In Paris with Franne Davids

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…