Publisher description

An unprecedented survey of artists in exile from the 19th century through the present day, with notable attention to Asian, Latin American, African American, and female artists This timely book offers a wide-ranging and beautifully illustrated study of exiled artists from the 19th century through the present day, with notable attention to individuals who have often been relegated to the margins of publications on exile in art history. The artworks featured here, including photography, paintings, drawings, prints, and sculpture, present an expanded view of the conditions of exile--forced or voluntary--as an agent for both trauma and ingenuity. The introduction outlines the history and perception of exile in art over the past 200 years, and the book's four sections explore its aesthetic impact through the themes of home and mobility, nostalgia, transfer and adjustment, and identity. Essays and catalogue entries in each section showcase diverse artists, including not only European ones--like Jacques-Louis David, Paul Gauguin, George Grosz, and Kurt Schwitters--but also female, African American, East Asian, Latin American, and Middle Eastern artists, such as Elizabeth Catlett, Harold Cousins, Mona Hatoum, Lotte Jacobi, An-My Lê, Matta, Ana Mendieta, Abelardo Morell, Mu Xin, and Shirin Neshat.

During the first half of the twentieth century—decades of war and revolution in Europe—an "intellectual migration" relocated thousands of artists and thinkers to the United States, including some of Europe's supreme performing artists, filmmakers, playwrights, and choreographers. For them, America proved to be both a strange and opportune destination. A "foreign homeland" (Thomas Mann), it would frustrate and confuse, yet afford a clarity of understanding unencumbered by native habit and bias. However inadvertently, the condition of cultural exile would promote acute inquiries into the American experience. What impact did these famous newcomers have on American culture, and how did America affect them? George Balanchine, in collaboration with Stravinsky, famously created an Americanized version of Russian classical ballet. Kurt Weill, schooled in Berlin jazz, composed a Broadway opera. Rouben Mamoulian's revolutionary Broadway productions of Porgy and Bess and Oklahoma! drew upon Russian "total theater." An army of German filmmakers—among them F. W. Murnau, Fritz Lang, Ernst Lubitsch, and Billy Wilder—made Hollywood more edgy and cosmopolitan. Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich redefined film sexuality. Erich Korngold upholstered the sound of the movies. Rudolf Serkin inspirationally inculcated dour Germanic canons of musical interpretation. An obscure British organist reinvented himself as "Leopold Stokowski." However, most of these gifted émigrés to the New World found that the freedoms they enjoyed in America diluted rather than amplified their high creative ambitions. A central theme of Joseph Horowitz's study is that Russians uprooted from St. Petersburg became "Americans"—they adapted. Representatives of Germanic culture, by comparison, preached a German cultural bible—they colonized. "The polar extremes," he writes, "were Balanchine, who shed Petipa to invent a New World template for ballet, and the conductor George Szell, who treated his American players as New World Calibans to be taught Mozart and Beethoven." A symbiotic relationship to African American culture is another ongoing motif emerging from Horowitz's survey: the immigrants "bonded with blacks from a shared experience of marginality"; they proved immune to "the growing pains of a young high culture separating from parents and former slaves alike."

In Venus in Exile renowned cultural critic Wendy Steiner explores the twentieth century's troubled relationship with beauty. Disdained by avant-garde artists, feminists, and activists, beauty and its major symbols of art—the female subject and ornament—became modernist taboos. To this day it is hard to champion beauty in art without sounding aesthetically or politically retrograde. Steiner argues instead that the experience of beauty is a form of communication, a subject-object interchange in which finding someone or something beautiful is at the same time recognizing beauty in oneself. This idea has led artists and writers such as Marlene Dumas, Christopher Bram, and Cindy Sherman to focus on the long-ignored figure of the model, who function in art as both a subject and an object. Steiner concludes Venus in Exile on a decidedly optimistic note, demonstrating that beauty has created a new and intensely pleasurable direction for contemporary artistic practice.

Soviet in Exile is the definitive examination of unofficial art from the Soviet Union, richly illustrated in color and black-and-white. It is also the chilling story of the continuing repression of freedom of expression in that country. - Book Jacket.

In 1947 Leonard and Reva Brooks left for Mexico where Leonard planned to study painting for a year. In Mexico they discovered a vibrant, sometimes even dangerous, society and a dynamic artistic community, unlike the mundane world they had left behind in Canada with its stale and unwelcoming artistic scene. Invigorated by their new environment Leonard and Reva ended up staying for over half a century, playing a key role in establishing San Miguel de Allende as a world-famous art colony. In this new biography, John Virtue chronicles the lives of these two important artists and offers an intimate look at these complex and creative people. Virtue describes how they were caught up in the McCarthy era of Communist witch hunts and blacklisted in the United States. He details their close friendships with luminary figures such as Marshall McLuhan, Earle Birney, and the Mexican art icon David Alfaro Siqueiros, as well as a host of others. As Leonard became a fixture in the Mexican art scene Reva's photography quickly garnered international recognition, applauded by photographers Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. In 1975 the San Francisco Museum of Art selected her as one of the top fifty female photographers of all time. With tales of deportations, shootouts, murder attempts, failures, and triumphs, Leonard and Reva Brooks is a biography of two creative people caught up in interesting times.

An analysis of the career of Ana Mendieta, a Cuban-American feminist artist who came to prominence in the late 70s and early 80s, in terms of gender and performance theory.