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This was a remarkable chapter in American cultural history, and one worth recalling today, as the air grows thicker with politically opportunistic denunciations of the immigrant--as though America was ever anything but an immigrant society. Barron's timing is impeccable, but this is not the kind of show that offers a continuous visual feast or a crescendo of visual achievement. It is heavy (and has to be) with information, pamphlets, books, press clippings, old exhibition catalogs. It comes up with some intensely interesting and little-known figures, such as Varian Fry, the Scarlet Pimpernel of cultural rescue, who after 1940 ran an emergency committee whose task, as he put it, was "to bring the political and intellectual refugees out of France before the Gestapo got them...I had no experience in refugee work, and none in underground work. But I accepted the assignment because...I believed in the importance of democratic solidarity."
Given the subsequent fame that many of the artists enjoyed, one is apt to suppose that their emigre life (especially in America) was secure, but actually it depended on stipends, teaching jobs and ad hoc support arranged by dealers--many of them emigres themselves, like Curt Valentin--and by a few museum officials, notably Alfred Barr Jr. of Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art. Visas, stamps and bureaucratic routines took on a disproportionate significance, as they always do for the marginal. After the U.S. entered the war in 1941, the foreignness of some artists counted against them even more: the Hungarian photographer Andre Kertesz fell under suspicion of being a spy, and Max Ernst was briefly declared an enemy alien. It wasn't easy to keep a group together in exile: the Surrealists found this in New York City, which had none of the informal meetingplaces they were used to in Paris.
It is idle to expect that artists and writers, torn from their context and milieu and dropped by the fortunes of war into a strange society, would easily continue to produce their best work. One who did was Mondrian, whose years in New York culminated in the wonderful Broadway Boogie-Woogie paintings, which couldn't be borrowed for this show. Beckmann painted some of his greatest allegories after 1937, when he fled to Amsterdam. Among them: Birds' Hell, 1938, his one clearly political work, a lurid scene of martyrdom with a bird-headed torturer carving parallel stripes on the back of a sacrificial prisoner (Beckmann himself?) while figures in the background throw up their arms in a collective Nazi salute. Some painters, like Andre Masson, were essentially unchanged (at least in their work) by American refuge--although the iconic, "primitive" violence and sexuality of Massons like The Seeded Earth, 1942, had a considerable effect on American painters, especially the young Jackson Pollock.
Other artists, however, were already a little past their prime. Ernst's paintings in America, with their ambiguous figures emerging like dream images from runny, blotted, metamorphic landscapes, hardly compare with his work in the 1920s. And though Chagall's Yellow Crucifixion, 1943, swarms with images of contemporary loss and persecution--the burning shtetl, the fleeing refugees, the sinking torpedoed ship--its formal softness indicates the turn his work would take after the war toward pious ethno-kitsch.