Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2brh9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-04T03:18:43.789Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The Visual Arts and Cultural Migration in the 1930s and 1940s: A Literature Review

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 November 2008

Marion F. Deshmukh
Affiliation:
George Mason University

Extract

In 1932, the artist George Grosz offered an optimistic account of his arrival to the United States:

It was really quite a change from Germany at that time, when you saw so few happy faces and heard so much complaining and quarreling. You had the impression that Americans of all races, classes, and occupations were satisfied with the world, and actually, in spite of the Depression, their American world was still much more colorful and richer than the German.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Quoted in Panofsky, Erwin, “Three Decades of Art History in the United States: Impressions of a Transplanted European,” Meaning in the Visual Arts (New York: Vintage, 1955), 332Google Scholar.

2 Grosz, George, An Autobiography, trans. Hodges, Nora (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998, first published in 1946), 234Google Scholar.

3 Ibid., 249–250. See also Schuster, Peter-Klaus, ed., George Grosz. Berlin-New York [Exh. Cat. Nationalgalerie] (Berlin, 1996)Google Scholar.

4 Grosz, An Autobiography, 249.

5 Krohn, C.-D., Intellectuals in Exile: Refugee Scholars and the New School for Social Research, trans. , R. and Kimber, R. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 1112Google Scholar. Originally published in German as Wissenschaft im Exil. Deutsche Sozial- und Wirtschaftswissenschaftler in den USA und die New School for Social Research (New York and Frankfurt: Campus, 1987).

6 Jay, Martin, “Is there a Figure in the Carpet?,” in Exiles+Émigrés: The Flight of European Artists from Hitler, ed. Barron, Stephanie [Exh. Cat., Los Angeles County Museum of Art] (Los Angeles, 1997), 326Google Scholar.

7 For example, Exilforschung. Ein internationales Jahrbuch, sponsored by the Gesellschaft für Exilforschung (Munich: Text+Kritik, published yearly since 1983).

8 See Ninkovich, Frank, The Diplomacy of Ideas: U.S. Foreign Policy and Cultural Relations, 1938–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981)Google Scholar, particularly 24–34; Milton Cummings, “Cultural Diplomacy and the United States Government: A Survey,” www.culturalpolicy.org, 2003; Larson, Gary, The Reluctant Patron: The US Government and the Arts, 1943–1965 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On 8. For the occupation period and early years of the Federal Republic, see Kellermann, Henry J. (himself a refugee from Nazism), Cultural Relations as an Instrument of U.S. Foreign Policy: The Educational Exchange Program between the United States and Germany, 1945–1954 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of State, 1978)Google Scholar.

9 See Arndt, Richard, The First Resort of Kings: American Cultural Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2005)Google Scholar, written by a former French literature professor turned U.S. State Department official, and Ninkovich, The Diplomacy of Ideas, 32.

10 Jackson, Ivor, Editorial, International Journal of Refugee Law 3, no. 2 (1991): 183184CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Other institutional centers have included the Germanic (now the Busch-Reisinger) Museum at Harvard University, the De Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco, the Art Institute of Chicago, and art dealerships either run or staffed by émigrés, such as the Nierendorf and Buchholz galleries in New York.

12 Karen Koehler, “The Bauhaus, 1919–1928: Gropius in Exile and the Museum of Modern Art, N.Y, 1938,” and Holz, Keith, “The Exiled Artists from Nazi Germany and their Art,” in Art, Culture, and Media under the Third Reich, ed. Etlin, Richard A. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Borchardt-Hume, Achim, ed. Albers & Moholy-Nagy: From the Bauhaus to the New World [Exh. Cat., Tate Modern] (London, 2006)Google Scholar; Kentgens-Craig, Margret, The Bauhaus and America: First Contacts, 1919–1936 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999)Google Scholar; Mansbach, Steven, “The Artifice of Modern(ist) Art History,” in Exiles, Diasporas, & Strangers, ed. Mercer, Kobena (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 97120Google Scholar; Horowitz, Frederick A. and Danilowitz, Brenda, To Open Eyes: Joseph Albers at the Bauhaus, Black Mountain College, and Yale (London and New York: Phaidon, 2006)Google Scholar; Caroline, and Harrison, Michael, eds., Starting at Zero: Black Mountain College [Exh. Cat., Arnolfini Gallery] (Bristol, UK, 2005)Google Scholar; Harris, Mary Emma, The Arts at Black Mountain College (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987)Google Scholar.

13 For example, Ehrlich, Susan, ed., Pacific Dreams: Currents of Surrealism and Fantasy in California Art, 1934–1957 [Exh. Cat., UCLA] (Los Angeles, 1995)Google Scholar; Heilbut, Anthony, Exiled in Paradise: German Refugee Artists and Intellectuals in America from the 1930s to the Present (New York: Viking Press, 1983)Google Scholar; Leslie, Esther, Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory, and the Avant-Garde (London: Verso, 2002)Google Scholar; Omasta, Michael, Mayr, Brigitte, and Steit, Elisabeth, eds., Peter Lorre. Ein Fremder im Paradies (Vienna: Zsolnay/Kino, 2004)Google Scholar; Bahr, Ehrhard, Weimar on the Pacific: German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Schnauber, Cornelius, German-Speaking Artists in Hollywood: Emigration between 1910 and 1945 (Bonn: Inter Nationes, 1996)Google Scholar; Schnauber, , Hollywood Haven: Homes and Haunts of the European Émigrés and Exiles in Los Angeles, trans. Schoenberg, Barbara Zeisl (Riverside, CA: Ariadne Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Daily, Victoria, Shivers, Natalie, and Dawson, Michael, eds., LA's Early Moderns: Art/Architecture/Photography (Glendale, CA: Balcony Press, 2008)Google Scholar; Verge, Arthur, Paradise Transformed: Los Angeles during the Second World War (Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt, 1993)Google Scholar; Lawrence Weschler, “Paradise: The Southern California Idyll of Hitler's Cultural Exiles,” in Exiles+Émigrés, ed. Barron, 341–357; Brinkmann, Reinhold and Wolff, Christoph, eds., Driven into Paradise: The Musical Migration from Nazi Germany to the United States (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999)Google Scholar; Gozani, Tal, ed., Driven into Paradise: L.A.'s European Jewish Émigrés of the 1930s and 1940s [Exh. Cat., Skirball Cultural Center] (Los Angeles, 2005)Google Scholar; Taylor, John Russell, Strangers in Paradise: The Hollywood Émigrés, 1933–1950 (New York: Faber & Faber, 1983)Google Scholar.

14 Armstrong, Elizabeth, Boyd, Michael, Colpitt, Frances, and Hickey, David, Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design, and Culture in Mid-Century (New York: Prestel, 2007)Google Scholar. For the postwar period, see Forster-Hahn's, Françoise account of Max Beckmann in Kalifornien. Exil, Erinnerung und Erneuerung (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2007)Google Scholar. Not all California émigrés found Los Angeles the Eden that advertising and word-of-mouth implied. For example, Bertolt Brecht noted, “odd, i can't breath [sic] in this climate. The air is totally odourless, morning and evening, in both house and garden. There are no seasons here.” Brecht, Bertolt, Journals, ed. Willett, John, trans. Rorrison, Hugh (London: Methuen, 1993), 193Google Scholar.

15 Taylor, Strangers in Paradise, 9. As Taylor and many others have suggested when describing the experiences of German intellectuals in Los Angeles, the contrast between their lifestyles in Europe and southern California appeared unique: “The bizarre image of Central European intellectuals set down with a bump in the sunshine of Santa Monica, having to deal with the day-to-day problems of living in a strange country, speaking a strange language, and integrating themselves (or deciding not to) into a community that was notorious even within the strange and dangerous United States for being without culture and without roots.”

16 For music in Germany during the Nazi regime, see the recent article by Pamela Potter that also dispels the trope of modernist progressivism in “Dismantling a Dystopia: On the Historiography of Music in the Third Reich,” Central European History 40, no. 4 (2007): 623–651. As she concludes, “It was far easier to presume that the arts suffered at the hands of the Nazi dictatorship than to analyze the paradoxical implication that they might have actually benefited in some cases from the new order,” 651.

17 Eckmann, Sabine, “German Exile, Modern Art, and National Identity,” in Caught by Politics: Hitler Exiles and American Visual Culture, ed. Eckmann, Sabine and Koepnick, Lutz (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 96CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Davie, Maurice, Refugees in America: Report of the Committee for the Study of Recent Immigration from Europe (New York: Harper & Bros., 1947), 324Google Scholar.

19 Fleming, Donald Peterson, The Refugee Intellectual: The Americanization of Immigrants, 1933–1941 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1953), 1617Google Scholar.

20 Ibid., 242.

21 Roder, Werner, ed., Handbuch der deutschsprachigen Emigration nach 1933/International Biographical Dictionary of Central European Emigres, 1933–1945, 3 vols. (New York: K. G. Saur, 1980–1983)Google Scholar.

22 Emigrants and Exiles: A Lost Generation of Austrian Artists in America, 1920–1950 [Exh. Cat., Mary & Leigh Block Gallery, Northwestern University-Österreichische Galerie, Vienna] (Evanston, IL, 1996), viii. For the U.K., see Feichtinger, Johannes, “The Significance of Austrian Émigré Art Historians for English Art Scholarship,” in Intellectual Migration and Cultural Transformation: Refugees from National Socialism in the English-Speaking World, ed. Timms, Edward and Hughes, Jon (Vienna and New York: Springer, 2003), 5169Google Scholar.

23 Papenbrock, Martin, “Die Emigration bildender Künstler aus Deutschland 1933–1945,” Kunst und Politik. Jahrbuch der Guernica Gesellschaft, ed. Held, Jutta (Osnabruck: Rasch, 1999), 91118Google Scholar.

24 Biographisches Handbuch der deutsch-sprachigen Emigration nach 1933, XLIV.

25 Wendland, Ulrike, Biographisches Handbuch deutschsprachiger Kunsthistoriker im Exil. Leben und Werk der unter dem Nationalsozialismus Verfolgten und Vertrieben Wissenschaftler, 2 vols. (Munich: Saur, 1998), XII-XVIIICrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 Fermi, Laura, Illustrious Immigrants: The Intellectual Migration from Europe, 1930–1941 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968)Google Scholar; and Fleming, Donald and Bailyn, Bernard, eds., The Intellectual Migration: Europe and American, 1930–1960 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1969)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 Colin Eisler, “Kunstgeschichte American Style: A Study in Migration,” in The Intellectual Migration, ed. Fleming and Bernard Bailyn, 629. Eisler properly notes that the art historical profession did not emerge in Germany before the mid-nineteenth century. Americans appointed to professorships in the discipline began in the 1850s in Michigan, Vermont, the College of the City of New York, and Princeton University. German textbooks were the primary sources used by art history students, 548.

28 Wendland, Biographisches Handbuch deutschsprachiger Kunsthistoriker im Exil, and Michels, Karen, Transplantierte Kunstwissenschaft. Die deutschsprachige Kunstgeschichte im Amerikanischen Exil (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1999), passimGoogle Scholar.

29 Barron, ed., Exiles+Émigrés. Holz, Keith also has written a very informative account of the artistic exile experience, specifically within European countries during this period: Modern German Art for Thirties Paris, Prague, and London: Resistance and Acquiescence in a Democratic Public Sphere (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

30 Thus far, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) has featured exhibitions and produced catalogs detailing the German avant-garde during the First World War through the mid-1920s: German Expressionism: The Second Generation, 1915-1925, LACMA (Munich: Prestel, 1988); National Socialist arts policies: “Degenerate Art”: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany (Los Angeles: LACMA, 1991); and the volume on Exile Art: Barron, ed., Exiles+Émigrés. The museum is currently organizing a major exhibition for the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. This show will focus on German art from 1945 to 1989, entitled The Art of the Two Germanys during the Cold War and opens in 2009.

31 For the fate of French cultural exiles, see Mehlman, Jeffrey, Émigré New York: French Intellectuals in Wartime Manhattan (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

32 Cf. Exiles and Emigrants: A Lost Generation of Austrian Artists in America, 1920–1980; Peter Eppel, “Exiled Austrians in the USA, 1938–1945: Immigration, Exile, Remigration, no Invitation to Return,” and Wimmer, Adi, “‘Expelled and Banished’: The Exile Experience of Austrian Anschluß Victims in Personal Histories and Literary Documents,” both in The European Emigrant Experience in the U.S.A., ed. Hölbling, Walter and Wagnleitner, Reinhold (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1992), 2538, 51–72Google Scholar.

33 See the H-German online discussion forum “German History after the Visual Turn,” in particular the contribution by Paul Betts, “Some Reflections on the ‘Visual Turn,’” , September 22, 2006, as well as Burke's, Peter volume, Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence (London: Reaktion Books, 2001)Google Scholar, wherein Burke describes the uses and difficulties in various approaches to visual analysis as a way of understanding historical context.

34 Haxthausen, Charles, ed., “Introduction,” The Two Art Histories: The Museum and the University (Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2002), 5Google Scholar.

35 In addition to the LACMA exhibition Exiles+Émigrés, an essay in the inaugural catalog of the Neue Galerie, New York, explored the artistic impact of German and Austrian art: Topp, Leslie, “Moments in the Reception of Early Twentieth-Century German and Austrian Decorative Arts in the United States,” in New Worlds: German and Austrian Art, 1890–1940 [Exh. Cat., Neue Galerie] (New York, 2001), 572582Google Scholar.

36 See also Zimmermann, Michael, ed., The Art Historian: National Traditions and Institutional Practices (Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2003)Google Scholar, particularly the essay by Karen Michels, “‘Pineapples and Mayonnaise—Why Not?’ European Art Historians Meet the New World,” 57–66.

37 Roeck, Bernd, “Introduction,” in Cultural Exchange in Early Modern Europe, vol. IV, Forging European Identities, ed. Roodenburg, Herman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 3Google Scholar. The term, “cultural transfer” was used twenty-five years ago for the subtitle of editors Jackman, Jarrell C. and Borden's, Carla M.The Muses Flee Hitler: Cultural Transfer and Adaptation, 1930–1945 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1983)Google Scholar.

38 Roeck, “Introduction,” 5.

39 Feiwel Kupferberg, “From Berlin to Hollywood: German-Speaking Refugees in the American Film Industry,” in Intellectual Migration and Cultural Transformation, ed. Timms and Hughes, 140.

40 Espagne, Michel, “Jenszeits der Komparatistik zur Methode der Erforschung von Kulturtransfers,” in Europäische Kulturzeitschriften um 1900 als Median Transnationaler und Transdisziplinärer Wahrnehmung. Bericht über das zweite Kolloquium der Kommission “Europäische Jahrhundert—Wende, Literatur, Künste, Wissenschaften um 1900 im Grenzüberschreitender Wahrnehmung,” ed. Friede, Susanne and Mölk, Ulrich (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006), 13Google Scholar.

41 Holz, “The Exiled Artists,” 347. One interesting example Holz provides is the exhibit of thirty picture-text panels entitled “Germany of Yesterday—Germany of Tomorrow,” sent to the New York World's Fair of 1939 by German artists exiled in Paris With this exhibit, the artists wished to “present themselves as bearers of cultural and political heritages distinct from those championed by the German government,” 352. The National Socialists did not send an official representation to the World's Fair.

42 See Coser's, Lewis A. introduction in Refugee Scholars in America: Their Impact and Their Experiences (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984), 315Google Scholar. On science, see Ash, Mitchell, “Forced Migration or Scientific Change after 1933: Steps Towards a New Overview,” in Intellectual Migration and Cultural Transformation, ed. Timms, and Hughes, , 241263Google Scholar.

43 Zühlsdorff, Volkmar, Hitler's Exiles: The German Cultural Resistance in America and Europe, trans. Bott, Martin H. (London and New York: Continuum, 2004)Google Scholar, which describes Prince Hubertus zu Löwenstein's organizational efforts at founding the German Academy in Exile together with the American Guild for German Cultural Freedom, set up to aid German-speaking intellectuals financially. When Löwenstein arrived in the U.S. in 1935, he wrote in a German language New York newspaper, “Modern Germany is no longer a home to German culture, to German intellectual life. The real Germany survives only outside the Reich's borders, wherever Germans are able to live in freedom. My idea is to unite all these Germans, not into a political Reich, but rather into a spiritual and intellectual one … Over the course of history, Germans who cherished their liberty have often come to the United States. It is therefore my desire to win friends among the people of America, people who are ready to understand our situation.” Quoted in Zühlsdorff, Hitler's Exiles, 21. See also Michels, Transplantierte Kunstwissenschaft, chapters I and II. For political activities of refugees, see the recent article by Lamberti, Marjorie, “German Antifascist Refugees in America and the Public Debate on ‘What Should be Done with Germany after Hitler,’ 1939–1945,” Central European History 40, no. 2 (2007): 279305CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

44 The many essays by Benjamin Buchloh and Andreas Huyssen discuss the conundrums in defining twentieth-century literary and aesthetic modernism. For an examination of U.S. cultural modernism and politics during the 1930s, see Kalaidjian, Walter B., Revisionary Modernism and Post-Modern Critique: American Culture Between the Wars (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993)Google Scholar.

45 Among many such discussions, see Lewis, Beth Irwin, Art for All? The Collision of Modern Art and the Public in Late Nineteenth Century Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), especially 29–46Google Scholar.

46 Barr, Alfred H. Jr., “Otto Dix,” Arts 17, no. 4 (January 1931): 250251Google Scholar, quoted in Pamela Kort, “The Myths of Expressionism in America,” in New Worlds: German and Austrian Art, 1890–1940, 270.

47 Flint, Ralph, “German Art Shown at Modern Museum,” Art News 29, no. 25 (March 21, 1931): 5Google Scholar, quoted in Kort, “The Myths of Expressionism,” 272.

48 More than twenty-six thousand attended the exhibit of the 123 works on display. Kort, “The Myths of Expressionism,” 272.

49 See Whiting, Cecile, Anti-Fascism in American Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989)Google Scholar, for an account of the politically charged U.S. art landscape during the 1930s and 1940s.

50 Vivian Endicott Barnett, “Banned German Art: Reception and Institutional Support of Modern German Art in the United States, 1933–1945, in Exiles+Émigrés, ed. Barron,, where she describes American museum and gallery efforts in exhibiting and purchasing German modernism during the 1930s and early 1940s, until the U.S. entered the war, curtailing museum exhibitions generally and the circulation of German art; 273–284. But several paintings the Nazis had deemed “degenerate” made their way into U.S. museum collections; for example, Franz Marc's Girls Bathing, sold at the Fischer auction in Switzerland, entered the Norton Simon collection in Pasadena, CA; Oskar Kokoschka's Tower Bridge of London, also sold in Switzerland, is now at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.

51 Holz, “The Exiled Artists,” 355.

52 Milton, Sybil, “Is There an Exile Art or Only Exile Artists?,” in Exil. Literatur und die Künste nach 1933, ed. Stephan, Alexander (Bonn: Bouvier, 1990), 8389Google Scholar.

53 For example, a recent exhibition highlighted the similarities of international modernism, whether of the Soviet, Nazi, or interwar American varieties: Wilk, Christopher, ed., Modernism: Designing a New World, 1914–1939 [Exh. Cat., Victoria and Albert Museum and the Corcoran Gallery of Art] (London and Washington, D.C., 2006–07)Google Scholar.

54 See contemporary excerpts of such critiques (as well as critiques of American culture) in Kaes, Anton, Jay, Martin, and Dimendberg, Edward, eds., The Weimar Republic Sourcebook (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994)Google Scholar, especially the sections on “Intellectuals and the Ideologies of the Age,” 285–387; “The Challenge of Modernity,” 393–502, and “Changing Configurations of Culture,” 507–635.

55 As is well known, the literature on art and art institutions during the Third Reich is voluminous. Some titles include Michaud, Eric, The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004)Google Scholar; Petropoulos, Jonathan, Art as Politics in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Petropoulos, , The Faustian Bargain: The Art World of Nazi Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000)Google Scholar; and Steinweis, Alan, Art, Ideology, and Economics in Nazi Germany: The Reich Chambers of Music, Theater, and the Visual Arts (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1993)Google Scholar. A number of exhibitions on art in the Third Reich coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of Hitler's coming to power; see, for example, Verfolgt-Verführt. Kunst unterm Hakenkreuz [Exh. Cat., Kunsthalle] (Hamburg, 1983) and Verboten-verfolgt. Kunstdiktatur im 3. Reich [Exh. Cat., Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum] (Duisburg, 1983).

56 Dyke, James Van, Franz Radziwill and the Problem of Nazi Art (Ann Arbor, MI: 2008)Google Scholar, in which Van Dyke evaluates the ambivalent relationship between Nazi officials and the painter Radziwill, whose modernist aesthetic and relationships to the Weimar avant-garde art while seeking prominence in the Third Reich highlighted the ambiguity of modernism and National Socialism. See also Potter, Pamela M., “Music in the Third Reich: The Complex Task of ‘Germanization,’” in The Arts in Nazi Germany, ed. Huener, Jonathan and Nicosia, Francis R. (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2006)Google Scholar, in which she notes the distinction between largely unsuccessful attempts at “Germanizing” music and successful attempts at eliminating Jews from musical practice and performance, 85–104.

57 Cf. Schuster, Peter-Klaus, “Kunst für Keinen—Zur inneren Emigration der deutschen Moderne,” in Deutsche Kunst im 20. Jahrhundert. Malerei und Plastik, 1905–1985, ed. Joachimides, Christos M., Rosenthal, Norman, and Schmied, Wieland [Exh. Cat., Staatsgalerie Stuttgart] (Munich: Prestel, 1986), 455457Google Scholar. Schuster's title, “Art for No One” is a play on the well-known German art periodical, “Art for All.”

58 A good example of this binary approach, contrasting progressive modernism with retrograde Nazi cultural policies can be seen in the catalog accompanying a major MOMA survey show of German art in 1957, twenty-six years after the 1931 MOMA show. This was the first survey show of twentieth-century German art since the 1931 exhibit. The exhibition's director, Andrew Carnduff Ritchie wrote in the catalog's forward, “The exhibition begins with the artists of Die Brücke expressionist movement … coincident with the rise of the Fauves in France. It continues through the next wave of German expressionism, known as Der Blaue Reiter, begun in 1911, the Neue Sachlichkeit or New Realism at the end of and immediately after the first World War, the Bauhaus movement of the 1920s and early ‘30s and, ignoring the false pathos and propaganda art of the Nazi regime, concludes with a highly selective representation of some of the leading artists of post-World War II [West] Germany.” German Art of the Twentieth Century [Exh. Cat., Museum of Modern Art] (New York, 1957), 11 (my italics). For a more recent exclusion of Third Reich art, see Hans-Ernst Mittag's critique of Deutsche Kunst im 20. Jahrhundert. Malerie und Plastik, 1905–1985 [Exh. Cat., Staatsgalerie Stuttgart and Royal Academy of Art, London] (Munich, 1986) in “Art and Oppression in Fascist Germany,” in The Divided Heritage: Themes and Problems in German Modernism, ed. Irit Rogoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), in which he notes that “considering the standing practices of the discipline of art history, the products of Nazism should have been included in any appraisal of the twentieth century, if only for the sake of historical coherence,” 191.

59 The Nolde case was the most prominent example and described early on in the literature. Peter Paret has described the sculptor Ernst Barlach's Nordic modernism and the difficulties it revealed with Nazi arts policies in An Artist Against the Third Reich: Ernst Barlach, 1933–1938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

60 Lane, Barbara Miller, Architecture and Politics, 1918–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968, 1985)Google Scholar. For the contradictory Nazi policies in the graphic arts and advertising, see Aynsley, Jeremy, Graphic Design in Germany, 1890–1945 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

61 “Aspekte der Künstlerischen Inneren Emigration, 1933–1945,” Exilforschung. Ein internationales Jahrbuch 12 (1994).

62 Quoted in Ehrke-Rotermund, Heidrun, “Camoufliertes Malen im Dritten Reich. Otto Dix zwischen Widerstand und Innerer Emigration,” in Exilforschung. Ein internationales Jahrbuch 12 (1994), 126Google Scholar. Dix moved from Dresden to a small town near the Swiss border. His life during the Third Reich and after World War II was marked by hardship until his death in 1968.

63 On descriptions of inner emigration, see Krohn, Claus-Dieter, “Introduction,” in Aspekte der künstlerischen inneren Emigration 1933–1945, ed. Krohn, (Munich: Text+Kritik, 1994)Google Scholar.

64 Neugebauer, Rosamunde, “Avantgarde im Exil? Anmerkungen zum Schicksal der bildkünstlerischen Avantgarde Deutschlands nach 1933 und zum Exilwerk Richard Lindners,” in Exilforschung. Ein internationales Jahrbuch, vol. 16, “Exil und Avantgarden” (Munich: Edition Text+Kritik, 1998), 3255, especially 35–37Google Scholar. “Though never a member of the Nazi party, Mies [van der Rohe] did join several Nazi-sponsored organizations and in 1934 signed a petition in which artists and other cultural figures declared their support for Hitler.” Kathleen James, “Changing the Agenda: From German Bauhaus Modernism to U.S. Internationalism,” in Exiles+Émigrés, ed. Barron, 236.

65 Holz, “The Exiled Artists,” 353–354.

66 Kentgens-Craig, The Bauhaus and America, xi.

67 Ibid., 61.

68 These students included Joseph Hudnut, Lawrence Kocher, and Robert Davison. Ibid., 184.

69 See the recently published memoirs of Justi wherein he describes his plans for a museum of contemporary German and international art after World War I: Gaehtgens, Thomas and Winkler, Kurt, eds., Ludwig Justi. Werden, Wirken, Wissen. Lebenserinnerungen aus fünf Jahrzehnten aus dem Nachlass (Berlin: Nicholai, 2000)Google Scholar.

70 See the two fine articles Helfenstein, Josef, “Anticipating a Great Market: Klee and America 1930–1933,” in Klee in America, ed. Helfenstein, Josef and Turner, Elizabeth Hutton [Exh. Cat., Menil Collection] (Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany, 2006), 138157Google Scholar; and Charles Werner Haxthausen, “A ‘Degenerate’ Abroad: Klee's Reception in America, 1937–1940,” in ibid., 158–177.

71 See two important volumes detailing modernism in America wherein exiles figured prominently: Gross, Jennifer, Societé Anonyme: Modernism for America [Exh. Cat., Yale University Gallery], (New Haven, CT, 2006)Google Scholar; and Borchardt-Hume, ed., Albers and Moholy-Nagy. An interesting discussion of imported interwar modernism in Los Angeles is Iain Boyd Whyte's “Peters and Schneider: The Drawing Board as Home,” in Eckmann and Koepnick, eds., Caught by Politics, 139–173, in which he describes the art deco Bullock's and Sears department stores designed by Jacob (Americanized later as “Jock”) Peters.

72 To give but one example, the Austrian émigré, Victor Gruen, emigrated to Los Angeles and is considered the father of U.S. enclosed shopping malls, having designed the first in Minnesota (Southdale Shopping Mall). While the first malls of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s catered primarily to consumers expeditiously finding items in a safe and climate-controlled environment, Gruen's utopian vision was to see shopping centers as urban lifestyle environments. He wished to recreate the ambiance of pre-war Vienna with its street life and café society, terribly missed in car-clogged Los Angeles. The current turn away from big box shopping malls to outdoor planned urban environments (in California, Maryland, Virginia, Arizona, and Florida) are actual testaments to Gruen's initial vision. A current “star” architect who worked in Gruen's office as a young man was Frank Gehry. On Gruen, see Mennel's, TimothyVictor Gruen and the Construction of Cold War Utopias,” Journal of Planning History 3, no. 2 (2004): 116150CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

73 Jed Perl, “The Teacher as Magnetic Field: European Exiles and the American Avant-Garde,” in Starting at Zero, ed. C. Harrison and M. Harrison, 75.

74 Harris, The Arts at Black Mountain College. See also Katz, Vincent, ed., Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003)Google Scholar.

75 Bauhaus teacher Josef Albers left Germany partly because his wife, Anni Albers, a textile artist, was Jewish.

76 Horowitz and Brenda Danilowitz, To Open Eyes. The expression comes from Albers, who when asked about his teaching strategy at Black Mountain College, said it was “to open eyes.” Irving Sandler noted that “Albers's genius as a teacher depended less on what he taught than the example he himself set: his utter devotion to making art and to teaching.” Sandler, Irving, “The School of Art at Yale, 1950–1970: The Collective Reminiscences of Twenty Distinguished Alumni,” Art Journal 42, no. 1 (1982): 16Google Scholar.

77 Jacob Lawrence, Oral History Interview with Carroll Greene, October 26, 1968, Smithsonian Archives of American Art, quoted in C. Harrison and M. Harrison, eds., Starting at Zero, 88.

78 Interview with Noland, Kenneth, Lane, Mervin, ed., Black Mountain College: Sprouted Seeds of Personalities (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1990), 212Google Scholar, quoted in C. Harrison and M. Harrison, eds., Starting at Zero, 89.

79 Among those residing and teaching at Black Mountain College for shorter or longer periods of time were the Bauhaus student of Oscar Schlemmer, Xanti Schawinsky; the former student of Hans Sachs, the psychoanalyst Fritz Moellenhoff and his wife Anna; Erwin Straus, psychiatrist; and Heinrich Jalowetz, director of the Cologne Opera until his dismissal in 1933 and one of Arnold Schoenberg's students. Mary Emma Harris, “Black Mountain College: Experience and Experiment in American Education,” in Starting at Zero, ed. C. Harrison and M. Harrison, 13.

80 Harris, The Arts at Black Mountain College, 52, and Harris, Starting at Zero, ed. C. Harrison and M. Harrison, 21.

81 Albers, Josef, “Werklicher Formunterricht,” Bauhaus. Zeitschrift für Gestaltung 2, no. 3 (1928): 37Google Scholar, quoted in Borchardt-Hume, ed., Albers and Moholy-Nagy, 70.

82 Perl, “The Teacher as Magnetic Field,” 75.

83 Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy had already resigned from the Bauhaus in 1928 and first emigrated to the U.K. in 1934 (Moholy-Nagy in 1935), arriving in the U.S. in 1937. Gropius accepted a teaching position at Harvard University as did Breuer. Gropius recommended that Moholy-Nagy establish a Bauhaus school in Chicago. It lasted for about one year. But Moholy-Nagy established a School of Design in 1939. See Borchardt-Hume, ed., Albers and Moholy-Nagy. The artist George Grosz wisely decided to stay in New York after 1933 (where, in 1932 he taught as a guest lecturer at the Art Students League). Hans Hoffman was teaching in California when the Nazis came to power and remained in the U.S., while his wife arrived in 1939. A substantial number of artists either lived part of the year outside Germany before the Nazi takeover or were well connected to colleagues abroad and immediately left Germany in 1933. These artists included Oskar Kokoschka, who ultimately resided in Britain. The surrealists Max Ernst and Kurt Schwitters lived in France before 1933. On Grosz's American career, see Flavell, M. Kay, George Grosz: A Biography (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988)Google Scholar, particularly, 72–296.

84 See Selz, Peter, “The Impact from Abroad: Foreign Guests and Visitors,” in On the Edge of America: California Modernist Art, 1900–1950, ed. Karlstrom, Paul J. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press in association with the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, and the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, 1996), 100102Google Scholar.

85 See Campbell, S., ed., The Blue Four Scheyer Collection (Pasadena, CA: Norton Simon Museum, 1976)Google Scholar and Wünsche, Isabel, ed., Galka E. Scheyer und Die Blaue Vier. Briefwechsel 1924–1945 (Bern: Bentelli, 2006)Google Scholar.

86 See Bahr, Weimar on the Pacific, especially 150ff.

87 Karen Michels, “Transfer and Transformation: The German Period in American Art History,” in Exiles+Émigrés, ed. Barron, 304–316, and Kevin Parker, “Art History and Exile: Richard Krautheimer and Erwin Panofsky,” in Exiles+Émigrés, ed. Barron, 317–325.

88 Coser, Refugee Scholars in America, 3–4.

89 Michels, Transplantierte Kunstwissenschaft; Wendland, Biographfisches Handbuch deutschsprachigen Kunsthistoriker im Exil; and Michels, Karen, “Art History, German Jewish Identity, and the Emigration of Iconology,” in Jewish Identity in Modern Art History, ed. Soussloff, Catherine M. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), 167179Google Scholar; and Michels, “Transfer and Transformation,” 304–316.

90 Michels, “Art History, German Jewish Identity, and the Emigration of Iconology,” 167–168.

91 Parker, “Art History and Exile,” 318.

92 Michels, “Art History, German Jewish Identity, and the Emigration of Iconology,” 170.

93 For a description of the activities of the Warburg Library in Germany, see the recent monograph by Russell, Mark A., Between Tradition and Modernity: Aby Warburg and the Public Purposes of Art in Hamburg (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2007)Google Scholar as well as Holly, Michael Ann, Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984)Google Scholar for the American appropriation of Panofsky's methodologies.

94 Parker, “Art History and Exile,” 324.

95 Michels, “Transfer and Transformation,” 307; Eisler, “Kunstgeschichte American Style,” 575ff.

96 See the remembrance by Goldsmith, Martin, detailing his musician parents' careers before emigrating to the U.S.: The Inextinguishable Symphony: A True Story of Music and Love in Nazi Germany (New York: Wiley, 2001)Google Scholar.

97 Michels points out that the Institute of Fine Arts (NYU) became the premier center for émigré art historians with more than half of its department being displaced exiles. Walter Cook emerges as a hero in academic recruitment, for which NYU's administration took issue, fearing that the department was “being swamped with ‘Teutonic’ influences.” Michels, “Transfer and Transformation,” 309.

98 Eisler, “Kunstgeschichte American Style,” 627–628.

99 H. W. Janson and the Legacy of Modern Art at Washington University in St. Louis, 6th ed. [Exh. Cat., Salander-O-Reilly Galleries, Washington University Gallery of Art] (New York and St. Louis, MO, 2002). The textbook has gone through multiple editions, beginning in 1962 in the first edition (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1962). The text is now in its sixth edition, revised by Janson's son, Anthony.

101 “During the thirties and forties, in an effort to legitimate German expressionism, … dealers directed a large portion of their energy toward New York's modern art museums, establishing relations with, and selling works to, the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Brooklyn Museum,” Robin Reisenfeld, “Collecting and Collective Memory: German Expressionist Art and Modern Jewish Identity,” in Jewish Identity, ed. Soussloff, 126. A German émigré whose magnificent collection of Picassos and French modernism was donated to the Guggenheim in the 1970s was Justin Thannhauser, the son of the Munich art dealer Heinrich Thannhauser. See Barnett, Vivian Endicott, “The Thannhauser Collection,” in Thannhauser Collection (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1992), 1521Google Scholar.

102 Goldstein, Malcolm, Landscape with Figures: A History of Art Dealing in the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 205206Google Scholar; and Barnett, “Banned German Art,” 274–275. See also Ris, Anja Walter, Kunstleidenschaft im Dienst der Moderne. Die Geschichte der Galerie Nierendorf Berlin/New York, 1925–1995 (Zurich: Zip Interpublishers, 2003)Google Scholar, originally a Freie Universität dissertation.

103 Kort, “The Myths of Expressionism,” 278.

104 Reisenfeld, “Collecting and Collective Memory,” 132, note 31.

105 Rathbone, P. T., ed., In Memory of Curt Valentin: 1902–1954: Exhibition of Modern Masterpieces Lent by American Museums [Exh. Cat., Curt Valentin Gallery] (New York, 1954)Google Scholar.

106 Bayer, Herbert, Gropius, Walter, and Gropius, Ise, eds., The Bauhaus, 1918–1928 [Exh. Cat., Museum of Modern Art] (New York, 1938)Google Scholar. Unlike most art and architectural exhibitions held at major museums today when the costs of mounting exhibits is prohibitively expensive and hence, shows often run for several months, museum shows in the 1930s and 1940s often lasted only a few weeks. In the case of the Bauhaus show, it ran from December 7, 1938, to January 30, 1939.

107 Koehler, “The Bauhaus, 1919–1928,” 298–299. See also Hal Foster, “The Bauhaus Idea in America,” in Albers and Moholy-Nagy, ed. Borchardt-Hume, 92–102. Foster also observes that “The very notion of a ‘Bauhaus idea’ is a fiction, of course,” 92. See also Peter Hahn, “Bauhaus and Exile: Bauhaus Architects and Designers between the Old World and the New,” in Exiles+Émigrés, ed. Barron, 211–223.

108 FBI Files, Walter Gropius, quoted in Kentgens-Craig, The Bauhaus and America, 181.

109 Ibid., 182.

110 Press release, Bauhaus, 1918–1928, Museum of Modern Art Archives, NY, Records of the Department of Circulating Exhibitions, Album 2, II.1/40 (5), quoted in Koehler, “The Bauhaus, 1919–1928,” 297.

111 Ibid., 297.

112 Ibid., 299.

113 The association of Arts and Industries, a group of Chicago businessmen, invited Walter Gropius to become director of a new design school. Since Gropius had already been appointed at Harvard University, he recommended Moholy-Nagy. Moholy-Nagy named the school the New Bauhaus and received the support of a local industrialist before reorganizing and renaming the school the Institute of Design. Today the school is located within the Illinois Institute of Technology. Mies van der Rohe, another Bauhäusler, arrived in Chicago after an invitation to become the director of the School of Architecture at the Armour Institute of Technology. Armour later merged with the Illinois Institute, and Mies remained there for twenty years.

114 Robert Coates, New Yorker, May 5, 1945, 67, quoted in Fleming, The Refugee Intellectual, 143–144.

115 The wronged exile quote comes from Adorno, Theodor, Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life (London: New Left Books, 1951), 3839Google Scholar. In his reflections on his American sojourn, he noted, “I consider myself European through and through, considered myself as such from the first to the last day abroad, and never denied it. Not only was it natural for me to preserve the intellectual continuity of my personal life, but I quickly became fully aware of it in America.” Adorno, “Scientific Experiences of a European Scholar in America,” in The Intellectual Migration, ed. Fleming and Bailyn, 338.

116 Eckmann and Koepnick, eds., Caught by Politics, 4–5. The editors continue by noting, “modernism changed under the condition of exile and … the works of certain exiles allow us to come to a new understanding of the relationship between modernism and modernity during the 1930s and 1940s,” 5.

117 Bahr, Weimar on the Pacific, 20.

118 Coser, Refugee Scholars in America, 10. The idea of “deprovincialization” was described in Hughes, H. Stuart, A Sea Change: A Migration of Social Thought (New York: McGraw Hill, 1977)Google Scholar. See also Deshmukh, Marion, “Cultural Migration, Artists, and Visual Representation Between Americans and Germans During the 1930s and 1940s,” in Transatlantic Images and Perceptions: Germany and America since 1774, ed. Barclay, David and Glaser-Schmidt, Elisabeth (Washington, D.C., and Cambridge: German Historical Institute and Cambridge University Press, 1997), 265283CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

119 Palmier, Jean-Michel, Weimar in Exile: The Antifascist Emigration in Europe and America, trans. Fernbach, David (London: Verso, 2006), 510Google Scholar.

120 Palmier noted that the German writer Marcel Reich-Ranicki criticized historians of exile literature at a Bremen PEN conference when he suggested that it was wrong to examine only exile literature in relation to the anti-fascist struggle. This sparked a heated debate and controversy. Ibid., 664, note 38.