Although the role played by European émigrés in reshaping American cultural life in the 1930s and 1940s has long been recognized in this country as an historical development of immense intellectual consequence, the exhibition which Stephanie Barron has organized at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art this spring under the title “Exiles and Emigrés: The Flight of European Artists from Hitler,”[1] is the first event of its kind to concentrate on the work these artists produced during their period of exile and its impact on American thinking about art. In the exhibition’s book-length catalogue, the scope of the inquiry is expanded to encompass some of the émigré writers, musicians, art historians, art dealers, and museum curators who also exerted a significant influence on modern cultural life in this country. In both the exhibition and its ambitious catalogue we are thus recalled to a period that effected one of the greatest transformations in the life of art in this country—including its public life in the museums, the schools, and the media—in our entire history. There is a sense in which it can truly be said that it wasn’t until the age of the émigrés in the Thirties and Forties that American cultural life was brought into alignment with the imperatives of the kind of intellectual modernity that had dominated the high culture of Europe since the turn of the century.

The age of the émigrés was also a period that eventually brought an enormous change in the art life of Western Europe, which, as the result of this enforced emigration and its influence, found itself for the first time in its history obliged to regard the United States as a rival in shaping the course of contemporary artistic thought. What we owed this momentous change to was not, of course, an American initiative —not at the outset, anyway. Its principal cause was the totalitarian catastrophe visited upon Europe first by Lenin and Stalin and then by Hitler—a political catastrophe that was also a culture war which effectively uprooted the modernist movement in the arts from its places of origin in Europe and made its survival dependent upon exile in foreign and especially American venues.

It wasn’t only to the United States, to be sure, that European émigré artists fled this catastrophe. Vasily Kandinsky, after departing the debacle of the avant-garde in the Soviet Union in 1922 to join the Bauhaus in Germany, was obliged to quit that haven in 1933 when Hitler shut down the Bauhaus, and lived out his final years of exile in France—the last four of those years in a France occupied by the Nazis. Kurt Schwitters found refuge from the Nazis first in Norway, then in England, which also harbored Oskar Kokoschka. Max Beckmann found his refuge in Amsterdam before emigrating to America at the end of the Second World War. Still others escaped to Mexico, Canada, Palestine (as it then was), even China. But it was inevitably to the greater safety, freedom, and professional opportunities of the United States that the majority of these émigrés made their way when permitted to do so in the 1930s and early 1940s.

The principal figures upon whom the “Exiles and Emigrés” exhibition concentrates are, in addition to those already named here, artists who emigrated to America—Marc Chagall, Jacques Lipchitz, Piet Mondrian, Fernand Léger, Yves Tanguy, Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, André Masson, Matta Echaurren, Josef Albers, László Moholy-Nagy, George Grosz, Lyonel Feininger, the photographers André Kertész and Andreas Feininger, and the architects Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, and Marcel Breuer.

In the catalogue of the exhibition, in addition to material devoted to these figures, there is also an essay by Kevin Parker on the two most illustrious émigré art historians of the period—Richard Krautheimer and Erwin Panofsky—and Lawrence Weschler’s essay entitled “Paradise: The Southern California Idyll of Hitler’s Cultural Exiles,” which touches on the émigré careers of, among other celebrated figures, Arnold Schönberg, Thomas Mann, Franz Werfel and Alma Mahler-Werfel, Bertolt Brecht, Otto Klemperer, and Max Reinhardt. (There are even maps showing where these émigré eminences resided during their California exile.) This is far from an exhaustive list of the distinguished émigré artists and intellectuals who came to America in this period. To cite two very different examples: neither the exhibition nor its catalogue does justice to the role of André Breton in New York art life in the early 1940s, and a career like that of Hannah Arendt—far more influential on American thought than, say, Marc Chagall or George Grosz—lies beyond the scope of “Exiles and Emigrés.” Still, even with these and other omissions duly acknowledged, the roster of talent in this survey is quite extraordinary.

In fact, nothing quite like this rapid and highly concentrated infusion of avant-garde European art and thought into the advanced purlieux of American cultural life had ever before occurred in our history in such a short time and under such extreme conditions—conditions that did much to enhance the reception of ideas that would have been more easily resisted in a less tumultuous time. It hardly mattered that some of these émigré artists—George Grosz, for example, and Salvador Dali—were already well on their way to an irreversible decline when they arrived on these shores. Others—Josef Albers and Mies van der Rohe—would create their finest work and exert their strongest influence in the American phase of their careers. All in various ways and to different degrees contributed something vital, if only by their presence and their professional histories, to the radically altered atmosphere in which American artists and intellectuals now found themselves having, perforce, to think about their respective vocations in new ways and adjust their ambitions to a new scale of achievement.

Certain ideas fostered by the émigré artists—the concept of automatism promoted by Surrealists as the very key to creativity, for example, and the very different notion of an impersonal abstraction advanced by Mondrian—proved to be fundamental in the formation of the New York School, the single most important American art movement to emerge from this encounter with the avant-garde culture of the émigrés. Yet something less tangible but more imperative than a pictorial style or specific debts of artistic influence—a new sense of historical possibility—proved to be an even greater consequence of the émigré influence. For the first time, that is, it looked as if American art might become, instead of a dependency of the modernist movement, its principal heir—a belief that could only have been born at a moment when Europe was plunged into the darkness of war and postwar disarray. Looking back on this period with his usual mixture of nostalgia and hyperbole, Robert Motherwell later remembered it this way: “The art scene was parochial. No one thought that we could ever produce truly great modern painting; only Europeans could. So we had nothing to lose by risking all. A time of innocence in American painting; a now lost innocence that cannot be recovered.”

A time of innocence? It’s an odd way—a peculiarly American way, perhaps—to speak of the war years, which brought so much death, destruction, and spiritual ruin in their wake, not only to those who fought in the war but to the many more who saw in the war—correctly as it turned out—the extinction of the world they knew and the hopes they had cherished for it. Yet there is a sense in which it is true that for many of the American artists who found their vocation in the war years it was a time of innocence. For the senior members of the New York School, certainly, it marked a rebirth of artistic aspiration—a release from the moribund sentiments and conventions that had thitherto blocked their development.

For the émigrés, of course, it was a period of enforced furlough from the war, which in many cases would have meant certain death had they remained at home. For them, emigration was not only a reprieve from a death sentence but a release from having to bear responsibility for anything but their art. This was an attitude that came more easily to the European émigrés, for whom membership in the avant-garde had always been a form of internal emigration from the societies that had produced them, than to their American contemporaries. As artists in America, no matter what their aesthetic persuasion, the latter may at times have felt themselves to be exiles in their own country, but traditionally they lacked the kind of fully developed artistic subculture that could provide them with any equivalent form of internal emigration. The gift—if we choose to regard it as such— which the European émigrés bestowed on the aspiring talents of the New York School was precisely this license to become internal émigrés in their own culture, and the culture responded to this withdrawal with precisely the kind of incomprehension and indignation that confirmed the necessity of the very thing it disapproved of. It was in this sense that the New York School became, under the tutelage of its émigré masters, the first—and alas, the last—full-fledged European-style avant-garde in American art.

This moment of “innocence,” if we can still call it that, was not to last, however. In neither art nor life is it usually possible for innocence to survive the seductions of its own success. By the 1950s, the period of internal emigration for the New York School was over as the movement and its first-generation luminaries—now joined by a second generation determined to enjoy the fruits of its victories—acquired the attributes and privileges of a cultural establishment. All of the agencies that presided over the public life of art in America—the museums, the schools, the media, and the market, which had either resisted the movement or regarded it with curiosity and condescension—emerged as its ardent partisans and supporters. What had only a few years earlier been looked upon as avant-garde—and therefore suspicious and somehow “foreign”—was now considered mainstream. At Harvard in the spring of 1951, I heard Motherwell lecture to a hall packed with students and faculty, and no one was shocked to hear him compare the paintings of Mark Rothko to Van Gogh’s, the latter being one of the few modern masters the audience was certain to be acquainted with, if only in reproduction. I doubt if there were a dozen people in the audience that day who had ever seen a painting by Mark Rothko—or Motherwell, either. In those days, Harvard was somewhat backward in that respect, but as the 1950s unfolded that, too, would change.

It remained for the European avant-garde to perform one last service for the New York School: its certification as a bona fide avant-garde in its own right. This occurred in the later 1950s when the Museum of Modern Art sent major exhibitions—most notably, “The New American Painting” show and a Jackson Pollock retrospective— on a tour of European museums. Postwar Europe, otherwise so egregiously anti-American in its cultural and political pieties, responded to these exhibitions with unmistakable rapture. Much nonsense was written about the art itself, of course, which was sometimes taken to be the work of cowboys on the old frontier—a consequence, no doubt, of an immersion in too many Hollywood movies, which, with jazz, were often the only examples of contemporary American culture that met with ungrudging approval in Europe.

But this critical nonsense didn’t matter. What mattered was the approval and praise, which had the effect of conferring on the New York School the kind of European imprimatur which American modernist art still needed to make its ascent into the upper reaches of the international art market. By that time, the age—and the ethos—of the émigrés was little more than a memory, a memory of an “innocence” that, as Motherwell said, could not be recovered. Internal emigration had been succeeded by the privileges and power and deformations of the limelight. The way had been cleared for, among much else, the emergence of Pop Art, which, whatever else might be said of it, had little in common with the agon of the émigré experience.

In the “Exiles and Emigrés” exhibition in Los Angeles, this crucial chapter in the history of modern art—as much a chapter of European as of American history—isn’t given quite the measure of attention its importance merits. In only a single installation, albeit a very striking one—a replication (on a smaller scale, of course) of the Surrealist environment in Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery, designed by émigré architect Frederick Kiesler in New York in 1942—are newcomers to the subject given a hint of the larger historical drama that I have been attempting to describe here. Nor is there, in the exhibition’s catalogue, a sufficient account of the differing fates that had overtaken the modern movement in Europe and America in the period under review.[1]

In the 1930s, when the geographical scale of the modern movement was radically diminished in Europe under the pressure of the totalitarian ban on modernism, the United States witnessed the emergence of important new institutions—most particularly the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York—that were, in their different ways, specifically created to accommodate the achievements of modernism. It was owing (in part, anyway) to the existence of these new institutions—and especially the Modern under the leadership of Alfred H. Barr, Jr.—that the United States was able to respond as well as it did to the plight of the European émigrés. Barr is certainly given his due in “Exiles and Emigrés,” but the larger picture as far as the museums are concerned tends to remain a little blurry.

Never mind, “Exiles and Emigrés” does much to enlarge our understanding of this remarkable chapter of our—and Europe’s— history. The fact that the exhibition will not be seen in New York City, where so much of the history it recounts took place, is something of a scandal in itself, a reminder perhaps of how little sense of respect our museums have for their own historical past.

See my article on “The Modern Movement on the Eve of the Second World War,” in The American Scholar for spring 1982.

Notes
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“Exiles and Emigrés: The Flight of European Artists from Hitler” opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on February 23, 1997, and remains on view through May 11. The show will travel to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (June 19–September 7, 1997) and the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (October 9, 1997–January 4, 1998). A catalogue of the exhibition, by Stephanie Barron with Sabine Eckmann, has been published by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Harry N. Abrams (432 pages, $75; $35 paper). Go back to the text.