Exile and Modernism: Theoretical and Methodological Reflections on the Exile of Artists in the 1930s and ’40s

Abstract

The exile of artists in the 1930s and ’40s was first discovered, alongside the Third Reich and the Holocaust, as a subject of research in the humanities, including art history, in the late 1960s. Apart from debates over the significance of political or nonpolitical works of art produced in exile and their role in establishing a positive German national identity during the Third Reich, many of the interpretive approaches since then have been determined largely by biographical accounts. It should be noted, however, that some artists were inscribed into art history (or the so-called canon) because of their personal fates as Jews or the politically persecuted. Consequently, the work of art is often treated as a direct document of the individual’s biography.