifer Dasal about her recently published book The Club: Where American Women Artists Found Refuge in Belle Epoque Paris.

In The Club: Where American Women Artists Found Refuge in Belle Epoque Paris, Jennifer Dasal shares the never before told story of the American Girls’ Club in Paris.

As the book end reads, “Opened in the 1890’s, the Club was a center of expatriate living and singularly harbored a generation of independent, talented, and driven American women dedicated to the fine arts…These women forged connections in the arts and letters with luminaries like Auguste Rodin and Gertrude Stein, or became activists through their relationships with the likes of Emmeline Pankhurst. But just as importantly, these women’s lives revealed the power of the Club itself, and the way that having a safe home of ambition allowed them to grow as teachers, artists, suffragists, and people”. 

Jennifer Dasal is also the host of Art Curious, a podcast that explores the “unexpected, slightly odd, and strangely wonderful in Art History”.

Listen to this special bonus episode of ArtMuse:

This episode is produced by Kula Production Company.

The Club: Where American Women Artists Found Refuge in Belle Epoque Paris can be ordered online HERE.

Jennifer Dasal is an art historian, author, and podcast host. She is also the former curator of modern and contemporary art at the North Carolina Museum of Art, where she worked for over a decade. In 2020, she published ArtCurious: Stories of the Unexpected, Slightly Odd, and Strangely Wonderful in Art History. And her latest book, The Club: Where American Women Artists Found Refuge in Belle Epoque Paris, has just hit the shelves this July. We have included a link to order your own copy in the show notes of this episode. 

INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT

Hi listeners, Host Grace Anna here. Today I am thrilled to share a special episode from our ArtMuse ArtTalk series, in which I interview Jennifer Dasal, not only the author of The Club: Where American Women Artists Found Refuge in Belle Epoque Paris, but also the host of Art Curious, a wonderful and informative Art History podcast, that was a great inspiration to me when I first began ArtMuse. 

In The Club: Where American Women Artists Found Refuge in Belle Epoque Paris, Jennifer Dasal shares the never before told story of the American Girls Club in Paris. As the bookend reads, “Opened in the 1890s, the Club was a center of expatriate living and singularly harbored a generation of independent, talented, and driven American women dedicated to the fine arts. These women forged connections in the arts and letters with luminaries like Auguste Rodin and Gertrude Stein, or became activists through their relationships with the likes of Emmaline Pankhurst. But just as importantly, these women's lives revealed the power of the Club itself and the way that having a safe home of ambition allowed them to grow as teachers, artists, suffragists, and people”.

Art Curious is a podcast that explores the “unexpected, slightly odd, and strangely wonderful in Art History”. Art Curious has been featured in The Opera Magazine, NPR, and ArtDaily. The season titled Cherchez La Femme may be of particular interest to ArtMuse listeners, as it shares the stories of the women “who supported some of the world’s favorite artists”. Enjoy episodes on ArtMuse familiars, such as Anna McNeil Whistler and Gala Dali, as well as women that ArtMuse has not yet covered such as Johanna Van Gogh and Gertrude Stein.

Jennifer Dasal is an art historian, author, and podcast host. She is also the former curator of modern and contemporary art at the North Carolina Museum of Art, where she worked for over a decade. In 2020, she published ArtCurious: Stories of the Unexpected, Slightly Odd, and Strangely Wonderful in Art History. And her latest book, The Club: Where American Women Artists Found Refuge in Belle Epoque Paris, just hit the shelves this July. We have included a link to order your own copy of The Club in the show notes of this episode. 

With that, I hope you enjoy ArtMuse’s interview with Jennifer Dasal.

Grace Anna: Hi, listeners, host Grace Anna here. Today I'm joined by the author, curator and podcaster, Jennifer Dasal to discuss her recently published book The Club: Where American Women Artists Found Refuge in Belle Epoque Paris, which shares the stories of the American Girls Club in Paris and the fearless and brazen American women that came together to form it.

Jennifer, thank you so much for being here with me today. I'm so excited to dive into your new book. I found it utterly fascinating. But to begin, for our listeners today who haven't yet read your book, could you give us a brief introduction to The Club?

Jennifer Dasal: Sure. And thank you so much for having me on Grace Anna. I'm excited to be here. So I want listeners to picture what it is like to be a young woman living in the US in the late 19th or early 20th century. And imagine that you really want to do something on your own. Sure, maybe you have an interest in having a family or settling down at some point later down the road, but you really want to be a professional working woman as an artist. You're a painter, you're a sculptor, you're a miniaturist, and so you know that you've got to take that last step, go to Paris, which I think of as like going to get your grad degree before going into your chosen field. And so these women go to Paris to study art for this final last step in their professionalization.

But Paris is expensive, right? It was back then. It is a little bit now. And it's also hard to be a woman because you're being charged extra. It's not always deemed the best place as far as being safe. And so there's this wonderful Club that sprouted up, and as long as you were an American woman artist (it was very specific) then you could stay at this Club, take your meals at this Club, and be part of a community that was built specifically for you. And this Club lasted for a little over 20 years and only shut down really because of World War I. 

Grace Anna: This is such a fascinating story and I'm really excited to deep dive into all the lives and women who pass through this Club. But I loved how you began your book with a secret. You write: “This secret was about a place, a blink and you miss it, turn of the century structure in Paris that for two decades successfully sheltered, supported and spawned a generation of American women artists in a way that nothing else could”. 

So could you tell us a little bit about the discovery of this secret and how you discovered the Club?

Jennifer Dasal: Yes. It's a good story because I am sort of embarrassed that I had never heard about the Club, but while I was writing this book, I realized that very few people actually had, so I feel a little bit better now! 

But what ended up happening was when I was on a book tour for my first book that came out in 2020, I ended up meeting a woman after a presentation I was giving down in Naples, Florida, and she came up to me and said, “have you ever heard of the American Girls Club in Paris?” And I thought that sounded either like a romance novel, like a historical fiction, or I thought it reminded me of American Girl Dolls, which as an eighties baby, spoke to my soul immediately. But then she said, “No, no, no. This was a real place. And it was this specific place that sheltered and formed this wonderful vital bond for a community of American women”.

And so the more I started looking into it, because that story stuck with me since I had never heard it, I was excited to learn more about it. And the more that I started researching it, the more I started realizing that just as you mentioned, there was this fascinating generation of women who passed through its doors. And just as fascinating was the philanthropist, well two philanthropists really but one that we know much more about, who brought this Club to fruition, and I was really drawn into the lives of the women who formed this community in this one little special corner of Paris. I thought it was fascinating and I was surprised that no one had really done a lot about it. I think because it's sort of an under the radar kind of story. 

Grace Anna: That's so cool how one person's comment can lead to an entire project and an entire book! But it is such a fascinating story. I was saying to you before we started this interview that on ArtMuse we think about these women pictured in famous works of art that we overlook and we don't think about their names and stories and lives, but think about how many buildings you pass walking down the street around Paris, around New York, that have these stories and these lives that pass through and who knew?! So it's such an interesting way to think about it. Because I love that through ArtMuse it's really made me think about artwork in such a different way, and this made me think about neighborhoods and buildings and places, and that they have their own histories and stories.

It actually reminded me- a few months ago I was walking around Brooklyn, where I live, and I passed this building, and I wrote down the name here because the name caught my attention right off the bat. It was called the “Brooklyn Society for the Relief of Respectable Aged and Dignified Women”. And I was like, what is that? And I looked it up. Turns out it was around the same time, just before the Girls Club, it opened in the 1850s, and it was this old age home for women in Brooklyn, that similarly had these rules you had to adhere to, only certain people were admitted, and I'm sure had this immense community. The name alone! I love that it said “dignified women” and I think it was for women 65 plus who didn't have family who could take care of them. But it made me think how many of these places there might be. And I love that this really tells the story of this place and this community that was a living and breathing thing. It’s wonderful. 

Jennifer Dasal: I love that. By the way, I wanna read that book, so please feel free to write it so that I can read it. That sounds really cool! Buildings tell the stories of people in so many different ways, and I'm with you- we're surrounded by history all the time without sometimes realizing it. I mean, I think on a level we all understand that obviously places have been around for a long time and that eons of people have passed through. But it's really exciting when you have that moment when you see something that allows you to stop in your tracks and to backpedal and imagine yourselves in the shoes of those individuals. 

Grace Anna: So you mentioned the philanthropist who began the Club. Her name was Elizabeth Mills Reid. Her life is so intertwined with the Club's own history and life. Could you tell us a little bit about her and how she began the Club? 

Jennifer Dasal: Sure. So Elizabeth Mills Reid was from California. She was bi-coastal, so she lived partly in California and partly in New York. Her dad was one of those quintessential California 49er’s, people who moved out during the gold rush, became incredibly rich, not only in gold prospecting, but also in silver, and then he invested really early in the railroads, so he ended up for a time being the wealthiest man in California. So she came from an extraordinarily privileged background. And then when she got older she got married to a man who ended up making his own fortune in newspapers and eventually would go on to work in politics. And so he, in the 1880s, ended up working as the Minister to France under President Benjamin Harrison. And so that was basically a diplomatic position. So she and her husband and their two young kids at that point, she had a little boy and a little girl, both of them were under the age of ten, all picked up and moved to Paris for three years while he was in this diplomatic role. 

And so it was during that time when they were living in Paris that she learned basically that American women who were struggling in Paris and she figured- “You know what? I could do a little something about this. I'm not gonna make a charity because that's not what these women need. But what they need is just a little bit of assistance. And so what I can do is I can provide a place where they can come together, be with people who are like-minded, who are going through exactly the same thing that they are going through all going to school together, and they can have a little bit of company. They can read some American newspapers, they can have a cup of tea”.

And it all started with that idea. And then it blossomed into being a place just a few years later that you could go to as essentially a dormitory. You can stay there as a residence. It developed into a place where it was a full-blown restaurant, and it even went on to have not only this wonderful library of both French and American periodicals and books, but it would also go on to hold art exhibitions yearly and then far more frequently than that. And so it really became a center not only for American women artists, but also for the American expatriate community, and also visitors who were coming and taking part in these events that this club was holding. So it was a really unique place. And it's kind of interesting also to trace how spaces like this started popping up in Paris as this became more popular. And also in New York, interestingly enough as well. 

Grace Anna: Yeah, I found that really interesting that it inspired these similar like-minded places around the globe. It's such a brilliant idea. 

Jennifer Dasal: It was very cool, and I think it's really interesting because Elizabeth Mills Reid- I like to see her as somebody who could understand both the young women's position and also maybe the position of their moms and their parents, because it was still considered a little odd for American women to go out and seek this life of study and professionalization in the arts. And so parents were a little bit hesitant at this period to let their daughters go abroad to study like this. 

Partially that was because of the news at the time. There were this slew of magazine and newspaper articles that talked about the dangers of Paris, especially the dangers to women, because women were going more often and more in droves. So more of a light was being shone on these women going abroad. So people are like, “watch out, look out”. So having a place that they knew these women could go, they could be taken care of, they could be mothered to a degree, and know that people would be there looking out for them, was very much a calming thing for their families, as well as being calming to the women themselves. They knew that they weren't just being shoved alone into this whole new country. They had friends automatically off the bat that they could join and share this same literal and figurative language with by being at the Club. 

Grace Anna: Yeah, I think you make a really good point about safety and the importance of physical safety and also emotional safety, and how that really can help support and foster creativity. 

Jennifer Dasal: Very much so. It's really funny because I also think about the time, not only were you dealing with these issues of safety, but you also had the idea that American girls at this point were, and they were called girls by the way I'm not trying to trivialize them by any means, I think women were called girls if they were unmarried at this point. So that's also why it's called the American Girls Club and not the American Women's Club. But the idea of American women at this point, and American girls, as being very flighty and loud and boisterous, and doing things that were just seen as a little bit uncouth was huge at this point in Europe, and France was definitely part of that. And so I think this was also an interesting correction to the idea of the “wild American girl” that they were being cared for in this really loving, warm, mostly welcoming environment at the Club. So I think it's one of those things where there were multiple problems that were being solved by having this community come into focus.

Grace Anna: It's funny because I feel like those stereotypes in some ways still exist today. 

Jennifer Dasal: So true.

Grace Anna: And I thought you did a brilliant job in your book to address that. Yes, these girls that passed through the Club had their fun, but they really were hardworking. I mean, they studied and practiced their art from dawn to dusk, and they often just passed out in their beds at the end of the day. They were not at all the stereotype of what you're describing, of what was going around Paris at the time of these American women. They were really hardworking and I loved that you defended them in that sense. 

Jennifer Dasal: And it's so true because, exactly what you're saying in all of the newspaper articles you'd read. It was this idea of these boisterous wild American women just sort of running rampant through Paris. And it's like you said, they did have their fun. They do have journals and letters that they left behind talking about going to see plays and the opera, theater, and musical performances. One of my favorite artists that I profile in the book, I didn't include this image unfortunately, but she has this wonderful etching that she did of a New Year's party at a club in Montmartre. So they did go out to see CanCan dancers and things like that.

But for the most part, these women were going abroad not to have a great time. That was extraneous. You know, that was a cherry on top. But they're going to finish their all important last educational steps so that they could become professional working artists. And they took that seriously. And part of that was because it was not an inexpensive prospect. The vast majority of the women who we know of were part of the Club were upper or middle class. So they did have the means to do this because just to even get steamship passage across the Atlantic was not inexpensive, and then finding a reputable place to live, like the Club. The Club was the less expensive option, and Elizabeth Mills Reid as the proprietor, that was one of her goals is that she wanted to have this be a safe, warm, and welcoming place that was also within reach. So that was one of the things that she was really focused on. But these women- they weren't there to party and have a great time. They were there to make sure that they were getting the very best out of this limited time that they had to be in Paris and to learn. And for the most part I think they did that. 

Grace Anna: Yeah. I loved all of the quotes from their journals and their letters in which they specifically mentioned the good prices of the food at the Club. 

Jennifer Dasal: Yes, They were very obsessed with how cheap the food was and how good it was for the price. 

Grace Anna: I loved those tidbits.

Grace Anna: So you mentioned your favorite artist that passed through. I would love it if you could introduce us to that artist and some of the other standout women that spent time at the Club.

Jennifer Dasal: I would love to tell you about them. It's hard to choose my very favorite because there were a handful of women that I fell in love with. But if I have to choose one, I'm gonna say that my favorite was a sculptor who lived in Albany, New York, and her name was Alice Morgan Wright. She came from a very wealthy Albany family, but I like to say that I picture her life as being activism with a little bit of art in the middle because it seems like she was just this political social firebrand from the very start, and she ended up staying that way her whole life with this hope that she was finding a career as a sculptor in the middle.

What ended up happening and what I think makes her story so intriguing is that, first of all, she lived in the Club for multiple years. I think four out of the five or six years that she stayed in Paris. A lot of the women, if they chose to reside at the Club and not just visit it socially, would stay there for a few weeks or a month while they waited to, for the most part, find an apartment that they wanted to share with a few others. But some people did choose to live at the Club almost permanently throughout their stay, and Alice Morgan Wright was one of those. 

What ended up happening was that she went and she lived at the Club. She worked at a few different art schools. She had a few different people that she studied with during that time. But during that same period, she met a British suffragist named Emmaline Pankhurst and became very deeply involved with women suffrage, the right to vote, and she started politically this life of activism, not only in France, but also going abroad to Britain and also back in the US where she was working to protest the fact that women did not have the right to vote, and it ended up coming to a head when she was actually sent to jail ostensibly for throwing rocks, even though apparently she said that she never did that. 

And that really ended up being such a core of her time that she spent in Paris that she actually asked Emmaline Pankhurst, the Suffragist leader and said- “I'm not sure that I wanna continue with sculpture. I think I might want to work on suffrage full time”. And so you see this struggle as somebody who thinks that she wants to have one particular career really leaning in the opposite direction and trying to figure out what's next in her life and it's a really interesting story. 

Grace Anna: Yeah, I found her story so fascinating and thank you for that introduction to her. I loved at the end you tell us what happened to these women after the Club. And I loved reading about how she ended up being an animal rights activist, and that's actually what she's best known for today. 

Jennifer Dasal: Yes!

Grace Anna: But I also loved her story because it brought in queerness into this space and that she seemed to be as open as one could be at that time about having female partners and having a long-time female partner. So can you speak to that aspect of her story? And did you come across any other women who would perhaps today identify as queer in the Club? 

Jennifer Dasal: Yes, I did. I think the one thing that I wished I had had more of was the ability to pinpoint people who lived at the Club, residents at the Club, who were queer or in queer relationships. And that was much harder for me to find. But I think there were a handful of women, Ethel Modsquire and Ethel, all of a sudden, I can't remember her name. They were two women who were social members of the Club. So they did not live there, but they went quite frequently for art exhibitions that they participated in and also went to the restaurant and for tea quite often they were friends with Alice Morgan Wright, and also one of my other favorite artists, Anne Goldthwaite, who was from Alabama, who lived at the Club also for several years. They were known to be in a lifelong relationship. There has been some question about whether or not they were romantically involved or if it was just a more intimate friendship. Some art historians have been questioning that for the last decade. So we don't know for sure.

And part of the reason we don't know a lot of this for sure is that it was very common during this era for women to burn their correspondence. So in Alice Morgan Wright's case, the letters that we do have, the letters that she wrote, we have them still in archives at Smith College, for example, which is where her papers are, because her mother saved them, and her best friend saved them. Alice Morgan Wright herself burned her correspondence that she received, but her family and friends did not. So that's the only way that we're really able to get a lot of the details about her in particular. 

And she was more open in her letters to her best friend who lived back home. And I've quoted from them in the book a little bit where she talks about developing what I believe is her talking about developing feelings for Emmaline Pankhurst herself. She has a line that says, “I don't want you to read this line out loud to the others”, meaning I think there are other friends and family members, “because she has grown so precious to me” as a way of saying like- you understand what I'm trying to say, don't you? To her friend, sort of under the table admitting that she's grown to feel romantic feelings for Emmaline Pankhurst. . 

Grace Anna: Wow. So fascinating, so brave.

Jennifer Dasal: I know, I wish there was more. I want so much more. But when you read a little more in-between the lines, and especially during the period in which Alice Morgan Wright was in jail for two months in London, after this rock throwing incident during this suffrage protest, what's really interesting is during that time she kept her herself busy by writing poetry, which was something that she did throughout her life. And also she ended up sneaking art supplies into prison. And what she created still exists, and for the most part, she was creating these tiny little portraits of Emmaline Pankhurst. So I think if you look at the fact that she was creating these little images of Emmaline, and then she was writing poems that are, I believe, pretty romantic where she's saying “I'm imagining my soul or myself flitting like wings through the bars of your prison cell”, because Emmaline Pankhurst was also arrested and in the same prison at the same time. We don't know for sure, but it's not that hard, I think, to make the connection to this being a queer coded poem, for example. 

Grace Anna: Wow. So fascinating. 

Grace Anna: You mentioned Anne Goldthwaite and I also was struck by her story. I think it's worth noting that the cover of your book is one of her paintings. Could you tell us a little bit more about her and her story and her time at the Club? 

Jennifer Dasal: I love her, too. Like I said, it's so easy to fall in love with the story of so many of these really fascinating women. So she was basically your southern bell from Alabama. She came from a Confederate family who had pretty strong ideas about what women should do, and her parents unfortunately died when she was a teenager or a preteen. So she was raised by a series of stern family members, especially an aunt who had a real sense of what women should and shouldn't do, but eventually came around and realized that she had this artistic talent and with the connection of an uncle who was very supportive, decided that Anne should go ahead and move to New York and study art there.

And so, like many other artists, she went through basically as far as you could go as a woman during this point at art school in the US, and figured out that if she wanted to go further, she needed to go abroad. Once she did, she went directly, according to her unpublished memoirs, to the Club, got herself situated there, and really quickly met another woman from the south, a woman named Francis Thomason, who had been there a while and basically said, “I can introduce you and take you around and show you Paris and get you settled”.

And it was within the first few days that she and Francis Thomason found themselves doing a little sketching program, a sketching outing in the Jardin du Luxembourg, the Luxembourg Gardens, which was pretty close to the Club. It was less than a mile walk from the Club. And she started realizing that her friend, while they were sketching, moved away and started talking to this woman that she had never seen before, obviously because she was new to town, but it seemed to be this American woman. And she was dressed pretty oddly. Anne described her as looking like an immense brown egg, which I think is such an incredibly interesting way to talk about someone, looking like an egg. And she thought she was homeless, which was also kind of funny. And she said that the woman invited them over for tea to her house, and Anne said that she “wasn't really sure that she would have tea that she could share with us because she doesn't seem like she could afford tea”. And they did go to this woman's house and she did not have to worry for this woman's financial means because this was none other than Gertrude Stein who invited them over.

And so that's where Anne got involved with the Gertrude Stein circle, and she ended up going to her family's very famous Saturday evening salons that they would have, where they would invite artistic and literary figures from the US but also in France. And Anne got to know the people, but also the artwork of people like Picasso and Matisse, a lot of the big movers and shakers who were all involved with Gertrude Stein’s circle.

And so we have the story of the woman that I just talked about, Alice Morgan Wright, who was struggling with the idea of sculpture versus suffrage. Anne Goldthwaite came from a pretty traditional artistic background, and that was also for the most part being taught at all the art schools and academies at the time. But she was coming face to face with modernism as it was truly growing and developing during this really crucial era of Art History. She was kind of struggling with that. She found it really interesting, but also kind of didn't like it, but also really wanted to like it. And so I think her story follows this trajectory where you can see her expanding her mind and her artwork a little bit and trying to come up with her own ways to bring this tradition versus modernism together and seeing how that plays out over the next few years in her career. 

Grace Anna: That's really fascinating. Yeah, and her paintings were in a more impressionistic style, which in some ways was avant-garde.

Jennifer Dasal: Yeah, it's true. And you can see them becoming a little more Cezanne-ish, I think, through the end of the nineteen teens and into the early 1920s. And so it is interesting to think that she was seeing some of Cezanne’s stuff on the walls of the Stein salon, and actually she could have even possibly met with Cezanne. Cezanne was involved with Picasso and all of that. So it is interesting to see how things change the more you're exposed to, the more that maybe then starts infiltrating your own direction.

Grace Anna: Absolutely. And again, the Club gave her that safe space to explore these things, which is very important to point out. 

Speaking of safe space, there was a woman in your book who did not find safety at the Club, and I am speaking to Meta Vaux Warrick, who was an African American sculptor. Could you tell us a little bit more about her and maybe the shadow aspect of the Club?

Jennifer Dasal: Yeah. I felt it was super important to include this story because I don't want the Club to seem like it was all sunshine and rainbows because, as you mentioned, there was the other side of it, and the fact of the matter is that the Club was a club for American women and for the most part was also run by American women. So that means that a lot of the American politics, American viewpoints, everything that you would expect Stateside was to a degree transferred over to this little enclave in Paris as well. 

So the story of  Meta Vaux Warwick is that she grew up in a middle upper class African American family. Her family in their genealogical records noted themselves as Creole, as coming from a Creole background. So she was definitely on the lighter skinned side. And so she was able to pass a little bit more in Philadelphia society where her family was based. So she had a lot more economic and familial prospects. So after she went through art school, she did the thing that everyone else did, and she decided that she needed to go to Paris.

And she was, to my mind, a very responsible and very methodical thinker. And so she very carefully planned out her trip months before going to Paris. Part of that included that she wrote months in advance to the American Consulate in Paris and said, “Hey, I'm coming there. I need to know where I should stay”. And of course, they said, you need to go to the American Girls Club. That's where everyone goes. And so she wrote to the proprietress, the woman, the director who was living on site at the club and said, “I'm coming there. I'm coming in October. Please, if you have a room available, I would love to stay”. And they confirmed and said, “yep, you're all set. You have a room”. 

And so when the time came that she showed up in Paris, she ended up at the Club, walked in, and she was making her introductions to the directress. The woman turned around and looked at her and said, “oh, you didn't tell me you weren't a white girl”. And so there was that moment you can just imagine her heart just falling into her stomach because the directress essentially said, “I don't want you to be uncomfortable here, but we do have a number of women who hail from the American South and they're not going to be welcoming to you, and I don't want you to press upon the matter of staying here because you're just gonna be uncomfortable”, was what the directress said.

I don't like that response. That is obviously not how, in the 21st Century, I would think that is how you would respond, but that is how the directors told Meta Vaux Warwick how to deal with this situation. And to her credit, Warwick said, “it doesn't really matter to me because I am an American girl. And you said you would have room for me as an American girl. I'm entitled to stay here”. And the directress said, “yes, but I hope you don't press upon it”. And so, for good reason, I think Meta Vaux Warrick said, “I'm not gonna stay here and there are other places that I can go”. And luckily she got very involved in a community of expat black artists like Henry Ossawa Tanner who was a family friend who was living there at the time who also said, “you know what? You can find a better place. This place might be a little too cliquish for you”. 

And so I like to include her story that even though she was rebuffed immediately upon entry, basically to the Girls Club. She moved past that and she also didn't let it stop her. She continued to go to the Club on a social level. She would go for tea, she could go to the restaurant. She ended up showing her work at the invitation of the American Women's Art Association, which was an entity based at the Club that had annual and then later more frequent art exhibitions. So you can see that she, I'm sure, was extremely angry, obviously, about being disallowed from staying there after she had made the plan to stay there, but that she found her ways to still be part of this American girl community and to rise above. 

And it's also really interesting, not for nothing, to know that she was such an incredibly hard worker and also so incredibly skilled at what she did that she ended up working under none other than Rodin, who became her mentor. He didn't teach her, you know, as a student/ professor relationship necessarily, but on a more familiar level where he was able to critique her works personally one-on-one. And she really became one of the most predominant American artists during the three years that she lived in Paris. So it was really fantastic. You know, there were reviews of the time saying “Watch out Meta Vaux Warwick is returning to the US and she's gonna be a big deal”. People really thought extremely highly of her and her work. 

Grace Anna: Yeah, I think there was a quote, I have it written here, that Rodin says to her, “My child, you are a born sculptor”. So he was really impressed with her work. 

But I think you make a really good point that, you know, Paris was known at this time for being one of the most open-minded societies in the world, especially far more advanced and open than the United States in terms of race. But then this is the American Girls Club. So even in this more open-minded society, this particular little community still was run by the values of America at that time. And what I find, to go off of that, is quite sad and ironic is that it seemed like yes when she returned to America there were all these articles that came out praising her, but she was actually never able to have the same kind of success in America because of that same reason. So I think it is a good point. Her story really shows that coming to heads of Parisian values and American values at that time.

Jennifer Dasal: It really does, and I do agree. I sort of hate the fact that in that little afterlife section that you mentioned where I talk about what happened to a lot of the women I profile that I do have to sort of have the caveat of like- she returned with big dreams and it did not go as well as she had hoped. She did of course find a community who did support her and things definitely picked up for her. Once she moved into creating sculpture and works of art that really more directly talked about the African American or black experience or the black diaspora experience, she became more popular within that particular realm. But I think it's really only been within the last 15 or 20 years that people have started paying more attention to her work. So I feel like it's only really now that people are starting to take her and her career more seriously. So she's thankfully on the up and up. 

The other thing that I at least like to console myself personally with, is that we do know that at the time that she did come to the Club with hopes of staying there, that her experience did not go unnoticed. And there is at least one contemporary newspaper op-ed that was written by a woman who was herself living at the Club at the time, and that op-ed still exists where she wrote, using only her initials. So we think we know who she is, it was a woman named Cornelia Field Maury who wrote in to say this woman was an American girl. She came here and she is being rebuffed because of her race. And so I love that there is essentially someone who was calling the Club and calling Americans out on this really hypocritical idea that there was a Club that was meant to secure and be there for all American women, and here was an American woman, the very person that this community was supposed to support. So I liked that. It might've been kind of underground in that way, but you can see the stirrings that not everybody at the Club surely agreed with the directress in this idea. So that part, I at least like that there was this, at least some minor, pushback at the time. 

Grace Anna: Yeah. And another form of activism perhaps that was happening at the Club. 

Jennifer: Exactly. 

Grace Anna: Could we talk about the Club’s…because I found this to be quite a tragic aspect, is that the Club seemed to be at its height just before World War I and had renovations, they added a third floor and a grand salon and then essentially was shut down immediately with the start of World War I in 1914. 

Jennifer: Yes, yes.

Grace Anna: So could we talk about how its life was cut too short and the tragic aspect of that and what happened to this place after the start of World War I?

Jennifer: So, the club, as you mentioned, was around for basically 21 years in its fully wonderful form. It began as a small apartment that had a little room that you could come and borrow some books from and join their foree. And on Sunday nights they had church sessions. But then in 1893 was when it was opened in what would be its permanent home in the six Arrondissement and it stayed there, as you mentioned, all the way until World War I began in 1914, and during that 20 plus year period, it was basically at or near capacity for the entire time it was there. Its programming was very successful. People came in, not just from the American art world, but also the French art community would come and enjoy the exhibitions there. People who were even just passing through as tourists would come and enjoy the restaurant or tea. It was really this wonderful center of community.

And Elizabeth Mills Reid, the proprietor, the creator of the Club, knew this and she watched it, even if it was from afar, when she herself was no longer living in Paris, watching it grow and develop. So as you mentioned, just a few years before the War, she had it renovated, had it cleaned up, and added a whole new wing. All of these things, including having for the first time art studios so women could create and keep their work on site, which was, I think, incredibly forward-thinking and smart. This is an art community. It makes perfect sense to include that. And all of that was really only something that the women there could enjoy for about a year, maybe a year and a half. Before the war hit, and then immediately upon the war being declared, the Club shuttered its doors, and essentially, really for the women who hadn't already found their way back home, kind of kicked out the stragglers. 

But Elizabeth Mills Reid was a philanthropist throughout her life and was really dedicated, especially to healthcare, that was one of her loves, that was something that she had from her own father who was also really interested in healthcare. She knew very early on that while the war was happening, she didn't want her building, the Club building itself, to remain empty. So after a couple of years, it ended up as a French hospital and then was given over to the American Red Cross once America joined the war efforts, and it remained under the Red Cross's purview through the beginning of the 1920s, when it was finally determined that the club could safely reopen.

But by that point, it's really interesting because Elizabeth Mills Reid was still really interested in doing something for women, that was never something that she was going to negotiate on, but you can see her kind of half wavering about whether or not she wanted to open it again as a club for artists and eventually through a different bunch of machinations while people were kind of vying for position and hoping to get access to her building, she ended up giving it to an American University’s Women's Society, and that's sort of the new direction. And I think to some degree, she was a little bit prescient in this idea because once the 1920s and into the 1930s rolled around, there was a lot more access to higher education for women. A lot more women are starting to go to college or go to university as opposed to going to art school. Things have shifted in women's education really. That didn't mean that there wasn't an interest in women becoming artists. It just also shows the fact that women were seeking other professionalization and other careers. And I think it also speaks to the fact that after World War I, the art school side of the US educational system was getting so much better.

So there wasn't as much this dire need to support artists as there was to just support women. And so she transitioned the Club into being something that would support American Women University or postgrads, and that is the direction and how the Club ended up in the 1960s being given over to Columbia University and today that is who owns the building itself. It's part of Columbia University's global programs, which is now co-ed. It no longer is something that is just for women. So the bones of the Club still exist. This is not a building that's been demolished. It still exists, but I think it's really hard to go back and really visualize what it may have been in this heyday where it was specifically for female artists.

Grace Anna: But you did go back and were able to try to visualize! I love that the epilogue talks about your visit and your spending a night in the building of the Club. So can you tell us a bit about that experience? 

Jennifer: Yes. So the club itself as it is today is called Reid Hall. It is, as I mentioned, at the sixth Arrondissement. It is private, so you can't just sadly go and just walk in and enjoy it. It is related to Columbia University, and there are no longer any dormitories. Students do not live there anymore. It's mostly offices for faculty and for people who work for Columbia Global Systems, but they do have one apartment still on site so that if there's a visiting faculty or someone who's coming to stay to give a lecture, you can stay there.

So I requested permission and they kindly granted me the ability to stay for a night. And so you can go in and I think for the most part, like any building that's been around for several hundred years, that still works today, it's been retrofitted. So much that the interior- it's really hard not to see it as something other than being very modern. But where you can really get a sense that things have been unchanged since the women lived there is the courtyard. And basically the image that Anne Goldthwaite has painted on the front of the book itself, which is the courtyard and the gardens, which are all really the same. It's this wonderful 18th century building with this interior flagstone courtyard with boxes that are just brimming with flowers and ivy that's climbing up the side of the building. And that part, that's where you really get this energy because that was really what women loved so much about the Club. That you can see in a lot of the artwork that they created, they created so many scenes of the garden itself. The courtyard itself. People loved the way it looked. So I think in just being in that space, you could sort of imagine and put yourselves in the shoes of these women who were, a hundred years ago, also sitting and enjoying that space. So that was where I felt their spirit, I think, the most. 

Grace Anna: Beautiful. And I have a quote here that I just loved that you wrote of your time in the building. You wrote, “I did not feel alone. Not really. In this former Club, I was surrounded by the memory of the hundreds of women who visited here, began their careers here, and spent their best days, months, or years here”. I just thought that was beautiful. And I think you described raising a toast to them, which is such a beautiful tribute to the lives that did pass through this building.

Grace Anna: Can you tell us- what is the importance of sharing the Club and also these women's stories? You do make the point at the end of the book, that most of these women's names are not really known today. Their names have not really been included in either Art history or American history. So what is the importance of sharing the Club's history, as well as the many lives that passed through it? 

Jennifer: I think it really all comes down to a couple of different things. One is community and one is space. That literal and metaphorical space for women especially, to have the ability to try something different, to fail, to try to take a different path, and to do it in a place where they are safe to explore and to have people who have their backs. I went to an all girls school when I was in high school, and so I have that keen sense of the ability to know that you have sisters, sometimes literal sisters, but a lot of times just your sisters who are close to your heart, who have your support, who have your back, and who know what you're going through.

And so having there being this very particular community that was for women, for American Women, for American women artists, it's so particular. And so you know that just right off the bat, these women understood each other. They might have not always gotten along, and we do know that there were some cliques and some little cabals that existed on site, but for the most part, these women could show up into this place where they literally might not be able to speak the language and have this idea that- at least I know that there's one place I can go where I can be understood and I can understand others. And I think that's incredibly important. 

I also think it's important to remember the fact that these women themselves, we might not know a whole lot about all of them who pass through the Club’s doors, but the ones that we do know about for the most part, a lot of them went on to become teachers. I'm thinking specifically of Anne Goldthwaite in this story because many of them went on to teach the next generation of artists. And Anne Goldthwaite in particular, she taught for many years at the Art Students League in New York, which is one of the biggest, and most prestigious art schools, especially in mid-century America. That's where people like Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Willem de Kooning, were all coming up through the Art Students League and they were brushing up against people like Anne Goldthwaite, who was helping to train them.

And not for nothing, I think it's not the same as teaching Jackson Pollock, for example, but I think it's really interesting to note that somebody who Anne Goldthwaite specifically taught when he was a kid was Stanley Kubrick, which is really interesting. He took painting classes from Anne Goldthwaite when he was a child and liked it so much that he came back to take more classes from her, and then further classes onward with other instructors at the Art Students League. So thinking about these artists having an influence on the next generation of people who had this really interesting visual world that they were building, and that included artists, but also film directors. I think that's not a small thing to keep in mind. 

Grace Anna: Wow. That is such a cool anecdote. Stanley Kubrick too- his films are so aesthetically unique. He really is such a visionary and who would've thought that the woman who painted the painting on the cover of your book taught Stanley Kubrick art when he was a child?! It's very cool. Who knew? That should be the name of my next podcast: Who Knew?

Jennifer: I love that. I would totally listen to it!

Grace Anna: I wanted to end with another beautiful quote from the book, and I think this is a really nice quote to end on because it's kind of a teaser for our listeners. It's in the introduction of the book, but it really gets to the crux of what the book is about, and I think speaks to the importance of sharing this story and gives a bit of a teaser as hopefully everyone listening grabs their own copy of The Club and reads the stories for themselves.

But you write, “It is time to bring this special place back into the spotlight. Together in the pages that follow, we will attempt to correct this historical and artistic forgetting. We will finally swing open the sky blue French doors of this once proud but little appreciated artistic sanctuary, the origins of the institution, the women who made it what it became, and the legacy it left behind in the history of art”. And I think that is just a beautiful way to lead into the many fascinating stories and aspects of the Club that you describe in your book. 

So for everyone listening, I am putting a link to purchase your own copy of The Club  in the show notes of this episode. Jennifer, I'm so appreciative of all the work that you did in sharing this place's history and story, but also these women's stories because it is really fascinating and it really speaks to the experience of American women artists at this time in European history and American history. So thank you for your work and thank you so much for coming onto the show and speaking with me today!

I know that our listeners will not only love your book, but, listeners, if you haven't listened to Art Curious yet, I totally recommend checking that out as well because as I've said, Art Curious was a big inspiration to me as I was conjuring up ArtMuse and it's a wonderful podcast. There's the season Cherchez La Femme, which is very ArtMuse-esque and talks about the hidden women behind some of the biggest artists and artworks in Art History. The whole show in general is just fabulous, so I really recommend everyone listening to also check out Art Curious if you're not a big fan already, like I was. 

Thank you so much, Jennifer, for being here today. I really really appreciate your time. 

Jennifer: This was a blast and also a mutual admiration society. Thank you for shining a spotlight on women, especially in art. I love it, and it was wonderful to talk to you today. 

Thank you so much for listening to this special episode from our ArtMuse ArtTalk series, in which I interview the wonderful Jennifer Dasal. We have included a link to purchase The Club: Where American Women Artists Found Refuge in Belle Epoque Paris in the show notes of this episode, I cannot recommend The Club enough and know our listeners will find the world that Dasal beautifully describes, and the fearless women who joined forces as the American Girls Club in Paris, utterly fascinating. 

We will be releasing more interviews over the next few weeks as part of our ArtMuse ArtTalk series. Season Three of Art Muse will return this October. In the meantime, we cannot wait to continue to share more riveting interviews with you soon. 

Until next time, bye for now.