Exiles and Emigres," the exhibition running through May 11 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, is a fine example of a genre that often and easily goes wrong: the politically didactic art show. Its curator, Stephanie Barron, in 1991 created a survey named "Degenerate Art." Her subject then was the censorship, repression and persecution of modern artists in Hitler's Germany, culminating in the infamous "Entartete Kunst" ("Degenerate Art") show of 1937, in which hundreds of works by artists from Oskar Kokoschka to Henri Matisse were pilloried with insulting wall labels. "Exiles and Emigres" is the sequel to Barron's earlier exhibition. With her associate, the German scholar Sabine Eckmann, Barron sets out to describe the exodus of European modernist artists (and architects, musicians, scholars, photographers and writers) from Germany and France to refuge in England and America.
They were, of course, the lucky ones. Between 1933 and 1944, America's record in admitting refugees from Nazism was dismal, a moral blot. Less than half the already stingy immigrant quotas were filled because of the timidity of Franklin Roosevelt and the pigheaded xenophobia of his Under Secretary of State Breckinridge Long. Those in the arts had no special exemptions, of course; but by a combination of stubbornness, string pulling, blind luck and the help of a tiny number of devotees and friends in the U.S., some did get through, settling for the most part in Manhattan and Los Angeles. Among them, from Paris, were Fernand Leger, Marc Chagall, Piet Mondrian, Jacques Lipchitz and the core group of Surrealists who went to New York City: Max Ernst, Andre Breton, Yves Tanguy, Andre Masson and Roberto Matta. From Germany, Kokoschka, Kurt Schwitters and the Dada collagist John Heartfield reached London, while Max Beckmann, Josef Albers and George Grosz made it to America.
Hitler, one might say, had presented the Allies with an immense cultural gift, not that everyone appreciated it. And it wasn't just painters and sculptors. After the Bauhaus, the leading experimental visual-arts school in Germany, was suppressed, some of its leading lights--Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Marcel Breuer, Walter Gropius, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy--moved to America, where their example and teaching changed its architecture, making New York City and Chicago the epicenters of the postwar International Style. And the academic study of art history in America, which had been fairly larval before the 1930s, was transformed by German-Jewish and Austrian-Jewish refugees like Erwin Panofsky and Richard Krautheimer--despite the endemic anti-Semitism of many American universities.