Kristi V. Shanahan
It might be interesting at this point to see what was happening in the provinces of France during the Occupation. Many artists who figured they were a part of the “Judeo-Marxist-decadent”xiv list stayed in what was still the free zone of France. They, Jewish artists, Surrealists (and all other modern artists for that matter, considered subversive because their unconventional art challenged the German society’s established values) and resisters to the Nazi occupation, had sought refuge just a couple of steps ahead of the German troops in France.
In Grasse, a small but beautiful section of Provence in the south of France, Hans Arp, his wife Sophie and the recently widowed Sonia Delaunay became ensconced. Near there, in 1940, the great Jewish painter Marc Chagall purchased an abandoned religious girls’ school at Gordes. The German Jewish refugee, Wolfgang Wols, found a short and tenuous reprieve from persecution in Cassis, also in Provence. He was to find “at Cassis, the stones, the fish, the rocks, the salt of the sea and the sky seen through a magnifying glass made me forget human relevance, invited me to turn my back on the chaos of our acts, showed me eternity in the small waves of the port repeating themselves without repeating themselves.”xv
Further south near Marseilles was the beautiful Villa Air Bel. Interestingly, this villa had been rented for the staff of the American Rescue Committee, and headed up by the young American representative, Varian Fry. He arrived in late summer of 1940 with the hope of rescuing those artists, writers, philosophers and scientists who were in danger of persecution and deportation by the Nazis. The Germans were already in the process of routing out French dissidents and other German, Austrian, and Polish refugees in France, who had fled their native countries in fear for their lives for being critical or openly engaging in what the Nazis considered “subversive” activities. Fry’s charge was to provide these artists with money and visas, or to set up secret escape routes across the Pyrenees into Spain. Once there, he had the even greater task of procuring visas for them to the United States. Often, neither Spain nor France was willing to oblige his requests; many, therefore, were trapped in what would amount to a waiting and hoping state of limbo. He had arrived with $3,000.00, a rather huge sum of money in 1940, with a plan to rescue as many refugees as possible in the span of just three months. His work continued for more than a year and was fraught with difficulties and failures, though he was able, in the end, to insure the escape of more than 1,500 people and helped another 2,500 with financial aid and support. Fry said, “Among the refugees caught in France were many writers and artists whose work I had enjoyed… Now that they were in danger, I felt obligated to help them if I could; just as they, without knowing it, had often in the past, helped me.”xvi
Villa Air Bel quickly became a refuge for its famous “guests,” among whom were André Breton -- the writer, poet and artist -- and many other Surrealists from the School of Paris days. During this time, sentiments ran the gamut between outright terror of ruination or worse (the deportations had not yet become a reality in the outlying provinces of France) and a more wait-and-see attitude, held by many who were simply unwilling to believe that the Vichy government would, eventually, capitulate entirely to Nazi demands. People would not believe that Pétain would destroy France, and continued to hope for a bearable solution, in spite of Fry’s pleas and promises and the reality of the line between free and occupied France. Chagall was approached by the Rescue Committee, and encouraged to emigrate to America. He did not want to leave France: “Are there trees and cows in America too?xvii Others, like the Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry asked, “Why leave? If we all leave, where will France be?”xviii André Masson, too, had been implored to leave the country but replied “I prefer to wait, to swarm in the fatal earthquake.”xix Though he was not Jewish his wife was, so many felt that he would be deemed guilty by association. He took his family to the small village of Montredon, near Marseilles, with the plan and hope of being close to its large port if or when the time demanded. Masson was a friend of Breton and in the drawing Masson’s portrait of Breton xx we see how terribly conflicted Breton was. It depicts two heads, oddly connected in the back, with one face looking ahead -- perhaps to emigrating to America -- and the other, with eyes closed -- choosing to stay in France. Breton chose to emphasize, however, that during this time the horror that was happening to France was not to be an end of the human spirit. He said, “It appears to me that the task of intellectuals is not to let this purely military defeat, for which intellectuals are not responsible, attempt to carry with it the debacle of the spirit.”xxi In hopes of keeping this spirit alive, he organized a show of refugee artist’s works at Air Bel in 1941.
In addition to their continued production of art, artists
at Montredon formed an “association d’entraide” (artists offering mutual aid) “Pour que l’Esprit Vive”xxii (so that the spirit will live on). Musical concerts were held there for the people of the surrounding town, and all proceeds gained were given to the artists of the province. Among the artists who performed at no charge were Pablo Casals and Francis Poulenc, who offered songs written to the poetry of Paul Élouard, the great friend and soulmate of Picasso. It seems that artists were coming together to help each other in any way they could. In Marseilles, artist/film director Sylvian Itkine (who was Jewish) founded the Croque (crunchy) Fruit, a restaurant that made candy -- prized at the time when even the basic staples of food were difficult to obtain -- and sold it to help the refugees and Jews who were ostracized by Vichy laws.xxiii André Breton wrote slogans for the Croque Fruit, which held a food fair in Marseilles in September of 1941.