A CULTURAL GIFT FROM HITLER

By ROBERT HUGHES

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.

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.

For some the new context of exile provided a degree of artistic stimulus. In London, Kokoschka got to know--largely through his Marxist friend the refugee German art historian Francis Klingender--the tradition of English caricature, the mordant images of Hogarth and Gillray; they are reflected in such paintings as Anschluss--Alice in Wonderland, 1942, with its trio of figures, the appeaser Neville Chamberlain, a German soldier and an Austrian Catholic bishop, imitating the Chinese monkeys that see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil. And the ever alert Salvador Dali managed to include a number of proto-Pop American images in his pictures when working in the U.S. Painted just after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, his Melancholy Atomic and Uranic Idyll, 1945, has a bomber in it as well as the first Yank baseball player to turn up in a Surrealist picture.

The exiles most deeply affected by American culture were not painters at all but writers, musicians and directors, from Bertolt Brecht to Arnold Schoenberg, Ernst Lubitsch and Thomas Mann, who gravitated to Los Angeles, worked fitfully but sometimes successfully for the movies and for a while between the Anschluss and the McCarthy years made that palmy city into an extension of the Berlin, the Vienna they had lost. "It is wonderful here on the Pacific, and life is a thousand times better here than in New York," wrote the great director Max Reinhardt to his son. "But I grew up on the fourth balcony of the Burgtheater..."

That was the problem: so often, the natives didn't know who these people really were, or treat them with the deference they felt they had earned. In one of the excellent catalog essays for "Exiles and Emigres," the writer Lawrence Weschler compares their idea of themselves to "Roman nobility in the rustic provinces...as stubbornly patronizing and aloof as the locals were sometimes naive and gauche." The dachshund story sums them up--as it does the situation of most exiles in America in the late 1930s and '40s. Two dachshunds meet on the palisade in Santa Monica, California, and schmooze about their fortunes. "Here, it's true, I'm a dachshund," says one to the other. "But in the old country I was a Saint Bernard!"