Let’s Celebrate 100 Years of Surrealism in Belgium!
Surrealism celebrates its 100th anniversary! Since February 21, 2024, two key art institutions in Brussels have offered unmissable exhibitions. Bozar...
Tommy Thiange 4 April 2024
min Read
12 August 2024At the outbreak of World War II, Varian Fry, a US journalist, volunteered to travel to Marseille to assist in the repatriation of Europe’s cultural elite, many of whom were persecuted by the Nazis for their anti-authoritarian beliefs or Jewish heritage. By late August 1941, when Fry was forced to leave the city, he had successfully rescued approximately 2,000 individuals. Among them were some of Europe’s most influential artistic figures, including Marc Chagall, Remedios Varo, Max Ernst, Hannah Arendt, Jacques Lipchitz, Wilfredo Lam, and many others.
Varian Fry was born in New York City in 1907 and grew up in New Jersey in a Protestant family with liberal values. He constantly irritated his teachers at the various boarding schools he attended and was briefly expelled from Harvard for several months before graduating. Fry, a classicist, also loved the intellectual complexity of modernist culture. As a foreign correspondent, a trip to Germany in 1935 changed his view on politics and human nature. He witnessed firsthand the violence committed by fascists against Jews. This experience transformed Fry, channeling his natural rebelliousness into a strong hatred for Nazism and everything it represented.
Varian Fry photographed by Philippe Halsman in 1942. Photo: Varian Fry Institute.
In June 1940, after the fall of France to the Nazis, Varian Fry joined 200 museum curators, artists, journalists, and Jewish refugees at a meeting at the Hotel Commodore in New York. That day, the Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC) was created with the goal of helping anyone persecuted by the Nazis, including European artists, philosophers, and writers. Fry volunteered to travel to Europe and become the ERC’s agent in Vichy France.
Varian Fry (center, with glasses) in front of the Villa Air Bel in Marseille, where he hid the artists before helping them escape. Photo: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Fry arrived in Marseille on August 15, 1940, with $3,000 in banknotes taped to his leg and a list of 200 artists, writers, and intellectuals wanted by the Gestapo and the Vichy police. Although Fry thought he could complete his mission quickly, he found himself in a no man’s land full of Gestapo spies, corrupt French police, and many refugees. Fry also faced a U.S. State Department that viewed his work as a threat to their neutrality and was intent on keeping the U.S. out of the war. To U.S. authorities, Fry was a troublemaker whose covert operation undermined official policy.
Varian Fry at his office in Marseilles in the spring of 1941. Photo: Varian Fry Institute/International Rescue Committee.
In Marseille, Fry established an office at the Hôtel Splendide and quickly began forming a network of allies to plan escapes, forge documents, and exchange money on the black market. He soon became known among the underground network of refugees in France and received many requests for repatriation, receiving 25 letters a day and conducting up to 120 interviews on a typical day. In total, about 15,000 refugees contacted Fry, and he had to decide who would live and who would die.
To carry out this work, Fry was not alone. Among his closest collaborators were Americans Miriam Davenport and Mary Jayne Gold, as well as Hiram Bingham IV, a U.S. vice-consul in Marseille who fought against antisemitism in the State Department and issued thousands of visas, both legal and illegal. He also received help from Alfred Barr, director of the Museum of Modern Art, and his wife Margaret Scolari Barr, an art historian who also worked at MoMA.
Daniel Benedicte and Varian Fry. Photo: Collection P-O Ungemach-Benedite.
Fry and his team rented a villa, Air Bel, on the outskirts of Marseille, which had frescoed walls, antique fireplaces, and a grand piano. Many artists found refuge there while Fry worked on their visas and transport options. Among these artists, we can find the writer Victor Serge with his wife and son, André Breton with his wife Jacqueline Lamba and their daughter Aube, and other Surrealists such as the painters Victor Brauner, Max Ernst, Wifredo Lam, André Masson, Oscar Dominguez, Jacques Hérold, and the poet Benjamin Péret.
A group of artists, including André and Jacqueline Breton, Jacques Herold, Oscar Dominguez, and Wifredo and Helene Lam pause for a photo on the grounds of Villa Air-Bel. Photo: United States Holocaust Museum, Courtesy of Cynthia Jaffee McCabe.
The villa temporarily became home to a lively group of surrealist artists who impressed Fry with their imaginative discussions, liberal love affairs, and strange games. One of these games was the Marseille Deck of Cards. During one of their frequent meetings at the café Au Brûleur de loups, someone proposed the idea of creating a deck of cards. They wanted to “replace old images with new ones” without “breaking the general structure of the card deck.” André Breton explained that they rejected “everything in the old deck that indicated the survival of the sign and the thing signified.”
Jacqueline, André Masson, André Breton, and Varian Fry. Photo: Fonds André Breton et Jacqueline Lamba.
However, all this was temporary, and once Varian Fry had prepared the visas and transport, each artist had to leave for their new destination. Ernst departed for New York via Portugal, Lam and Breton bid farewell to Marseille aboard a converted freighter bound for Martinique. Varo emigrated to Mexico from Casablanca. After Fry organized an escape route for the Russian-born Jewish painter Marc Chagall, the artist gave him a small drawing as a thank-you. It depicted a female goat in a fur coat holding a violin. Chagall and his family arrived by boat in New York in June 1941.
A print by Marc Chagall contributed to the Flight Portfolio to help raise money for the IRC’s humanitarian work. Photo: IRC.
The arrival of artists in New York marked the greatest migration of intellectuals since the Byzantine Empire. The United States became home to a golden generation of European culture. American artists had the opportunity to see the great European cultural heroes not as remote demigods, but as regular presences on the scene. The presence of figures like Breton, the founder of Surrealism, confirmed New York as the new cultural center.
This gave New York artists a new and powerful self-confidence. It attracted international artists to live and work there. Ai Weiwei, Shirin Neshat, and Yoko Ono, to name just a few, were part of this vibrant new generation. They were drawn not to Paris, but to New York. But it wasn’t just New York that benefited from the cultural exodus; Mexico, where artists like Varo emigrated, also reaped the benefits of their presence.
Marc Chagall (left) escaped to the United States with help from Varian Fry (right) and the organization that would become the International Rescue Committee. Photo: Varian Fry Institute.
A group of refugees who were supported by the Emergency Rescue Committee, including artist Wifredo Lam, prepare to embark on a ship from Marseille to Martinique. Photo: United States Holocaust Museum, Courtesy of Dyno Lowenstein.
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