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After the Second World War, American artists flocked to Paris. Most of them were students taking advantage of a generous GI Bill to come and study in a city that was still considered as the “Mecca of the arts,” an obvious destination for any young artist seeking to complete his or her education. The flow of American artists to Paris after the war offers a complex image of a period long held as seeing the rise of American Art—a rise that would ultimately lead to its “triumph.” More than one million GI Bill students would actually come to Paris, many would-be painters or writers, seeking fame in the city that had welcomed the Lost Generation—a model for many of the young students of the 1940s. Their testimonies shed light on the persistent attractiveness of the city and its dynamic art life in the late 1940s and early 1950s. These newcomers revived a tradition that was based on an unequal relationship between the United States—a young country that had no proper avant-garde of its own to boast on the international scene —and Europe, more particularly France —regarded as the cradle of modern art. But the GI Bill also represented a challenge to such a traditional view. The emancipation of American students from the Paris masters they had come to study with seemed to announce the future independence of the American arts; the privileges they enjoyed as American citizens abroad and as grantees of the US government supported their sense of freedom. The way US magazines reported on these “new expatriates” further consolidated the idea that the Paris reign had come to an end, also marking the end of a tradition of American expatriation in the city.