The Army Museum pays tribute to the resistance of exiled artists during the Occupation

June 1940. France is occupied by Nazi Germany, with Marshal Pétain at the head of the Vichy regime. To escape its authoritarian and anti-Semitic policies, many artists flee France via Marseille. Surrealists Max Ernst, André Masson, Wifredo Lam, Marcel Duchamp, Jacques Hérold and Victor Brauner find themselves in a house in the Phocaean city, rented by the German journalist Varian Fry, who is responsible for getting them out of the country. During this wait, they devote themselves to creating collective drawings. Sketches born from several hands are now brought together among the 300 works and objects in the exhibition "A combatant exile. Artists and France 1939-1945" at the Army Museum.

Eighty years after the Liberation, the exhibition traces the resistance of these artists exiled to the four corners of the globe from 1940, imagining works that symbolize General de Gaulle's Free France. Creations by Fernand Léger, Vassily Kandinsky and Germaine Krull punctuate a tour organized from the artists' main territories of exile.

More than 300 works by artists exiled from France during the Occupation

Symbol of this troubled era, the New York studio of the French Jewish sculptor Ossip Zadkine is thus reconstructed, with the help of several of his works. Of Belarusian origin, exiled to the United States like 9,000 other people during the Occupation, he created 45 works, marked by anguish, such as his Harlequin hurlant, or Étude pour la prisonnière. They bear witness to the sorrow caused by the forced abandonment of his wife, the painter Valentine Prax who remained in Paris, but also assert themselves as allegories of occupied France, which had become a theater of terror.

A correspondence between intimacy and politics that is expressed during the exhibition "Artists in Exile" in 1942, in which the sculptor participates. Pierre Matisse, son of the painter Henri Matisse, brings together many artists who had fled France, in order to influence American public opinion which, at that time, had difficulty believing in Free France and doubted the legitimacy of General de Gaulle.

A contribution to Free France

The insignia that the latter wore throughout his life, in the colours of the Free French Forces (FFL) and the Free French Naval Forces (FNFL), are also visible in the exhibition, which devotes an entire section to Great Britain. A room with a half-solemn, half-secret atmosphere, reinforced by a play of shadows and subdued lighting, in which is stored the guitar of Anna Marly, composer of the Chant des partisans , which can be listened to during the visit. Uniforms of the members of the FFL are also on display, or photos of the many conferences in French organised throughout Great Britain, helping to maintain the Free French spirit outside of France, just like these hundreds of works.

"Beyond the militant message, all these artists contributed to a reflection on what free France should be, to the adoption of common values, and in particular more social ones," emphasizes Vincent Giraudier, curator of the exhibition. A thought that would permeate the pen of France during the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, and whose legacy the country still retains today.