She Was Marie-Antoinette’s Favorite Painter

What if we told you that just about every painting you’ve seen of Marie-Antoinette was created by a woman? Overlooked for two hundred years, Élisabeth-Louise Vigée-Le Brun was one of the most celebrated portraitists of the late 1700s. She painted all of the most glamorous women of the Versailles court and some of the most…

Where the Harlem Renaissance Got Its Swing

On West 140th Street and Lenox Avenue today, a drab supermarket squats in front of a housing project. It’s hard to believe that in the 1930s, the most famous dance club in the world stood on this dreary spot. Back then, the block was dominated by a two-story building with an enormous marquee sprinkled gaily…

She was Too Scandalous, Even for 1920s Berlin

Berlin is a city of ghosts and one of the most alluring phantoms is Anita Berber, the high priestess of debauchery; she of the kohl black eyes and flaming red hair and vermillion lips. Immortalised by Otto Dix’s paintbrush, this Weimar cabaret goddess challenged all the taboos with her performances and broke boundaries that would…

When Moulded Meals Were Haute Cuisine

It’s hard to imagine anyone ever salivating over a quivering tower of jellied meat, but for centuries – that’s right, not just the seventies – it was the height of haute cuisine. A hundred and fifty years ago, if you were an ambitious chef out to knock the socks off your guests, the centerpiece of…

The Japanese Fishing Village That Vanished From Los Angeles

Imagine being given 48 hours to pack up and leave for an unknown destination. What would you bring with you? What would you do with your house, your business, all your clothing and furniture? On February 25th, 1942, some 3,000 Japanese-American residents on Terminal Island in Los Angeles county were faced with this unimaginable situation.…

Ode to the Asian-American Faces in the Shadows of Hollywood’s Golden Age

Silver screen icon Anna May Wong is likely the only Asian-American actress from the Golden Age of Hollywood that any of us have heard of. From the dearth of information on any other Asian-American actress, it may seem as if Wong was all alone. But contrary to what mainstream narrative would have you believe, there…

Renoir’s Art Model Was the Greatest Painter You Never Heard Of

Name a post-Impressionist woman painter and most people would draw a blank. Or they would cast their mind back to Mary Cassat or Berthe Morisot and their pastel domestic scenes. Few know of Suzanne Valadon, who shocked the turn-of-the-century art world with her boldly outlined nudes. A circus performer, single teenage mother, and art model…

When Montmartre was Harlem-on-the-Seine

After the Great War, a new kind of music began to waft through the winding streets of lower Montmartre. Unrestrained, audacious, with a potent syncopated rhythm unlike anything ever heard in Europe. It was the music of Black Americans who had started to move into the neighborhood. For a brief time, far away from Jim…

The Geisha who Brought Kabuki to the West

At the height of japonisme, Sada Yacco appeared like a comet, touring America and Europe with the first kabuki theatre company ever seen in the West. She was the undisputed star of the 1900 Paris Exposition, drawing bigger crowds and garnering more rhapsodic praise than the divine Sarah Bernhardt herself. A trailblazer who defied tradition…