An outspoken critic of the National Socialist (Nazi) Party, Jewish photojournalist Gisèle [Gisela] Freund fled her native Germany in 1933 with Adolf Hitler’s rise to power. Having settled in Paris, she obtained her PhD at the Sorbonne in 1936 and would become the most talented chronicler of the vibrant and multi-national bohemian community of artists and writers that made its home in Paris during the 1930s.
By 1939, Freund had photographed many of the greatest writers and artists of the twentieth century, amongst them Henri Matisse, Samuel Beckett, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Jean Cocteau, André Breton, Colette, André Malraux, Paul Valéry, Tennessee Williams, Peggy Guggenheim, Simone de Beauvoir, and Jean-Paul Sartre. [Read more…] about The Battle for Ulysses in Paris & New York
They drove ambulances, bandaged the wounded, fed the hungry, ran hospitals and orphanages and raised money. The men and women who volunteered in Europe during the early years of the Great War – when the United States maintained neutrality – forged a template for modern humanitarian efforts.