In light of current world events, Artlyst thought it poignant to point out that with change comes cultural diversity, which in turn empowers the evolution of art. So we thought it fitting to give you a top ten that reminds us that many a great artist has, in fact, been a refugee at some point in their lives and careers – surely informing their practice – and in turn enriching their adopted environment, and therefore the cultural lives of their new society.
10. Ai Weiwei
Artist and Activist Ai Weiwei was born in Beijing in 1957, and his childhood was not an easy one – his father, the poet Ai Qing, was persecuted by the Chinese Communist government and exiled to a far Western province. After the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, Ai Qing was hailed as a great national poet. Ai moved to New York in 1981 to study visual art and discovered Marcel Duchamp’s “readymades”, found objects of everyday use that Duchamp elevated to the status of artistic objects, later incorporating the concept of readymades into his own artistic practice, which critiqued our cultural value systems.
9. Piet Mondrian
In September 1938, Mondrian left Paris in the face of advancing fascism and moved to London. After the Netherlands were invaded and Paris fell in 1940. Mondrian left London for Manhattan, where he would remain until his death.
8. Marc Chagall
The American Vice-Consul in Marseilles ran a rescue operation to smuggle artists and intellectuals out of Europe to the US during occupation by the Nazis in World War II; they did this by providing them with forged visas to the US. Chagall was one of over 2,000 who was rescued by this operation. The artist left France in May 1941, almost too late. Carl Van Vechten Public domain CC Marc Chagall 1941.
7. Camille Pissarro
The artist was a French-Jewish refugee. After the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, having only Danish nationality and being unable to join the army, Pissarro moved his family to Norwood, then a village on the edge of London. However, his style of painting, which was a forerunner of what was later called “Impressionism”, did not do well. He wrote to his friend, Theodore Duret, that “my painting doesn’t catch on, not at all …”
6. Max Beckmann
5. Salvador Dali
Public domain
In 1940, as World War II decimated Europe, Dalí and his wife Gala retreated to the United States, where they lived for eight years. They were able to escape because on June 20, 1940, they were issued visas by Aristides de Sousa Mendes, Portuguese consul in Bordeaux, France.
4. Wassily Kandinsky
Anonymous Public domain
Kandinsky was born in Moscow and spent his childhood in Odessa. In 1896 Kandinsky settled in Munich, studying first at Anton Ažbe’s private school and then at the Academy of Fine Arts. He returned to Moscow in 1914, after the outbreak of World War I. Kandinsky was unsympathetic to the official theories on art in Communist Moscow, and returned to Germany in 1921.
3. Lucian Freud
Born in Berlin, Freud was the son of a German Jewish mother, Lucie (née Brasch), and an Austrian Jewish father, Ernst L. Freud, an architect. The artist was a grandson of Sigmund Freud, and elder brother of the broadcaster, writer and politician Clement Freud. He moved with his family to St John’s Wood, London, in 1933 to escape the rise of Nazism. Freud became a British subject in 1939.
2. Mona Hatoum
The artist is a Palestinian-Lebanese refugee. During a visit to London in 1975, civil war broke out in Lebanon and Hatoum was forced into exile. She stayed in London, training at both the Byam Shaw School of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art (University College, London) between the years 1975 and 1981.
1. Max Ernst
In September 1939, the outbreak of World War II resulted in Ernst being interned as an “undesirable foreigner” in Camp des Milles, near Aix-en-Provence. Thanks to the intercession of Paul Éluard and other friends, including the journalist Varian Fry, the artist was released a few weeks later. Soon after the German occupation of France, Ernst was arrested again, this time by the Gestapo, but managed to escape and flee to America with the help of Peggy Guggenheim.