Art in a World Gone Mad

Max Beckmann was well on his way to achieving an international reputation in the 1920s. An enormously talented German painter known for urbane Expressionistic images steeped in ominous atmosphere and literary symbolism, he had studied art in Paris and Florence, exhibited his work in Berlin, Frankfurt and New York galleries and at the Venice Biennale, and he had been appointed a professor at the State Institute of Art in Frankfurt.

But in 1933, when Adolf Hitler rose to power in Germany, Beckmann was fired from his teaching position. Deeply conflicted about his homeland and his future, he left for Amsterdam on July 19, 1937, the day after the opening of “Entartete Kunst,” the infamous exhibition mounted by Hitler in Munich to denigrate modern art.

Beckmann tried to move to Paris but got caught in Amsterdam during the war. When the hostilities ended, he was invited to teach at several German schools, but he refused. Instead, he immigrated to the United States, where he enjoyed enthusiastic response to his work but never escaped the specter of his past.

He was one of the lucky ones.

*

The legions of European artists who fled their countries--or tried to leave and failed--during World War II populate a tragic chapter in the history of art. Their stories are an ongoing source of fascination for Stephanie Barron, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s senior curator of 20th century art and vice president of education and public programs. Barron organized “Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany,” the 1991 landmark show at the museum that, along with its catalog, examined events surrounding Hitler’s fateful exhibition. Originally scheduled to travel only to the Art Institute of Chicago and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, LACMA’s critically acclaimed scholarly show was so well received it had a second life in a 1992 presentation at Berlin’s Altes Museum, where it attracted enormous crowds.

It’s a tough act to follow. But now Barron is back with an ambitious sequel, “Exiles and Emigres: The Flight of European Artists From Hitler,” opening at the museum next Sunday. Featuring 130 works by 23 painters, sculptors, photographers and architects, this new exhibition explores the effects of oppression and exile on the artists. Like its predecessor, ‘Exiles and Emigres” is an art show with a compelling story, presented in a rich historical, political, social and cultural context.

Viewers will follow the narrative in a densely textured tapestry of images and educational material. Along with figurative portrayals of Hitler and his victims--in paintings by Beckmann, George Grosz and Oskar Kokoschka, sculptures by Jacques Lipchitz and collages by John Heartfield--there are abstract works by Wassily Kandinsky and Kurt Schwitters, Surrealist visions by Salvador Dali and Yves Tanguy, photographs of the New World by Andreas B.L. Feininger and Andre Kertesz; and models of modern buildings by Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, among many other pieces.

The artists’ stories come to life in examples of their work, done during periods of exile, and in extensive documentation of their activities and those of exiled art dealers and scholars.

***

Erwin Panofsky, a Jew who was to become the most influential emigre art historian in America, known for analyzing the historical transformation of symbols in art, joined the faculty at Princeton University after being dismissed in 1933 from the University of Hamburg in a telegram bearing the inscription, “Cordial Easter Greetings, Western Union.”

***

Indeed, this show is not a dry compendium of art historical memorabilia. A 15-minute film, “America and the Exiles: U.S. Immigration Policy and the European Refugee Crisis,” offers a gripping account of official reluctance to accept refugees, based on archival footage and interviews.

In the show’s largest gallery, architect Frank O. Gehry, who designed the exhibition, has erected a large, rectangular enclosure softly draped with chain link fencing, which serves as a study center, a see-through display unit and a subtle symbol of Nazi internment camps.

Visitors also can immerse themselves in period environments by walking into a model of Piet Mondrian’s New York studio and a startling re-creation of the Surrealist Gallery at Peggy Guggenheim’s New York showplace, Art of this Century, where miniature reproductions of artworks project from curved walls and the pictures are illuminated intermittently, accompanied by the sound of a train.

Organizing such a complex and deeply researched event is obviously a daunting task, but it has taken even longer than it might appear. Barron first thought of doing the exhibition in the early 1980s, a few years after she moved to Los Angeles from New York and became aware of Southern California’s wartime community of artistic refugees. When she found that it was musicians, writers, filmmakers and actors--rather than visual artists--who had temporarily settled in Los Angeles, she began to look for another way to approach the subject.

She found it in “Degenerate Art,” then returned to her earlier concept in 1993 with valuable experience and fresh resolve. “I don’t think I would have had the courage to tackle the subject had I not done ‘Degenerate Art,’ ” Barron said in an interview at the museum. “That show had tremendous numbers of documents. Interweaving them and visual art is not always so easy to do, but these shows demand it. The question is how do you do it in a way that’s convincing and not overwhelming?”

One important move was to enlist German art historian Sabine Eckmann as exhibition associate and author of three catalog essays. Barron has said she would have also worked with a German colleague on “Degenerate Art” had she known that show would go to Berlin. “In this case, I knew at the beginning the exhibition would travel to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin,” she said. “ Having Sabine involved allowed each of us to constantly monitor the show and represent our own audiences.”

The project suited Eckmann. “Doing social and historical exhibitions is more challenging than just organizing artworks,” she said. “In Germany we are educated to feel guilty about this period. I was interested in looking into it in a foreign country.”

***

A resident of France whose work had been banned in his native Germany, Surrealist Max Ernst immigrated to the United States, where he was declared an enemy alien but became a celebrity during his brief marriage to Peggy Guggenheim. “For me it does not matter whether I work in the United States or in Europe,” he told an interviewer shortly after the war. But he found himself feeling isolated and adrift in America and returned to France in 1953.

***

The biggest challenge in “Exiles and Emigres” was “defining the project,” Barron said. “It’s an enormously complex topic and there are so many different ways that one could have dealt with it. I started out with the notion that this was only going to be an exhibition of the visual arts, as opposed to something that included music and film and many other disciplines that were so significantly altered by the refugees.”

She also narrowed the field in two other respects. Instead of representing as many artists as possible, she concentrated on relatively few. And instead of exploring all the places artists were exiled, she focused on Paris, Amsterdam, London and several locations in the United States.

“Then the challenge was how to deal with visual artists in a way that made sense and worked as an exhibition,” Barron said. “Once we defined the geography of the exhibition, we sought to look at very specific themes. That was a way to get our hands around the topic and try to convey it clearly.”

Working with Eckmann, she eventually came up with six themes: major European centers of exile (1933-45), artists’ escape to the United States (1938-45), the cultural infrastructure of the United States (1940-45), exiles from Paris in New York (1940-45), exiles as teachers in American institutions (1933-45) and the American reception of banned German art (1933-45).

Then they selected the 23 artists and examples of their work. All the pieces on display were done during periods of exile, but that still left the curators with many choices.

“When an artist was engaged politically, we looked for those pictures,” Barron said, “whether it was Kokoschka with political allegories--as opposed to his portraits commissioned by society figures--or George Grosz, who did many illustrations and commissioned works in New York. We included his works dealing with themes such as the wanderer, the survivor or Hitler in hell. They don’t have the bite of his works from the Weimar period, but they certainly address big political issues. For Lipchitz, we chose works called ‘Arrival’ or ‘Flight,’ which were obviously an attempt to bear testament to exile.”

***

German avant-garde abstractionist Kurt Schwitters avoided the Nazis by staying out of the country for increasingly long periods and finally immigrated to Norway in 1937. When the Germans arrived there in 1940, he escaped to Britain but was arrested in Edinburgh as an enemy alien. For reasons that remain unknown, he was interned on the Isle of Man for 1 1/2 years, where he managed to create more than 200 artworks from junk, porridge, linoleum and paint.

***

Both Barron and Eckmann think the exhibition will present a new picture of the artists represented. “In American art history, most often the work of European exiles has been seen as a link to the evolution of Abstract Expressionism,” Barron said. “Their presence is viewed as very important, yet the work they actually created in America is given rather short shrift. It’s always a question of who they influenced. This exhibition is not about influence.

“One of the contributions the catalog makes is in the articles about the artists,” she said. “They are all very well known, so the challenge was: What do we have new to say about them? By going back to original reviews and primary sources, we went back to square one and looked at the material freshly. We wanted the artworks to mean something in the context of the exhibition.”

The point, Eckmann said, is not to turn the artists into heroes or victims, but to look at the period under a new light. “Modern art from 1933 to 1945, or even later, isn’t talked about,” she said. “The artworks are not regarded as important since they don’t fit into the notion of progressive movement. Modernism is often thought to be only about formal innovation. It is important to look at this period and see what artists really did when they were overwhelmed by political events.”

The two curators turned out to be quite compatible, but they had to resolve profound differences of opinion. “I think it was very good for both of us,” Barron said. “We realized the preconceptions we carry with us.”

The stickiest issue was the Bauhaus, she said, referring to a school of architecture and applied arts that became a center of modern design in Germany during the 1920s but was dissolved in 1933 by the National Socialist regime. “Certainly there is an American understanding of the Bauhaus and how it was transplanted from Germany to America and how itflourished,” she said. “That’s what we have learned in school and we have seen in the buildings. They are the paragon of Modernism of the International Style.

“Yet, the more we got into it, we realized that some of those ideas are not based in fact. Sabine suggested that in addition to having an American essay on the Bauhaus, we should have a German write about it, as we did on the art historians. Peter Hahn, the director of the Bauhaus archives in Berlin, wrote an essay that challenged this myth of the successful transplant.”

German art historians of her generation are more open and willing to question received wisdom than their predecessors, Eckmann said. They admit, for example, that “Mies van der Rohe was ready to collaborate with the Nazis if the Nazis had wanted him. Fortunately they didn’t,” she said of the preeminent Bauhaus architect. “Because the artists are heroes, American scholars just don’t want to mention that. On the other side of the Atlantic, we are more critical of the artists’ reactions to National Socialism.

“Another point is that here it’s always thought that the Bauhaus continued,” Eckmann said “From my point of view, it didn’t continue because the social agenda dropped out. In Germany the Bauhaus artists were connected to a specific social movement that didn’t get broad recognition. But in the United States, they gave up their social agenda so they could find wide recognition and have lots of important clients. When you read that the Bauhaus came to the United States, which was so much better suited to it that it could really flourish, that is not precise. The artists gave a lot up. What was gained was the formal Modernist style.”

***

French Modernist Fernand Leger fled Paris in 1940, just ahead of the German occupation. He made his way to Lisbon and then to New York, where he incorporated his experiences into his paintings. “This is clearly a powerful country--one feels it at once; one can resist it, but it is very strong,” he said in a 1946 issue of the Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art--published after he had returned to France.

***

“Exiles and Emigres” begins in a corridor, where 12 photographs marking historical events of 1933-45 are posted on a wall along with names of exiled artists, where they came from and where they went. Names of those in the LACMA show are interspersed with dozens of others. “Ours are but 23 individuals out of a whole procession,” Barron said.

This entry sets a somewhat somber tone for the show, which is the curators’ intention. Yet the show itself displays the artists’ unquenchable creative spirit. “The entire palette of the installation is gray, white and black,” Barron said. “The only color is in the art.”

Yet the art is so colorful, visitors are likely to leave the exhibition with memories of vivid images. They may also think they have seen a show based on contemporary issues as well as historical ones.

“It struck me about two years ago that it was pretty hard to pick up the paper and not find an article about migration, immigration, the rights thereof, or the overthrow of one group by another,” Barron said.

“This is the stuff of our news, not only in Los Angeles, but internationally. Making that the topic of the exhibition was never our interest, but there may be value for the public to think about these relationships.”

*

* “Exiles and Emigres: The Flight of European Artists From Hitler,” Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd. Next Sunday through May 11. Tuesdays to Thursdays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Fridays, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Adults, $6; students and senior citizens, $4; children and students under 18, $1; children under 5, free. (213) 857-6000.

* In conjunction with the exhibition, LACMA and several other local organizations are presenting dozens of related programs listed in a 24-page booklet. Tickets to special events: (213) 857-6010.

* COMMENTARY

Emigre composers and musicians had the greatest impact on American culture, Mark Swed writes. Page 87