This essay explores the relationship between creativity and exile in the work of a variegated group of visual artists, mainly working in Europe after World War II. For the artist, I maintain, although exile may indeed be devastating, it does not have the same impact on the creative condition as it does on the writer who is severed from his or her native tongue; on the contrary, exile has often provided stimulation and inspiration to the painter, especially the woman artist who finds herself freed from the conventional boundaries of feminine identity in her country of origin. Specifically, the careers of Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo, European exiles in Mexico, are briefly examined; the work of the American artist R. B. Kitaj, who chose "exile," or more precisely, expatriation, in England, is considered in greater detail. Kitaj, in a sense, has constructed himself as an artist of exile, a "diasporist," which makes his work particularly relevant to my project. Finally, I discuss the work of two contemporary American women artists living in Paris, Shirley Jaffe and Zuka. I arrive at no general conclusions about art and the condition of exile: on the contrary, it is the differences provided by gender, style, and relationship to the adopted country that interest me; diversity rather than unity in the production of the exiled or expatriated artist. When it comes to exile, artists would seem to be in a better position than writers. Somehow, the visual world loses less in translation. For the writer, exile and the loss of native language may be devastating, depriving the subject of access to the living world. "This radical disjoining between word and thing is a desiccating alchemy, draining the world not only of signifiPoetics Today 17:3 (Fall 1996). Copyright ? 1996 by The Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.115 on Sat, 08 Oct 2016 05:08:56 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 318 Poetics Today 17:3 cance but of its colors, striations, nuances-its very existence. It is the loss of a living connection," declares writer Eva Hoffman (1989: 107). "What has happened to me in this new world?" she asks in her moving exploration of the meaning of exile, Lost in Translation (1989). "I don't know. I don't see what I've seen, don't comprehend what's in front of me. I'm not filled with language anymore, and I have only a memory of fullness to anguish me with the knowledge that, in this dark and empty state, I don't really exist" (ibid: 108). For artists, on the whole, exile, at least insofar as the work is concerned, seems to be less traumatic. While some art is, indeed, site specific, visual language, on the whole, is far more transportable than the verbal kind. Artists traditionally have been obliged to travel, to leave their native land, in order to learn their trade. At one time, the trip to Rome was required, or a study-voyage in Italy; at other times and under special circumstances, it might be Munich or Spain or Holland or even North Africa; more recently, Paris was where one went to learn how to be an artist in the company of one's peers; and after New York stole the heart of the art world from Paris, it was here that ambitious young practitioners came to immerse themselves in the action. For every Constable enamored of the very slime on the logs of his native landscape, the few miles of the river Stour near his father's mill, for every Courbet finding his subjects in the people and landscapes of his native Franche-Comte or Cezanne repeatedly embracing the Montagne Ste. Victoire, we can point to a Sargent triumphantly catering to an international clientele; a Picasso finding himself and his modernism in Paris rather than in Barcelona; a displaced Mondrian inventing Broadway Boogie Woogie in New York rather than in his native Holland. For some artists, getting away from home and its restrictions has been the sine qua non of a successful art career. "After all, give me France," said the great American artist Mary Cassatt, writing to Sarah Hallowell. "Women do not have to fight for recognition here, if they do serious work" (quoted in Mathews 1994: 217). For women, whether they be artists or writers, as Janet Wolff has pointed out in Resident Alien (1995), the conditions of exile have especially ambiguous or even ambivalent implications. On the one hand, "for the woman writer who is either geographically displaced . . . or culturally marginalized . . . it may be her very identity as woman which enables a radical re-vision of home and exile" (Wolff 1995: 7). "Displacement . . . can be quite strikingly productive. First, the marginalization entailed in forms of migration can generate new perceptions of place and, in some cases, of the relationship between places. Second, the same dislocation can also facilitate personal transformation, which may take the form of 'rewriting' the self, discarding the lifelong habits and practices of a constraining social education and discovering new This content downloaded from 207.46.13.115 on Sat, 08 Oct 2016 05:08:56 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Nochlin * Art and the Conditions of Exile 319 forms of self-expression" (ibid.). Shari Benstock has pointed out that for some American women early in the century living and working in Paris, emigration was considered an escape from the constraints on women in their home cultures (quoted in Wolff 1995: 11). But, as Wolff also points out, there is little evidence that even adventurous women-writers or artists-had the same access to the city as their male contemporaries. Indeed, women artists themselves were often seen as a kind of threat to properly organized gender relations (ibid.: 107). Exile in the Feminine: Finding Oneself Together Yet in other situations, somewhat later in the early twentieth century, the condition of exile enabled at least a few women artists to join together in productive mutual support that would never have been possible in their original homelands. Such was the case with the English artist Leonora Carrington and her friend, Remedios Varo, both of whom fled to Mexico (from France and Spain, respectively) to escape revolution and war. Mexico seemed extraordinary to Carrington-vivid, exotic, and additionally enlivened by an active group of exiled painters and writers. But most important for this second-generation surrealist was the presence of another woman artist whom she had already met in France: Remedios Varo. The two now became "fellow travelers on a long and intense journey that led them to explore the deepest resources of their creative lives," to borrow the words of Whitney Chadwick in her study of women and surrealism. "For the first time in the history of the collective movement called Surrealism," Chadwick continues, "two women would collaborate in attempting to develop a new pictorial language that spoke more directly to their own needs" (1985: 194). Leonora Carrington declared in no uncertain terms: "Remedios's presence in Mexico changed my life" (Chadwick, private conversation with Carrington, 1983. Quoted in ibid.). For Remedios Varo, who came to Mexico with her husband, the surrealist poet Benjamin Peret, in 1942, searching for peace in a war-torn world, exile meant, quite literally, the end of all travel. Once settled in Mexico City, she developed a terrible fear of moving and rarely strayed outside her neighborhood. As her last husband, Walter Gruen, recalled: "She said she didn't have to go to the trouble of traveling because the best and the most beautiful travel was within her imagination" (Engel 1986: 2). Paradoxically, it was as an exile that Varo, like her friend Leonora Carrington, found herself and her way as an artist. "As an emigree, uprooted and exiled from her homeland, she embarked on a search for selfknowledge, a pilgrimage, both psychological and spiritual, to find deeper, more reliable roots," declares Varo's major biographer, Janet Kaplan. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.115 on Sat, 08 Oct 2016 05:08:56 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 320 Poetics Today 17:3 "Having been subject to the outside forces of world events shaping her life, she now sought metaphoric control through her art work by creating an alternative world of her own design peopled with characters bearing her own features. Like an actress taking on roles, she consistently used the self portrait device as a way to experiment with alternative identities. Finally able to settle in, and now distanced from the intimidations of the Surrealist circle, she developed a distinctive mature style that was to become her signature" (Kaplan 1984: 5-6). Exile, then, in the case of these two women artists, provided a fertile site for independent development and growth. The case of Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo is a relatively unusual one, and part of its unusualness has to do with the gender of the artists concerned. Nevertheless, despite the terrible destruction wrought by the Second World War on the vanguard artistic communities of Europe; and although the resulting displacement was inevitably hard on artists as well as writers, disrupting many careers irrevocably; many of the former landed on their feet and exerted considerable influence on their places of refuge: Albers disseminated his ideas at both Black Mountain and Yale; Breton and the surrealists in exile made a considerable splash in their new surroundings; Beckmann did some of his most serious and memorable work outside of Germany. Emigrants like de Kooning and Arshile Gorky found themselves at the center of the most innovative artistic movement of