Exiles, Migrations and Orientalism

The exhibition Exiles, reminiscences and new worlds currently being held at the Chagall, Léger and Picasso museums in the south of France is based on the following premise: "The twentieth century has seen increasing numbers of people living in exile, in a world in which the movement of people has accelerated at a fast pace, not only in line with trends, but also because of tragic episodes of poverty, wars and totalitarianism. Whether or not it was their choice to leave their country, these artists, although uprooted, did not give up their creative work. Indeed, in many cases their work bears the hallmark of a former world charged with meaning and feelings, unforgettable. For these artists, the return to the past - embarked upon from a sense of loss and in a mood of reminiscence - was in fact a necessary transition in the way forward to new experiences in form."

Similarly, Migrations: Journeys into British Art explored British art through the theme of migration from 1500 to the present day, reflecting the remit of Tate Britain Collection displays. Over 500 years, developments in transport, new artistic institutions, politics and economics have all contributed to artists choosing to settle temporarily or permanently in Britain. From the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Flemish and Dutch landscape and still-life painters who came to Britain in search of new patrons, through moments of political and religious unrest, to Britain’s current position within the global landscape, the exhibition revealed how British art has been fundamentally shaped by successive waves of migration, raising questions about the formation of a national collection of British art against a continually shifting demographic.

Within this, in the early 20th century different definitions of Jewish art were explored through two influential exhibitions. The first emphasised Jewish artists’ contributions to mainstream British art and the second showed a distinctive identity for Jewish art by aligning it with modernism and the avant-garde. Then in the 1930s and 1940s European artists fled to Britain to escape political unrest and persecution on the continent, strengthening existing links with avant-garde British groups and bringing with them modernist principles of art and design. Here they discovered new materials and responded to different visual traditions as well as to the conditions of exile. Important figures who marked the course of British Art included Piet Mondrian, Naum Gabo and Laszlo Maholy-Nagy, who sought refuge in Britain whilst escaping political unrest and war in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s.
Exile was a founding experience for Chagall and Picasso, who set off for the fascinating city of Paris in the early 20th century and it spurred Léger to new heights in the United States after the Second World War. The Exiles exhibition centres on these three figures, aiming to show how exile inspired many artists, particularly in the first part of the 20th century. Their migration, voluntary or forced but never indifferent, transformed their vision and profoundly altered their art. The exhibition shows how their works were affected by the abandonment of their homeland and their investment in a new country.

The musée Chagall presents some of Chagall’s reminiscent works, which hark back to his origins, alongside artists whose experience of exile was not unlike his own: Brancusi, Brauner, Kandinsky, Masson, Miró, Hantaï or Picasso. The musée Léger centres on Léger as a builder of new worlds, overcoming the past to look into the future, accompanied by artists with a similar frame of mind: Arp, Magnelli, Mondrian, Freundlich, Laslo Moholy-Nagy, Albers and Schwitters. Exile was initially a founding experience for Chagall as he set off for Paris in the early 20th century before returning to Russia to marry. Following the Russian Revolution exile became a more permanent experience as he felt forced to leave once again returning initially to Paris but then being exiled to the US as a result of World War II before making his home finally in the South of France.

The exhibition argues that these are artists whose experience of exile, like that of Chagall, remained linked to a tireless search for the past. Yet the works shown do not always seem to bear out that contention as, in composition - primarily the then contemporary styles of abstraction (Kandinsky, Léger, Hantaï etc.) and surrealism (Brauner, Ernst, Lam etc.) - and content, they seem primarily focused on their present. So, Andre Masson’s La Resistance was a contemporary encouragement from exile to those participating in the Resistance while Wols and Jean Hélion focused on close-up’s of contemporary everyday objects and Brauner wrote of letting yourself ‘go forward towards a contemplation of the unknown experience’ because there ‘you find the keys to your eternal doubting.’

Generally, those artists featured here seem to have found that their style of creating fitted their experience of exile and often, as in the Artists in Exile show organised by Pierre Matisse in New York in 1942 (of which Chagall was a part) being feted for doing so. Only in more straitened circumstances, such as Kurt Schwitters painting landscapes of the Lake District for economic reasons during exile in the UK, do we see, in this exhibition, artists changing styles as a result of exile.

An exhibition on a related theme - The Jews in Orientalism - recently ended at the Musée d'art et d'histoire du Judaïsme in Paris. Where Migrations explored the impact of exiles on national art and Exiles the impact of migration on artist's themselves, The Jews in Orientalism explored the world of Orientalist painting, focussing on the representation of the Jew as “Oriental” in art from 1832 to 1929, in other words perceptions of a migrant group from those who view themselves as other than the group themselves.
Orientalism, the study of the East and its various cultures, is a conflicted discipline where arguments rage about the cultural agendas underpinning the various approaches used in its study. Accusations of Eurocentrism and colonialism, differences between the familiar and the strange, and the extent to which Islam and Judaism are under discussion are just some of the areas of debate. For some, Orientalism is based on the Christian West's attempts to understand and manage its relations with both of its monotheistic Others - Muslims and Jews.

The Jews in Orientalism was not therefore simply an exhibition exploring the world of Orientalist painting from 1832 to 1929 but also a contribution by its curators to these debates through their focus on the representation of the Jew as “Oriental.” Historically, the exhibition demonstrates the extent to which Jews have almost always been present whenever occidentals talked about or imagined the East.

Artists like Eugène Delacroix in Morocco and Théodore Chassériau in Algeria filled their notebooks with sketches of Jewish figures, using them later in large pictures such as Delacroix’s pioneering Jewish Wedding in Morocco (1841). As a Romantic artist fascinated with the exotic, Delacroix was restless for adventure and was excited by the opportunity which opened to him when he was asked by Ambassador Charles de Mornay to join a goodwill mission to Morocco's Sultan Moulay Abd al-Rahman. Delacroix filled seven notebooks with drawings, watercolours and notes on the people, architecture and accoutrements of Moroccan life in order to ensure that details of costume and demeanour were as accurate as could be.

This sense of ‘truth to nature’ motivated many of the artists who travelled to the Orient, in part because their involvement in such journeys was often, as with Delacroix, in the role of official artist documenting such missions. For William Holman Hunt though ‘truth to nature’ was already a key element of the symbolic hyper-realism that was Pre-Raphaelitism.

In order to ensure that he represented “all objects exactly as they would appear in nature” (Ruskin), Hunt travelled to the Holy Land where he developed what he acknowledged to be an “Oriental mania” that resulted in paintings such as The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple (from his first trip in 1854-5). The Manchester Guardian marvelled at Hunt’s scholarship and skill: ‘No picture of such extraordinary elaboration has been seen in our day… Draperies, architecture, heads and hands, are wrought to a point of complete imitative finish… this picture is replete with meaning, from the foreground to the remotest distance.” For a later engraving of the picture Hunt produced an explanation of 29 symbolic details in the image.

However, in doing so, Hunt, like others at the time, believed that the contemporary Orient would reveal what the Orient had always been and, as a result, it can be argued that in much Oriental Christian art, most Israelites are actually depicted as though they were Muslims. The reverse occurred in the work of Maurycy Gottlieb whose Christ before His Judges (1877–1879) is included here and who created two significant canvases where Jesus' shroud is a Jewish prayer shawl, the talith. In Gottlieb’s work we see then, for the first time, a genuinely Jewish Jesus.  

At the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem artists strove “to create a synthesis between European artistic traditions and the Jewish design traditions of the East and West, and to integrate it with the local culture of the Land of Israel.” Artists such as Abel Pann, Ephraim Moses Lilien and Zeev Raban created a style of Oriental arabesques, Jugendstil flowing lines and decorative flatness that, as Haim Finkelstein and Haim Maor have noted, combined biblical motifs, often in a Zionist perspective, and landscapes done in an idealist-utopian and Orientalist spirit.

It is arguable, however, that this synthesis was more independently and powerfully achieved by Lesser Ury. Martin Buber considered that Ury lived “the old sacred flame of the Orient, the hot breath, which washes over the rough earth, the gigantic figures of elemental creatures before the grand background of an immeasurable expanse.” In a letter Buber sent to Ury, he described his vision of a Jewish artist. "… who independently of outside formulas and commandments found his way through the wilderness, who has nothing in common with schools and cliques and who is led only by the laws of his own being, who was hard as metal to all external solutions, and whose art was soft and flexible as wax under the hand of the angel. Only from such an artist…can we learn that the Jewish spirit, the old turmoil over pictures is reborn to a second youth and incorporated in paintings."

Ury’s images of Jeremiah, Moses and Jewish exiles included in this exhibition amply bear out the contention that, in this letter, Buber was actually describing his appreciation of Ury and his work. By ending with the Bezalel Academy and Ury, more than simply demonstrating the extent to which Jews have almost always been present whenever occidentals imagined the East, the exhibition also reveals the ability of Jewish artists to re-embrace an oriental Jewish identity by establishing a continuity between Biblical Antiquity and the contemporary Middle East.

Fresh light is also cast on the biblical paintings of artists such as Moreau, Vernet, Tissot and Holman Hunt through this exhibition. While this focus supports the argument made by Ivan Davidson Kalmar and Derek J. Penslar that one benefit of studying the Jews as a topic in orientalism involves discovery of the extent to which orientalism has been not only a modern Western or imperialist discourse but also a Christian one, it is also possible that, in doing so, the exhibition does not adequately address the extent to which orientalism has been, in the view of Edward Said, a political vision of reality whose structure promoted the difference between the familiar (Europe, the West, ‘us’) and the strange (the Orient, the East, ‘them’).

Chagall’s work can also be understood as exploring Jewish identity by establishing a continuity between Biblical Antiquity and his contemporary experience of exile as, through his Message Biblique and other similar paintings, he engages with his Jewish heritage from the Exodus through the Pogroms to the Holocaust. Thereby, linking past and present together in experience and understanding. In Chagall’s work exodus and exile are the normal state of the Jewish people and the source of their joys, sorrows, inspirations and insights.

Surprisingly, his key symbol of faith in exile is that of the crucified Christ who featuring centrally or tangentially in numerous of the works shown here. Always visually and accurately a Jewish Christ, nevertheless Chagall uses this image in ways that have real synergy with Christian theology. In ‘The Sacrifice of Isaac’, for example, the crucified Christ appears above Isaac as the future sacrificial son. Christ becomes the embodiment in Chagall’s work of Israel as the suffering servant; an understanding which culminates in the ‘Exodus’ of 1952 - 1966 where the crucified Christ embraces both the Jews of the Exodus and of the Holocaust.

In these paintings past and present cohere allowing an experience of exile, where personal sorrow is set within a narrative of ongoing faith, to be experienced and felt, revealing exile as pilgrimage.

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