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 An
exhibition of work by the artist Chagall shows the complexity
of the wandering master, writes Dan Carrier
VARIAN Fry had an important mission to accomplish and time
was running out. He had been sent to occupied France with a brief:
Stop some of the country’s best-known artists falling into
the clutches of the enemy. Use any means necessary to get them
to America.
On his list was artist Marc Chagall, the Russian-born émigré
who had settled in France. But he had a problem. Despite the German
occupation, Chagall was convinced he was safe.
Chagall’s biographer Monica Bohm-Duchen, who lives in Gayton
Road, Hampstead, and has written a guide for a new show of his
work at the Ben-Uri Gallery in Swiss Cottage, says the artist
was curiously unaware of the danger he was in.
She says: “In early 1940, just before the German invasion,
the Chagall’s retreated to the remote and unspoilt Provencal
village of Gordes, where he and his wife Bella were to live for
a year. So impervious did Chagall seem to the dangers of remaining
in France, he bought the house he was renting on the day the Germans
invaded Belgium and Holland.” Ignoring the political turmoil
and enthused by the Provencal spring, he busied himself painting
landscapes and still lifes confident that moving from Paris to
the countryside would be enough to allow him to continue to work
in peace. And this, says Mrs Bohm-Duchen, is where Fry stepped
in. The 32-year-old journalist, who had volunteered to go to Europe
for a privately funded relief organisation called the Emergency
Rescue Committee, thought otherwise. He had information that Chagall’s
name, along with others including Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso,
were on a top secret Gestapo hit list. He spent the following
year criss-crossing the country to find the artists and persuade
him to leave. He gave them cash and advice on how to get a safe
passage out of the country. But for Fry’s actions, Chagall,
who painted right up to his death aged 97 in 1985, may not have
survived.
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Poet
Andy Croft says novelist writing about World War II could learn
a thing from those who experienced the conflict in the latest
of our features about life during the war