Then there is an American in Paris—like the abstract painter-sculptor Kate van Houten. Like her husband, Takesada Matsutani, an abstract artist from Japan, she has lived and worked in the French capital since the 1960s. Van Houten offers a unique take on what it means to be an American artist outside her homeland. “I think of myself first of all as an artist,” she observes,  “then as an American, then as a Parisian with this wonderful baggage—my personal history—from New York.”

Echoing Ashton, van Houten says she hopes her own work may offer “enough of a universal message” so that “anyone, anywhere may experience it with some understanding.” At the same time, she recognizes that “people of different nationalities will inevitably have different interpretations” of whatever art they may encounter.

“It has to do with what they know and feel, the language they speak, the food they eat, the streets they walk or the music they love,” van Houten says, noting that those same cultural references shape every artist’s outlook and sensibility, too. “‘American artist,’ ‘Japanese artist,’ ‘French artist’— they’re just convenient labels,” van Houten concludes. “They don’t mean much for the artist, though, and they never have.”

ART& ANTIQUES New York correspondent and art critic Edward M. Gomez most recently wrote on art and American culture.