he exiles who wowed America
How exiled European artists reacted to the energy and freedom of the US
Clive James
Imagine Balanchine watching a bunch of cheerleaders and you’ve got this book in a flash. Vignettes are its basic strength, as was bound to be true. The subject of the twentieth-century European artists in exile is too big for one book. Jean-Michel Palmier proved it by publishing his pioneering compendium Weimar en exil (1988) as two books, one of them called Exil en Europe and the other Exil en Amérique. Since there could easily have been others – Exil en Australie would have been interesting – it will be appreciated that Palmier himself felt obliged to limit his purview.

Joseph Horowitz gets the story into a single volume, Artists in Exile, by concentrating on a single destination, America, and even then he trims the field. His subtitle “How refugees from twentieth-century war and revolution transformed the American performing arts” leaves out the writers, painters, photographers and architects, which means we aren’t going to hear much about any of the Mann clan, and nothing at all about Mondrian, Ernst, Léger, Moholy-Nagy, Mies, Gropius, Andreas Feininger, Lyonel Feininger . . . but let’s stop. Horowitz gives us mainly those exiles who worked in music, theatre and film. Even then, there are more than enough names to be going on with: Balanchine, Stravinsky, Koussevitsky, Toscanini, Stokowski, Kurt Weill and Rouben Mamoulian are only the most prominent.

Horowitz provides biographical sketches for them all, each sketch studded with quotable illustrations. (Otto Preminger, hearing a group of his fellow émigrés speaking Hungarian, said, “Don’t you people know you’re in Hollywood? Speak German.”) The result is a rich assembly, an unmasked ball teeming with famous names, but you always have to remember – and our author, to his credit, never forgets – that in too many cases their attendance was compulsory, a fact which can lend a sad note to the glamour.

There was a trend towards America anyway. Market forces did their stuff, and even if there had been no wars and revolutions there would have been a transfer of creative power. Horowitz is right to feature Dvorák prominently at the beginning of his line-up of the musicians. In the late nineteenth century, Europe wasn’t trying all that hard to drive Dvorák out, but he could see how America was trying to pull him in. His symphony “From the New World” was written not just out of appreciation for America’s plantation melodies and rolling landscapes, but out of gratitude for America’s readiness to employ him. Mahler, too, went to America for the job opportunities. Caruso could have stayed in Europe, but he wanted to sing at the Met, correctly estimating that it was the centre of his world.

In the twentieth century, not even the Nazis could send Picasso transatlantic, but after his 1939 MoMA retrospective exhibition, New York became the centre of Picasso’s financial empire. If Horowitz had been following the money, Picasso would have got a mention. But our author can be excused for following only the physical freedom, which was the thing that the combined totalitarian assault from Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany made obviously crucial. There had always been a flight from Eastern Europe. The flight increased after the Russian Revolution in 1917. Even before the Nazis came to power in 1933, the flight had turned into an exodus. Between 1931 and 1945, 1,500 European musicians arrived in America. Most of them would have been superfluous to requirements if there had not been a demand to match the supply.

more at: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article4618457.ece

Interesting Bot. I think I shall purchase that book under review.

- Peter.

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