Artists in Exile
Yale puts suffering and hope on display
Friedrich Nietzche once wrote, “To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.” History is dense with famous aphorisms about agony, as it is one of the constants in the human condition. Turmoil is the counterweight to bliss, and the art world is ripe with the fruit of both.
There are the suppositions about artists only creating great work after having experienced the worst days of their lives. The belief that great beauty can only come from great suffering is a cliche that many artists fear because it dares one’s fate to take a turn for the worse. It is a sensitive nerve in the global art body – one begging to be pressed, and one precisely targeted by Artists in Exile: Expressions of Loss and Hope, an exhibition currently on view at the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut through the end of 2017.
The artists included in the show survived exile in the form of being forced from their motherland or from their adopted home because of genocide, war, or discrimination. This experience can make anyone feel like a severed limb, and the way each artist processes that condition makes for a provocative and heart-wrenching curation. The show features works by Josef Albers, Kurt Schwitters, Marcel Duchamp, and other prominent individuals, as well as several noteworthy lesser-known artists.
Though all of the work collectively sings in a minor key, there are notes of bright clarity and of the promise of hope. A photograph by Shirin Neshat shows figures clad in burkas standing motionless on the shore. Their dark forms are arranged like quarter notes scattered across a musical staff, and you can hear their despair, and their acceptance of what their lives have become. In an untitled painting by Ahmed Alsoudani, a face is depicted in a disfigured expression that anyone can recognize as the experience of witnessing death.
The artwork rips your heart out, but hands it back to you with a solemn nod that urges you to use it better the second time around. Here’s to finding meaning in the suffering.
Artists in Exile: Expressions of Loss and Hope is organized by Frauke V. Josenhans, the Horace W. Goldsmith Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art. Made possible by the Richard Brown Baker, B.A. 1935, Collection Care and Enhancement Fund and the Société Anonyme Endowment Fund.
