PARIS.- Art history sometimes lacks fiction. We wish we could write certain untold stories, reinvent moments from the past, uncover unsuspected and mysterious connections. We wish we could tell what happened only in secret. Take the American painter Franne Davids, whose work is being exhibited in Paris for the first time.

The broad outlines of her life are known. She was born in Connecticut in 1950; she is said to have attended Woodstock — at the very least, she owned a programme from the festival — and her brother was convinced that she had taken psychedelics. She attended Skidmore College for a year and took various classes in art and writing. In the late 1970s, she was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. She then returned to live with her parents in Waterbury, where she would spend the rest of her life. The basement of the family home became her studio. For nearly forty years, she tirelessly painted the same obsessive world: women, alone or in groups, sometimes accompanied by men, caught within flat, intensely coloured spaces saturated with pattern.

Davids would sometimes travel to New York, where she disappeared for days at a time. At MoMA, she became convinced that some of the works on display were in fact her own, stolen from her and then falsely attributed to other artists. Matisse, Picasso, the late Impressionists, the Fauves, James Ensor: furious, she recognised her own work beneath other names and other signatures. At the same time, she corresponded with several major American museums, submitting her work and receiving rejections in return. She died in 2022, in relative obscurity. She left behind forty-two large paintings and some five hundred and fifty works on paper. In 2024, her work was truly revealed to the public in New York, first at The Art Show and then in an exhibition at Ricco/Maresca. She was readily placed within the realm of outsider art, although the category soon seems insufficient to describe her work.

One particular fact, deliberately omitted from this brief biography, concerns us here: Franne Davids travelled to Paris. Almost nothing is known about her stay in the French capital, not even precisely when it took place. So let us imagine. Let fiction take over. Let us imagine Franne Davids in Paris in the early 1970s.

She walks through the galleries of the Musée de l’Orangerie. The Jean Walter and Paul Guillaume collection has only been on public display there since 1966. Before her, Franne encounters some of the “influences” she would continue to claim — or, more strangely still, to claim as her own: Soutines with thick impasto and distorted figures — Le Petit Pâtissier, La Fiancée, Enfant de chœur — whose expressiveness echoes the saturated pictorial matter of her own paintings; Matisses with flat, vibrant patterns — Les Trois Sœurs, the odalisques — whose frontality and refusal of depth seem to anticipate her own treatment of space on the canvas; but also Cézanne and the late Renoirs, each in their own way displacing the legacy of Impressionism.

Leaving the museum, she sees the Seine and decides to follow the quays westwards. She looks at the city that welcomed so many painters before her. Reaching the Musée National d’Art Moderne, still housed within the Palais de Tokyo, she encounters Picasso again — an artist she claimed not to particularly like — but also Derain and Vlaminck, two Fauves whose colours are violent, almost hallucinatory. And why not Soutine’s Le Groom, that red, twisted, almost disjointed figure? For her, it is a lesson in colour: colour liberated from reality.

Back to the river and the city. At the bouquinistes, let us imagine once more that she buys an old monograph on the Belgian painter James Ensor: his grimacing figures, his masked crowds, his strange carnivals shake her to the very core.

Franne leaves Paris, but the city and its painting never quite leave her. Despite the illness, despite the twilight studio in the basement of the family home, she takes up, transforms and reinvents on canvas. She carries the lessons of art history into her own world. The Man with Hat recalls certain faces in late Picasso; The Boy with the Hat, the silhouette of a Matisse; The Two Seated Men, the detail-laden compositions of an Ensor. The Man and the Girl with Hats, too, seems to transpose onto canvas the hallucinatory colours of a great Nabi or Fauvist painting.

And when she titles a work The Seated Girl with the Men at the Opera House, we imagine Franne Davids walking through the Palais Garnier, her gaze raised towards the ceiling painted by Chagall and unveiled in 1964, as though drawn into that vision and into the spectacle of the Parisian audience itself, perhaps more than by whatever is taking place onstage.

Franne’s journey to Paris remains a mystery. We can only rewrite, suppose, invent, formulate hypotheses. One thing, however, seems certain: the museums of the city, their collections, their visions, could not have left her indifferent. For although she is often placed within outsider art, cast as an artist on the margins, her works abound in references, allusions, direct connections, echoes and rewritings. Even in the basement of her parents’ house, Franne Davids takes possession of painting and inscribes herself within its history.

It was time for her works to arrive in Paris. In the city she once visited and from which, through fiction, we can imagine she never entirely left.

- Boris Bergman