In the early 1950s, heiress Mary Jayne Gold wrote a tender tribute to her friend and colleague Varian Fry. She described the journalist there as a preppi, an ornithologist, a specialist in the classics who read Greek and Latin poetry to relax – in other words, in his habits and behavior, he “hardly suggested the daredevil “. And yet it was Fry, also a “creature of contrasts”, who helped smuggle nearly 2,000 refugees, including a group of artists and intellectuals, from Nazi-occupied France between 1940 and 1941.
Fry’s Extraordinary Efforts Form the Backbone of Netflix’s New Limited Series Transatlantichimself an adaptation of Julie Orringer The flight portfolio, a 2019 novel based on Fry’s life. Regardless of the dramatization, the series, which stars Cory Michael Smith as Fry, serves us with a factual framework.
Over a period of 13 months, Fry and a motley crew of volunteers, including Gold, helped Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, André Breton and his wife Jacqueline Lamba, along with other Jewish and anti-Nazi refugees, flee Marseille. . It was a job that involved housing refugees, obtaining their exit visas and plotting unorthodox routes out of France, all under the auspices of the Emergency Relief Committee (ERC).
Cory Michael Smith as Varian Fry in Transatlantic. Photo: Anika Molnar, courtesy of Netflix.
The organization was established in 1940 by some 200 political leaders and intellectuals and was the American counterpart to the Europe-based International Relief Association (IRA) headed by Albert Einstein. A founding member of the ERC, Fry was sent to Marseilles with $3,000 and a list of around 200 intellectual and artistic figures to rescue – a number he soon discovered was a staggering underestimate.
To this existing drama, transatlantic has chose to inject additional (and, frankly, unnecessary) romantic intrigue, of which there is no historical record. But there is ample documentation of the group’s valiant attempts to rescue European artists and how the ERC’s work reshaped artistic heritage. Here are the facts behind Transatlanticit is fiction.
Was there really a surreal party in the middle of this rescue mission?
Lucas Englander as Albert Hirschmann, Cory Michael Smith as Varian Fry and Gillian Jacobs as Mary Jayne Gold in Transatlantic. Photo: Anika Molnar, courtesy of Netflix.
Yes, and apparently many more. The third episode of Transatlantic introduces us to the lively animations of Villa Air-Bel, the 18-room castle outside Marseille that served as a refuge for ERC refugees. From 1940 to 1941, legendary names such as Marcel Duchamp, Breton, Chagall and Ernst passed through its halls – and these artists celebrated, in their own way.
Ernst arrived, having survived a series of detention camps, wearing a white sheepskin coat and a roll of his paintings, sticking them in the villa’s living room as a kind of makeshift exhibition . Breton, on the first day, arrived carrying a bottle of living praying mantises, which he spread out on the dining-room table as one would a vase of flowers.
Breton’s stay, in particular, attracted the visit of other surrealists. As Fry recalled in his memoirs Discount on requestSunday afternoons at the villa saw regular unrestricted visits to Spanish surrealist Oscar Dominguez, poet Benjamin Péret, one-eyed painter Victor Brauner and Cuban artist Wilfredo Lam, one of Picasso’s very few pupils.
“Next, Breton would pull out his collection of old magazines, colored paper, pastel chalk, scissors and pots of paste, and everyone would make montages, draw or cut out paper dolls,” Fry wrote. “At the end of the evening, André was deciding who had done the best job, crying, ‘Formidable!’ ‘Sensational!’ Or ‘Impossible!” with each drawing.
What was Peggy Guggenheim doing there?
Art collector Peggy Guggenheim poses with paintings at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Oct. 22, 1942. (AP Photo.)
Although it is not known if Ernst threw himself a birthday party at Villa Air-Bel, as shown Transatlantiche meets Peggy Guggenheim during his stay at the castle.
The collector had been on a buying spree in Paris, where fleeing Jewish artists and dealers rushed to unload their collections before the Nazis arrived. She bought ‘one photo a day’, she wrote in her 1987 memoir out of this centurycollecting works by Man Ray, Giacometti, Dalí, Tanguy and Brancusi (from a tearful Brancusi himself) even as German bombs hit the suburbs.
Guggenheim found himself in Marseilles and visited Villa Air-Bel in the spring of 1941, wearing earrings that were “long crescents from the ends of which hung tiny framed pictures of Max Ernst,” according to Fry. It will finance the transatlantic crossings, among others, of the Bretons, Chagalls, André Masson, Jacques Lipchitz, and yes, Ernst. For $2,000, including shipping, she also acquired several works by Ernst.
Ernst arrived in New York in July 1941, and he and Guggenheim were married later that year.
Why did Marc Chagall take so long to leave?
Marc Chagall in New York in the 1950s. Photo: Bettmann / Contributor
The modernist, as portrayed in the latest episode of Transatlantic, needed convincing before he and his family decided to leave France for the United States. He had become a naturalized French citizen in 1937, and the “rich greenery” of the French countryside, he wrote, turned out to be “advantageous…to me in an artistic sense”. Fry also wrote of the “serious responsibility of uprooting and transplanting a great artist”.
However, the implementation of the anti-Jewish laws eventually disgusted Chagall enough to propel his departure. And there was another factor. During one of their last meetings in Marseilles, the artist asks Fry an anxious question: “Are there cows in America?”
“When I said yes, there was,” Fry recounted, “I could see from the look of relief on his face that he had already decided to leave.”
Chagall would settle in New York until 1947. Fry reported that he was “very pleased with American trees and American cows, and finds Connecticut as good for painting as the South of France”.
What happened after the events of Transatlantic?
Jacques Lipchitz, Untitled (1965) from ‘Flight Portfolio’, published in 1971. Photo courtesy of the International Rescue Committee.
Transatlantic ends with a series of partings and farewells, but the ERC’s humanitarian work had only just begun. After Fry was forced to leave France for good in 1941, the ERC and IRA would join forces to form the International Rescue Committee (IRC) to better address the worsening refugee crisis. IRC resettlement and relief programs would continue to support Cuban, Angolan, Chinese and Afghan refugees, among others; it remains in operation today.
In 1964, to raise funds and awareness for the plight of refugees, Fry, in partnership with MoMA, engineered the sale of a series of prints by refugee artists, some of whom he would help save. The eventual collection, titled “Flight portfolio», brought together 12 works on paper by Chagall, Lipchitz, Masson, Robert Motherwell and Alexander Calder on the theme of flight. In 1971, 250 limited edition copies of the portfolio were sold in support of the IRC.
Marc Chagall, Untitled (1968) from ‘Flight Portfolio’, published in 1971. Photo courtesy of the International Rescue Committee.
“To be honest, I don’t think the ‘Flight portfolio’ never ignited the art world or garnered the accolades bestowed upon many of the individual artists who contributed to the work,” Sarah O’Hagan, IRC Advisory Board Member and former Board Co-Chair, told Artnet News. “But it stands the test of time as a testimony. At various times in its history, CRI has offered the wallet for sale. »
Today, with a record 103 million displaced people worldwide, the IRC continues to center the refugee perspective through the prism of art.
Installation view of ‘Protecting Milestones: Portraits of Girls in Conflict’ at Gagosian, London. Photo courtesy of the International Rescue Committee.
In 2020, the organization included a selection of children’s drawings on the trauma and violence of displacement in the Queens Museum exhibition “animal conference“; most recently, in May 2022, the IRC partnered with Gagosian London to “Protect Milestonesa program featuring photographs of women who have been affected by conflict.
“The ability to provide context or historical background often deepens appreciation for both the art and the role of an organization like the IRC in saving insights that might otherwise be lost,” O’Hagan said. . Separately, the artist has long brought an outsider’s eye, or as Bryan Stevenson calls it, the perspective of the ‘disadvantaged’ in society, to a wider audience. The dissemination of these stories advances the goals of the IRC.
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