The Powerful Stories of Artists Forced to Flee Their Homelands

Frank Auerbach was born in Berlin to a Jewish family in 1931. When he was seven years old, his parents arranged for him to travel to Britain to escape the Nazi oppression that was dominating the country. They were sent to a concentration camp not long after.

He is considered one of the most important living artists of today, having represented Britain in the Venice Biennale in 1986, where he was awarded the exhibition’s grand prize for lifetime achievement. His figurative-style work focuses on portraits and city scenes around London, where he still lives and paints daily. He often works with thick layers of acrylic paint that he scrapes off his canvas and paints over again, creating highly-textured artworks.

Artist Marc Chagall is known for the dream-like imagery of his artworks, which often revolve around his own personal history, Jewish motifs, and themes from European folklore. He was born in 1887 in Belarus but later moved to France, where he developed his poetic artistic style.

In 1941, upon realizing his life was at risk from the Nazi Occupation, he fled to America with the help of a forged US visa arranged by the American Vice-Consul in Marseilles. The same rescue operation saved over 2,000 other lives. Chagall later returned to Paris where he famously painted the ceiling of the Opera House, one of his most notable works. His art was greatly influential on the Surrealism movement.

The Palestinian multimedia artist Mona Hatoum was born in Beirut in 1952. During what was supposed to be a brief visit to London in 1975, war broke out in Lebanon and she was unable to return home. Stranded in England, she studied art and began producing performance pieces that explored the themes of human struggles against political conflicts, global inequality, and the struggles of being an outsider.

Later, her work shifted into installations and sculptures made from a wide range of materials that often examine systems of control in society using grid and geometric forms. She still lives in London today.

Danish artist Camille Pissarro is often referred to as the “Father of Impressionism” for the significant impact he had on both the movement and his contemporaries Monet and Cézanne. Known for his pastoral and en plein air (outdoor) works, he was the only artist to show his paintings in all eight Impressionist group exhibitions.

Pissarro was living and working in France when the Franco-Prussian war broke out in 1870 and he was forced to move to London. When he returned home after the war, he found that of the 1,500 paintings he had left behind, only 40 remained.

Romanian-born Marcel Janco is best known for being one of the founders of Dadaism, an European avant-garde art movement, and a leading figure in Constructivism. He also had a significant impact on the world of architecture, setting up a studio in the 1920s that was later responsible for introducing modern art to his hometown of Bucharest.

Facing violent anti-semitic persecution during WW2, Janco emigrated to British Palestine in 1941 where he worked as an art promoter and teacher and encouraged the development of local Jewish art. Here he also founded New Horizons, a group of abstract Israeli painters, and Ein Hod, a utopian art colony.

Born in the Netherlands in 1872, Piet Mondrian is considered to be a leader of the 20th century abstract art movement as one of the founders of De Stijl, a group that applied abstract principles across other mediums, like sculpture and architecture. He is most famous for his square and rectangle compositions made up of blocks of primary colors.

Mondrian settled in Paris in 1911 but became a refugee twice, firstly when the breakout of WW1 prevented him from returning home from a visit to the Netherlands for four years. The second time was in 1938 when he was forced to move to London to escape the threat of advancing fascism.

Daniel Marot was born a French protestant in 1661 and made his name as an architect and furniture designer in the ornate Late Baroque style often associated with Louis XIV. In 1685, the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes meant that he and his family, who were Hugenots, no longer had the right to practise their religion without persecution from the state. They moved to Holland, where Marot met William II of England (the future king) who took him to London to become one of his architects and Master of Works.

Marot was highly influential in the styling of Hampton Court Palace where he designed the garden parterres and is thought to have worked on the mirrors, sculpted tables, and state beds.

The German painter, sculptor, and printmaker Max Beckmann was known for the self-portraits he painted throughout his life. His early style was academic but evolved to become more expressionistic after he was traumatized by his experiences volunteering as a medical orderly during WW1.

Although in 1927 he received the Honorary Empire Prize for German Art and the Gold Medal of the City of Düsseldorf, he began to face oppression in his work when Adolf Hitler spoke out against modern art. He was dismissed from his teaching post at the Art School in Frankfurt and more than 500 of his works were confiscated from museums. In 1937, a day after Hitler made a speech about degenerate art, he left Germany to live in the Netherlands.

Renowned Surrealist Salvador Dali is famous for his highly unusual and bizarre paintings as well as his flamboyant personality. He was influenced by the teachings of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and often included scenes from his own dreams as well as the landscape of the Pyrenees mountains where he grew up in his works.

Born in Figueres, Spain, he and his wife were forced to emigrate to the United States in 1940 to escape the ravaging effects of WW2 throughout Europe. The couple were issued visas by the Portuguese consul in Bordeaux, and remained abroad for eight years. Dali’s arrival in New York is credited as being one of the reasons that the city became an important art center after the war.

Mark Rothko was born in 1903 in the Russian Empire (in what is now Latvia) but his father, fearing that his sons would be drafted into the Imperial Army, moved the family to the United States in 1913. Here he became a prominent figure among the New York School painters.

His interest in surrealism led him to become integral in the development of Color Field Painting, a style of abstract painting that is characterized by open space and an expressive use of color. Rothko’s works are recognizable for their layers of vivid soft rectangles that convey a sense of spirituality and emotion.

Despite starting his career in law and economics, Wassily Kandinsky is generally considered to be one of the foremost pioneers of abstract art. Born in Moscow in 1866, he was forced to flee from his home in Germany to France in 1933 when the Nazis closed the Bauhaus school of art and architecture where he taught.

In 1937, 57 of his works were confiscated by the Nazis in a purge of “degenerate art”. Kandinsky had a strong interest in the relationship between art and classical music and also believed that art should be an expression of an individual’s inner life, instead of following artistic trends.

Iraqi artist Hayv Kahraman was born in Baghdad in 1981. The dangers of the Iran war led her parents to hire a smuggler to transport the family to Sweden where she began oil painting at the age of 12. She went on to study at the Academy of Art and Design in Florence, focussing her art on the themes of gender, female identity in the Middle East, and her experiences as a refugee.

Her paintings, sculptures and sketches are influenced by Arabic calligraphy, art nouveau, Persian miniature, and Greek iconography. She now lives and works in California in the United States.