Uploaded June 2025 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
A conversation with Debra Bricker Balken and Éric de Chassey on how Paris shaped a generation of American artists after World War II.
Filmed on 6/3/2025 with a live audience both in person and on Zoom.
Curator Debra Bricker Balken and art historian Éric de Chassey discuss the key artists featured in the exhibit “Americans in Paris” about American artists in postwar Paris, whose catalog was on the American Library in Paris 2023 Book Award short list. This groundbreaking volume explores the American creative community in postwar Paris, uncovering the academies, galleries, and artistic exchanges that defined their experience. Featuring never-before-published interviews and new scholarship, Americans in Paris examines how the city influenced a pivotal moment in American art between 1946 and 1962.
About the speakers:
Debra Bricker Balken is an award-winning independent curator, scholar, and writer who has assembled numerous exhibitions internationally for major museums on subjects relating to American modernism and contemporary art. Most recently, she authored Harold Rosenberg: A Critic’s Life (University of Chicago Press, 2021), and Arthur Dove: A Catalogue of Paintings and Things (Yale University Press, 2021). In 2017, she curated Mark Tobey: Threading the Light, which was organized by the Addison Gallery of American Art, and opened at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection with that year’s Venice Biennale.
Éric de Chassey, art historian, has been Director of the French National Institute for Art History since 2016 and Professor of Contemporary Art History at the ENS de Lyon since 2012. He is Honorary Director of the Académie de France in Rome – Villa Médicis, which he directed for six years (2009-2015). He has published́, in French, English, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese and Polish, articles, essays, catalogs and books on art. He has also curated some forty exhibitions. Since 2022, he has chaired the RIHA, leading its project to compile a history of the visual arts in Europe.
This event was part of Ways of Seeing, a special series exploring the connections between storytelling, creativity, and the visual world.
Evenings with an Author is generously sponsored by GRoW @ Annenberg.
A conversation with Debra Bricker Balken and Éric de Chassey on how Paris shaped a generation of American artists after World War II.
Filmed on 6/3/2025 with a live audience both in person and on Zoom.
Curator Debra Bricker Balken and art historian Éric de Chassey discuss the key artists featured in the exhibit “Americans in Paris” about American artists in postwar Paris, whose catalog was on the American Library in Paris 2023 Book Award short list. This groundbreaking volume explores the American creative community in postwar Paris, uncovering the academies, galleries, and artistic exchanges that defined their experience. Featuring never-before-published interviews and new scholarship, Americans in Paris examines how the city influenced a pivotal moment in American art between 1946 and 1962.
About the speakers:
Debra Bricker Balken is an award-winning independent curator, scholar, and writer who has assembled numerous exhibitions internationally for major museums on subjects relating to American modernism and contemporary art. Most recently, she authored Harold Rosenberg: A Critic’s Life (University of Chicago Press, 2021), and Arthur Dove: A Catalogue of Paintings and Things (Yale University Press, 2021). In 2017, she curated Mark Tobey: Threading the Light, which was organized by the Addison Gallery of American Art, and opened at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection with that year’s Venice Biennale.
Éric de Chassey, art historian, has been Director of the French National Institute for Art History since 2016 and Professor of Contemporary Art History at the ENS de Lyon since 2012. He is Honorary Director of the Académie de France in Rome – Villa Médicis, which he directed for six years (2009-2015). He has published́, in French, English, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese and Polish, articles, essays, catalogs and books on art. He has also curated some forty exhibitions. Since 2022, he has chaired the RIHA, leading its project to compile a history of the visual arts in Europe.
This event was part of Ways of Seeing, a special series exploring the connections between storytelling, creativity, and the visual world.
Evenings with an Author is generously sponsored by GRoW @ Annenberg.
