Migration and Displacement

INTRO: Collage of sound from archival radio and sound effects, suggestive of the Second World War and immigration. I’m working on this and will send for a listen.

 

NARRATOR: Hi, welcome to LACMA. This audio tour in our modern art galleries is about  migration and displacement in 20th century art.  

It begins in the first of our modern art galleries on the third floor of the BCAM building. If you aren’t there already, pause until you get there.

 

Ready? Let me tell you a little bit about our theme.

 

The story of modern European art, with its bold moves away from tradition, toward abstraction and experimentation, depends on mobility across borders: artists seeing one another’s work, finding ways to come together and collaborate. Trains, ships, then planes all made it possible as never before for 20th-century artists to move freely among major art centers. Then again, by the same token, politics and war sometimes made it completely impossible for them to move freely. The lives of these artists were interrupted, sometimes more than once, by war and persecution. Themes of emigration and immigration, the need to adapt, survive, and start over, have everything to do with the cross-pollination of ideas and influences in modern art. 

 

This is not a comprehensive overview of the collection. One of the mistakes museums have made in the past is to offer a totalizing narrative, without acknowledging the gaps and idiosyncrasies of a collection. Our aim is simply to invite you into a conversation about displacement and migration, in the context of modern art. 

 

As you enter the first gallery, look at the wall to your right. Near the corner of the room, find the painting of two figures in a dark bar.  It’s by Max Beckmann.

 

Perhaps no other painting in our collection better captures the experience of the refugee than this one. The artist’s wife, Quappi, sits with a friend who sheltered the couple in his home in Amsterdam after they fled Nazi Germany. A silhouette that looks like the artist himself appears behind them.

 

Beckmann had been teaching at the art school in Frankfurt when the Nazi government denounced him as a cultural Bolshevik and fired him. Then things went from bad to worse. In 1937, Hitler opened an exhibition of art that he labeled “degenerate”--artwork by artists whose lives the regime set out to destroy. Beckmann’s work was included. He and Quappi fled to Amsterdam that same year.

 

In Amsterdam, they joined tens of thousands of other Germans displaced by the Nazis. In fact, if you are familiar with the story of Anne Frank, she was among those hiding in Amsterdam. Beckmann, whose work had once hung in German museums, could not just carry on working in his new temporary home. As the war dragged on, it became harder and harder to get art supplies, and to make and sell paintings. By the time these three friends took refuge in this dark bar, the Allied liberation was underway. It was not the overnight relief that we might like to think it was. There is a sense of fear and exhaustion in the painting that surely reflects the feelings that must have haunted them as they waited out the war.

 

Louise Lawrence-Israels is a Holocaust survivor who was a young child in Amsterdam at the time this painting was made. She describes the atmosphere there in 1944:

 

LOUISE LAWRENCE-ISRAELS: 

18:21 Food was very scarce. We were very often hungry…for all the Dutch people. The occupying Nazis and the collaborators took all the good stuff. The occupying Nazis took the good stuff and sent it to their families in Germany and the collaborators feasted on it. There were rations for everybody.

27:22 There were bombers flying over Holland. And stray bombs that fell off. We had air raid alarms telling you that a bomber was approaching. We had a routine. The air raid alarm sounds, my brother and I holding onto each other for dear life would walk to the door, my father would open the door, check the stairwell, and we would sit on top of the stairs. My mom would have an emergency blanket…And then the all clear alarm would sound…That happened sometimes 15, 20 times day and night.  

34:08 It was actually difficult for all Dutch people. Because we had nothing. The whole country had been raided. There was nothing in the stores. There was absolutely nothing. We had to rebuild.

 

NARRATOR: Beckmann realized after the war that he could never return to Germany. Post-war Germany was not a place where he could regain what he had lost. He spent the last few years of his life teaching in the United States, as did many of his contemporaries. His students recalled that he would tell them to simplify, to be bold in their use of color, and to make their work personal. Like so many other emigrant artists, he made a profound mark on the development of American art.

 

Now, pass through the doorway next to the Beckmann painting.  The next gallery has an enormous platform with a grouping of sculptures. On the wall to the right, you’ll see a large painting of a reclining woman. It is painted in richly colored planes, almost like stained glass. Let’s look at it more closely. This painting and  two others nearby are by Lyonel Feininger. 

 

LAZAROF  ROOM

Lyonel Feininger, Sleeping Woman – Julia 1913

 

Lyonel Feininger, Arcueil I

 

Lyonel Feininger, Village in Thuringia

 

NARRATOR: Feininger painted mostly semi-abstract scenes of the architecture of cities and towns. But here we also have an extraordinary portrait of his wife, Julia. 

 

Try to imagine yourself in the shoes of the artist as I tell you about his life: 

 

Imagine you were born in New York at the end of the 1800s. Both your parents are musicians and they encourage your creativity. Your father is German, and at sixteen, with his encouragement,  you move to Germany to study art. You have a successful start as a cartoonist. You’re really talented and restless, and by your mid-thirties, you are working as a painter, taking part in experimental artist collectives. You meet and fall in love with Julia, your second wife, and have two sons. Shortly after your sons are born, you make this painting of Julia sleeping. It captures her beautiful profile, the delicate bone structure of her face. The flattened planes of the picture, the vivid and emotive use of color capture the experimental energy of young European artists at the forefront of modern art. As you progress through middle age and into maturity, you become a renowned teacher at the Bauhaus museum of art and architecture. Your paintings hang in museums. 

 

But Julia is Jewish, and despite your comfort and success, tension is all around you. Nazi storm troopers come to your house, asking questions. Then your paintings are confiscated from museums, the very museums that used to celebrate you. Then they close the school where you teach. Worse fates befall some of your friends. It is time to go, But where will you go? You’ve been here for nearly fifty years. You feel that returning to the U.S. after building a life in Germany will be a kind of spiritual death. and still, you see that you have no choice.

 

It’s easy to forget the difficulty and drama that the artists in these galleries survived when we see them in such polished circumstances today. But the dilemma that faced Feininger is exactly the kind of dilemma that faced so many German and European artists in the early and mid twentieth century. Maybe we imagine that, offended by the Nazis, they simply packed up and left. Or that the disruption was temporary. But it was not. It destroyed lives, it drove people into hiding, and it ended people’s careers. 

 

Feininger was one of the lucky ones. When he and Julia moved to New York in 1937, in a way, he was returning home. He spoke English, he knew the city, he had family. But in his heart he felt German, and he remained an important part of a subculture of  exiles from Europe who made their mark on art, architecture and academia in the United States. 

 

Pass through the doorway on the far side of the large sculpture platform and enter the next gallery up ahead. It’s the one with several sculptures of a woman’s head, all in a line. As you enter, look to your immediate left. On the wall just next to the doorway through which you entered, you’ll see a portrait of a man by Miki Hayakawa. To its right, you’ll see a colorful semi-abstract painting by Yun Gee. 

 

MODERN ART I GALLERY

Yun Gee, Artist Studio and Miki Hayakawa, Portrait of a Negro

 

We’re taking a big leap here, to California. Both of these paintings were made by immigrants to the west coast of the United States in the early 20th century. Miki Hayakawa has painted a portrait of a man in a blue suit, with lively eyes, as if he is about to say something. Notice the simplified background, with it’s swathe of a red backdrop, and the broad brushstrokes that make up the face and the hands, deftly communicating light and shadow. During the twenties, American artists embraced realism, capturing the personalities of American cities as they grew and changed rapidly. Hayakawa, perhaps responding to her own experience with anti-Asian policies at the time, tended to paint portraits of ethnically diverse subjects.  

 

To the right, in Yun Gee’s painting called Artist Studio, you see Miki Hayakawa at work on the portrait. The two artists knew one another, as they had studied at the same art school in San Francisco in the 1920s. Gee came from China, Hayakawa from Japan. Gee paints in a vividly colorful semi-abstract style reflective of European modernism.

 

Neither Hayakawa nor Gee escaped American racism. Gee spent some time in Paris, and realized upon his return that, as he said, he would always be seen as, quote, “an oriental from Chinatown” in this country. Eventually , he relocated to Paris, where he said that he experienced a kindness and inclusion that had not been extended in the US. Hayakawa’s career was interrupted when she was detained during the second World War in relocation camps for Japanese Americans. Nevertheless, she continued to exhibit her work, even during her daunting experience of xenophobia and incarceration. 

 

So many of the artists in these galleries were subject to social and political forces beyond their control. The story of modern European and American art when it is told this way can be unsettling, upsetting. Emigration, incarceration, even just a sudden reversal of fortune are the stuff of nightmares. Yet in these stories of perseverance, and regeneration, we see some of the roots of modern art. And, in remembering what these artists went through to persist in their work, we honor them as models of creative resilience.

 

Now, turn facing the other side of the room. Toward the left, find a painting of soldiers, with a red background. 

 

Mikhail Larionov, Dancing Soldiers

 

Natalia Sergeyevna Goncharova

 

NARRATOR: We’re back in Europe here, looking at the work of an artist, Mikhail Larionov, who spent time as a soldier in Russia after finishing art school. The experience shows up in pictures not of battle, but of down time back at camp, often painted in a style drawn from Russian folk art. Two soldiers play cards while another plays the accordion. Larionov thought that Russian artists should ignore the trends in Western European art and seek out a style grounded in Russian history. Ironic, then, that five years later, he and his partner, Natalia Goncharova would leave Russia for Paris and never return, establishing themselves in a cosmopolitan community of artists who gathered there to make and share their work. 

 

Just to the left, you’ll see Goncharova’s painting of a figure on a red horse. She and Larionov were life partners in every way. Goncharva’s paintings, like this one, fuse modern art as she encountered it in Paris with traditional Russian religious iconography. She and Larionov set out to live an unconventional life, making unconventional art that introduced their love of Russian culture to a world audience. 

 

In this gallery, we have work by artists who came together in Paris from all over Europe and beyond. Bringing their work back together here in Los Angeles took some strategy and some luck.  Stephanie Barron.

 

NARRATOR: Museum collections do not just arrive, of a piece. As curators, when we want to build the collection as we have done here at LACMA over the past half century, one strategy we employ is to mount major exhibitions. Then we try to acquire a work from the exhibition. In 1980, Maurice Tuchman and I organized an exhibition titled The Avant-Garde in Russia. Think about the 1980s. It was the height of the Cold War. I was a young curator, and this was my first major exhibition. But getting loans of Russian art was hard work at that time!  The Soviet Union considered avant garde abstract art worth showing and kept everything they had in their museum basements!  There were a few works in the exhibition that I hoped to acquire for LACMA. We were a young museum then, with significant gaps in our collection of modern art. This painting by Mikhail Larionov was something I hoped would find a permanent home here.  When we succeeded in acquiring it, this painting and a few others that were in that show helped form the basis of our holdings in works by the Russian avant garde. Today, that is something that distinguishes LACMA. 

 

Relations with Russia were frosty. 

 

21:40 After that exhibition we were able to acquire the Goncharova…To have these examples in our collection is pretty special…These are artists who learned a lot from what was going on in Paris….Much of it was politically engaged. It was also a kind of reductivist painting, works on paper, poetry, literature, sound poems. This was a really breakthrough time in the development of 20th century art.

 

NARRATOR: Now, turn to the right. Enter the gallery with the video monitors. It marks a transition in our collection, to art made after 1950—and to a story of migration and displacement that is voluntary, rather than forced. 

 

You can’t miss the very large landscape here by David Hockney. 

 

David Hockney, Mulholland Drive

 

HOCKNEY: I knew there was a big wide world somewhere else, and frankly, I was going to go there.”
 

NARRATOR:    Not every story of emigration and arrival is tragic, and not every artist arrived in the United States reluctantly. David Hockney was born in the late 1930s in England, and when he landed in Los Angeles as a young man, he was euphoric. 

DAVID HOCKNEY IN THE NOW 1:10 And I went to live in California when I was 26. 
 

1:49 It was sunny and sex. Sexy! People have more joy in the sun…you make the lines dance and flow. 

 

NARRATOR: This painting is here as a transition, a relief, a moment of spiritual lightness after our conversation about war and displacement. But it also exemplifies the experience of the European artist, arriving, willingly in this case, on the west coast, and finding freedom here. The light, the landscape, the mix of cultures all contributed to artists from all over the world finding literal and psychic space in California to pursue their work. 

 

NARRATOR: Head into the next gallery. Directly ahead of you and to the right, you’ll see a chair.

 

Josef Albers, Butaque Chair for Black Mountain College
 

NARRATOR: No other object in these galleries better represents the extraordinary intersection of cultural influences brought about by war and displacement in the 20th century than this chair. The form of the chair, called a butaque, originates in Mexico—it has roots in both indigenous ritual seating and traditional Spanish folding chairs. But this modern version of the butaque came about because of a collaboration between two great twentieth century designers, both of them in exile. 

 

Clara Porset was a Cuban designer who hoped to study at the famous Bauhaus school in Germany. When she sought admission, she was advised that the rise of the Nazis threatened the future of the school, and encouraged instead to seek out Josef Albers, an influential Bauhaus teacher who had just left for the United States. He was teaching at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, and Porset studied with him there. But when she was ready to resume her career at home in Cuba, her outspoken criticism of the government made that impossible. She went to Mexico, instead, and became a famous designer, who reinvented the butaque chair, among other notable designs. Josef Albers and his wife, artist Anni Albers (who also taught at Black Mountain College), visited Porset in Mexico many times. After one of these trips, Josef Albers designed the  butaque chair that you see here for the student dormitories at Black Mountain College, drawing heavily on Porset’s version. 

 

This butaque chair that could not have come about except through the intersection of two designers, one Cuban, one German, in the hills of North Carolina, and their subsequent encounters in Mexico, all of it the result of political forces beyond their control.

 

NARRATOR: Now, turn to the left. Look toward the doorway to the next gallery. You’ll see a large dark painting just next to the doorway. It is by Wifredo Lam. 

 

Wifredo Lam, Tropic (Trópico)

 

NARRATOR: Try to discern what, in these forms, is human, what is animal or vegetal, and what is machine. As in so many of Lam’s paintings, doing so is impossible. His work is full of semi-abstracted, densely layered hybrid forms. If you saw our earlier gallery of paintings by Picasso, the similarity in modern aesthetics is unmistakable. But Lam found his own artistic style by incorporating influences from Afro-Cuban culture, as he has done here. For example, notice in this painting the horse-like heads that appear like masks, like the one near the center right. Like some of his European contemporaries, Lam would have seen African masks in an ethnographic museum or in the pages of a magazine. But he also grew up around people practicing Santería, a religion that mixes West African Yoruba rituals and aspects of Spanish Catholicism. 

Lam was born in Cuba; his mother was the daughter of a formerly enslaved Congolese woman and a mixed-race Cuban man, and his father had immigrated from China. In 1923, Lam moved to Europe to study art when he was just 21. He stayed, establishing his career in Spain, and later Paris, where he befriended Picasso. 

When the Nazis invaded Paris, Lam, like so many others, had to flee. He ended up back in Cuba in 1942, after being away for eighteen years. Upon arriving home, Lam set out to develop a unique visual vocabulary, which drew on European modernism yet foregrounded his own cultural roots. He once said, “Africa has not only been dispossessed of many of its people, but also of its historical consciousness … I have tried to relocate Black cultural objects in terms of their own landscape and in relation to their own world. My painting is an act of decolonization not in a physical sense, but in a mental one.”

Enter the next gallery. On the far side of the gallery, look for a wire sculpture by Ruth Asawa. Feel free to pause this tour until you get there.

 

Ruth Asawa, Untitled 

 

NARRATOR: Ready to continue? You should be standing near the hanging wire sculpture by Ruth Asawa. 

 

Asawa studied at Black Mountain College with Josef Albers. In a 1978 interview, Asawa talked about Black Mountain and how Albers encouraged her to be led by her material. 

 

RUTH ASAWA:22 Black Mountain really influenced my whole approach…He was talking about abstracting from the material. Rather than being concerned that your  own design ideas forcing something into it, you become background, just like the parent allows the child to express himself and the parent becomes supportive. 

 

NARRATOR: Asawa also studied with Buckminster Fuller, popularly known as “Bucky,” at Black Mountain College. 

 

RUTH ASAWA: 2:14 The thing that really impressed me most about both Bucky and Albers is that they were only interested in ideas that didn’t have a shape yet. 

 

Black Mountain was an experimental college that became a legendary birthplace for modern art, architecture and design. It was a magnet for artists, designers and intellectuals who had fled Nazi Germany. Asawa must have felt some affinity for her teachers who had been displaced by war and racism. As a girl, she and her family had been forced to enter a Japanese internment camp after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Her father was a vegetable farmer. The FBI arrested him and sent him to a camp in New Mexico. Ruth and the rest of the family didn’t see him for nearly two years. because they were sent to a camp at the Santa Anita racetrack, where they lived in two horse stalls. Later, she was moved to a relocation camp in Arkansas. It was in the camps that she learned to make art. 

 

NARRATOR: Now, enter the next room. Turn to the right. In the far corner, look for a huge comb. It’s leaning against the wall. Vija Celmins made this sculpture here in Los Angeles after graduating from UCLA. 

 

Vija Celmins, Untitled (Comb)

 

NARRATOR: This huge comb has a comforting quality, and a definite sense of humor. Celmins says that it is just about exactly the same height as her former husband. The comb is also visually identical to one that appears in a famous René Magritte painting that she loves. 

 

Celmins is best known for her paintings and prints, which she began making in her Venice Beach studio in the 1960s. She began her practice by painting everyday objects in shades of grey: her television, her space heater, a lamp. She was born during the Second World War, in Latvia, where Germany and Russia were battling for control. After spending two years in a refugee camp in Germany, Celmins and her family resettled in Indiana. When they arrived in the midwest, they had nothing and spoke no English. Celmins has said that when she was a child, making art made her feel as if she could possess the objects that she depicted. She used drawing to communicate while she struggled to learn the language. Celmins later recalled that as a child, her biggest fear was losing hold of her mother’s hand and never seeing her again. She said, quote, “My own experience, from which I probably have functioned and which gave a kind of an emotional tone to my whole life, was one of fear and trauma and I always thought I was going to get caught and put in a camp, in a jail. Millions of people experienced this. ”

 

For so many in the U.S., identity is a complex equation, and artists are no different. Disjunctions in narrative, fragments of memory, a tension between where one came from and where one is now, culturally speaking, all show up in the works in these galleries. 

 

Now turn around. There’s a narrow side gallery along one edge of this room. Head towards it. As you move through the gallery, you can’t help but notice the large painting of explosive forms that takes up a full wall. It was inspired by the 1965 rebellion in Watts, an event that shook Los Angeles and brought global attention to the trauma of American racism.  

 

For Black American artists, questions of hybrid identity and ruptures with the past are particularly searing. Slavery and its aftermath have involved extraordinarily violent forms of displacement.  In this gallery, artists such as Melvin Edwards, Daniel LaRue Johnson, John Outterbridge, John T. Riddle, Jr., and Betye Saar, among others, are part of a dialogue about geographic and spiritual dislocation.

 

As you enter the side gallery, look for a small steel sculpture hanging on the wall, with a padlock. This is the work of Melvin Edwards, who came to LA from Houston to study art, first at City College, then at USC.  He learned to weld, and began making sculptures like this one that reference bondage, American industry, and the abstract forms of African masks. This work is part of a series called Lynch Fragments. The sculptures that comprise the series incorporate nails, spikes, blades, chains -- elements that function ambiguously, as tools that can be used to build or to destroy, depending on who holds them and for what purpose.  

 

Nearby, to the right, you’ll see a leather pouch on the wall with fringe, by Los Angeles artist Betye Saar. Saar’s work is made up of objects she finds by scouring flea markets, thrift stores, and other troves. In a sense, the objects themselves have been displaced, divorced from their original context, left behind in a sea of people on the move. The leather pouch references Native American leatherwork and medicine pouches. In fact, inside the bag is a smaller pouch in which Saar has placed a bone, the mojo referenced in the title of the work, Mojo Bag #1 Hand. The hand with an eye pictured on the bag comes from the hamsa, an amulet found in North Africa and the Middle East that represents protection, blessings, or good fortune. 

 

Saar’s work hints at what she has called “the beginning before the beginning”-- the distant past, an origin real and imagined, an idea that is particularly poignant for people living in diaspora. In one way or another, that experience, of leaving one’s original home, often involuntarily, and arriving in a foreign land is what recurs in all of the work we’ve seen on our tour today. 

 

This is the end of this tour. Thank you for being part of this conversation about migration, displacement, resilience, and modern art.  For other tours in this series, go to lacma.org/moderntours