From the Archive: "Three Who Were Warmed by The City of Lights"
The New York Times, Sunday, June 25, 1989
By Michael Brenson
WE ALL KNOW ABOUT THE glory days of Parisian art between the wars and immediately after World War II when all roads seemed to lead to the City of Light and artists from throughout the world huddled together in cafes, pounded the streets and made art with a radiance that no other city could equal.
And we know, too - or at least we have been told - that in the mid- to late 1950's Paris ended. Celebrated American painters who lived there after the war, like Ellsworth Kelly, Sam Francis and Jack Youngerman, came home. Although more and more Americans poured into Paris, the flow of gifted American artists dried up. New York replaced Paris as the art center, and New York artists and critics dismissed Paris - as Parisian artists and critics had once dismissed New York - as artistically provincial.
''When I was visiting the States,'' said Biala, an American painter with close ties to the Abstract Expressionists, who has lived in Paris for 50 years, ''I would sometimes say, very ironically of course, that I live in that well-known backwater, Paris, because that was the feeling.''
