By L. John Harris
From the moment I spied her leaning against a pile of junk on a Paris sidewalk, she spoke to me—a portrait of a young girl wearing a red head covering, dated January 12, 1935. It was her gaze that drew me in, the look of a vulnerable soul during a dark time in Europe.
I found her the summer of 2015, in Saint Germain des Près, and took her back to my apartment with some trepidation–was I stealing the painting or gleaning it? I named it The Girl in Red, in homage to Gustav Klimt’s iconic Woman in Gold, the 1919 portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, which I had seen at the Neue Gallery in New York, just before my arrival in Paris.
These two portraits, though dissimilar in their formal aspects, have some common history. Through her dark, hypnotic gaze, The Girl in Red seems to foreshadow the Nazi occupation of Paris in 1940. During the war, Klimt’s sumptuous portrait was looted by the Nazis in Vienna. Both the paintings are, in a sense, objets trouvés, lost and found, and victims of the holocaust. I couldn’t help wondering, Did my Girl in Red survive? Was hers a story of resilence and resistance or collaboration and conformity? My book, Portrait in Red (Heyday, 2024), is an attempt to answer these and other persistent mysteries.
Today “The Girl in Red” hangs in my living room near a professional portrait of my mother (1963), a portrait of me by my brother (1960), and a pencil drawing of the English model Twiggy by my father (1966). My family, all departed, lives on through these objects. The Girl is the newest member, with me serving as her foster parent.
The Girl’s story has continued to unfold. New authorship opinions, comments from museum curators, art dealers, art historians, arrive almost daily. Early on, I consulted Robert Flynn Johnson, emeritus curator of the Auchenbach print collection at the San Francisco Fine Arts Museums and author of Anonymous: Enigmatic Images from Unknown Photographers—a celebration of anonymous art and its collectors. Robert advised me to just love The Girl and forget about trying to uncover her provenance—an almost impossible task. Yet, I told him, hers was a story I had to pursue.
The summer after finding the painting, I went back to Paris with “Wanted” posters showing the painting and requesting information about it. I posted dozens of them all around the area where I had found The Girl, on the walls of buildings, in café and shop windows, and on kiosks.
It was inevitable that an angry merchant would rip the poster down and toss it in the trash. When this happened, I was surprised by how hard it hit me. I had placed a poster on a narrow vertical strip of wall between the door and display window of a vintage print and poster shop on Boulevard Saint-Germain, just a few steps from the entrance to my apartment building, just after dark. In a nearby shop window were two very large posters, one advertising a Brigitte Bardot film, La Parisienne, and the other, a travel poster showing the amazing view from Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel outside the Louvre, all the way to the Champs Elysées.
In the morning, I approached the shop as I headed out for my first coffee at Le Saint-Germain on rue du Bac, and found an empty space where the poster had been. Continuing on Saint-Germain toward the café, I passed a corner poubelle (trash bin) and there she was, peering up at me through a plastic liner. Suddenly, I recalled the image of my first son, severely jaundiced, staring out from behind the glass of the newborn intensive care unit. The Girl in the poubelle remains a vivid and painful image of loss and disappointment to this day.
After I rescued The Girl, I posted images of her on social media, trying to describe my feelings about her—and hoping to find a clue to her identity. When none were forthcoming, I began to explore other questions about fate and chance, and the meaning of art as a catalyst for self-discovery.
The Girl has the uncanny power to grab and hold, obsess and hypnotize, whomever she meets—- she is what critic Walter Benjamin called a fétichisme d’art. In a sea of paintings and prints, sculpture, antique tapestries, vintage guitars and all the mementos in my Berkeley home, she is the surprise. Her anonymity heightens her power, inviting us to project our own inner feelings.
When the Berkeley violinist Dan Flanagan came over before an important New York performance of works inspired by nineteenth- and twentieth-century paintings, he made a beeline for The Girl in Red. He swept past an antic Picasso lithograph, a charming Bonnard sketch, a trompe-l’oeil sculpture, an Elizabethan-era tapestry, and many other works in my collection.
“What is that?” he asked.
Had I offered to sell him this painting then and there, I believe he would have said yes, in a heartbeat. Enchanted, he composed an original piece for piano and violin titled The Girl in Red. The haunting work debuted at my salon in Berkeley, Villa Maybeck, in November, 2025.
My strange journey with The Girl brings to mind Renoir’s colorful cork theory of life. In Renoir, My Father, the filmmaker Jean Renoir relates the great impressionist’s notion that we are like corks tossed by a river’s current, with little navigational control other than slight adjustments–bobbing up and down, or leaning to one side or the other. This is an apt metaphor for my relation to The Girl. She has taken me by surprise, deepening old perspectives on art and life, opening the way to new ones, changing my life in ways I could not foresee.
Reader responses to the book and The Girl have surprised me as well. Some women (and girls) have chosen to emulate her, sending me photos of themselves with red hats, white blouses and red lipstick. There is just something about her that evokes powerful and creative responses. It’s as if viewers somehow “finish” the painting and respond to its mystery with their own passions and impressions—like an aesthetic Rorschach test.
While I have found nothing definitive–yet–on the artist or the subject of the painting, that has not lessened the impact of The Girl upon my life. She has become a central figure in my relationships with family, friends, and colleagues, and a never-ending source of revelation. The Girl will be with me, come what may, until the end.
L. John Harris is the author of the art mystery, Portrait in Red: A Paris Obsession (Heyday Books, 2024). This article has been adapted from that book. Harris has also written and illustrated My Little Plague Journal (2023) and Café French: The Language, Lore and Food of the Paris Café (2019), Foodoodles: From the Museum of Culinary History (2010), and The Book of Garlic (1974).
