“Exile” On Chapel Street

“Artists in Exile,” at the Yale University Art Gallery until the end of the year, is as ambitious as it sounds. The exhibition fills several large rooms and, in the gallery’s own words, ​“spans 200 years of art history” and multiple continents. It’s big.

The gallery has grown fond of topical exhibitions like this one of late — ​“Modern Art from the Middle East” and ​“Before the Event/After the Fact: Contemporary Perspectives on War” being the most recent examples. The topicality seems right for the moment, and in that, timing is on the gallery’s side, as ​“Artists in Exile” has been in the works for years.

In line with curator Frauke V. Josenhans’s aesthetic (see ​“Everything is Dada,” on display last year at the gallery) ​“Artists in Exile” eschews chronology in favor of thematic designations: ​“Home and Mobility,” ​“Nostalgia,” ​“Transfer and Adjustment,” and ​“Identity.” Sometimes these categories prove a little too baggy for the overwhelmingly varied work on display. In one room, a Chinese landscape hangs alongside a grotesque portrait by Iraqi artist Ahmed Alsoudani, depicting a man whose face has been marred by an explosion.

But other juxtapositions work marvelously. ​“Artists in Exile” opens with a bang: Lebanese-born Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum’s colorful Nature morte aux grenades (“Still Life with Grenades”), a set of crystal grenades with a shapeliness and vibrancy that complement the Paul Gauguin painting, Parau Parau (“Whispered Words”), to the left.

You could also argue that the exhibition’s definition of ​“exile” is too broad. Was Gauguin, properly speaking, an ​“exile?” He went to Martinique and Tahiti to escape the stifling academicism of the Parisian art world, and also to get away from his wife and kids. Ditto Emil Nolde, a German Expressionist whose suite of watercolors is one of the highlights of ​“Artists in Exile.” Nolde was a Nazi sympathizer who later painted in hiding during the Third Reich once his art was labeled ​“degenerate.” It’s a bit of a stretch to call ​“exile” a person like Nolde, who had the luxury of withdrawing from public life once he got on Hitler’s bad side and chose to make art the Nazis disliked.

Meanwhile, the Austrian Jewish artist Henry Koerner, who has two affecting paintings on display, lost his family to the death camps. Koerner’s My Parents I and My Parents IV encapsulate the exilic artist’s evolution: My Parents I is a remembered portrait of his parents in their Viennese sitting room, knitting and dozing. My Parents IV brings us to the precipice of grief: a landscape of pure greenery, lushness scrubbed clean of memory.

Despite the overbroad definition of ​“exile,” many of the inclusions are surprising and illuminating. Kurt Schwitters, whose ​“Merz” collages have never much interested me, has one such work on display, Merzbild mit Regenbogen (“Merz Picture with Rainbow”). Chunks of wood stand out against a muted background of blue and green recalling the fjords of Norway, where Schwitters lived in exile during the Nazi era; a rainbow swatch in the center of the painting is optimistic but hemmed in.

At the heart of ​“Artists in Exile” is Baggage Series #4 (2016) by New Haven-based Syrian artist Mohamed Hafez, a work that must be seen in person. The impact of Baggage Series #4 is immediate and visceral: a gray, bombed-out building is piled neatly on top of a suitcase, an eloquent testament to the Syrian refugee’s plight.

Many of the other artworks on display are lesser-known works by heavy hitters: black-and-white woodcuts by Yale darling Josef Albers, realist portraits by the Neo-Classicist history painter Jacques-Louis David, brilliant watercolors by German Expressionist George Grosz. In response to historical trauma many of these artists adopted, like Koerner, the reticence of landscape and abstraction, attempting to ignore the past or go beyond it. The anti-figural direction of art in the 1950s and 1960s (evidenced by the ample supply of Abstract Expressionism on display) is at once moving and dismaying. Many of these artists were at a loss in the wake of World War II’s enormities. Innovation was a way of forgetting — but also, one worries, an abdication of art’s political duties.

“Artists in Exile” can be discombobulating. Jews fleeing Nazis, Cubans fleeing Castro, Iranians fleeing the Revolution — it’s a bit hard to take it all in. The gallery speaks of its intent to “[expand] on the narrative … of white, male artists who fled Europe during World War II.” Not all exile narratives are alike, however, and the ​“internal exile” explanation proffered for artists like Nolde waters down the notion of ​“exile.”

All the same, ​“Artists in Exile” answers to our moment. Hafez’s Aleppo miniature makes us reckon with the destruction of Syria, now a blip on the news radar. Shirin Neshat’s epic, Eisensteinish portrayals of Iranian Muslims offer a fresh depiction of an oft-stereotyped and ‑maligned group.

Museums are still figuring out the language of exhibitions like this one. ​“Exile” is a universal theme of modern history and of modern art; how do we put it on display? The same problem confronts exhibitions about imperialism. As Great Britain colonized a quarter of the planet until fairly recently, can one show really cover ​“the British Empire” in a meaningful way? Rarely are such exhibitions perfect. The wrangling over recent history is all too fresh. But ​“Artists in Exile” is a valiant and broadminded effort, and one worth seeing.

“Artists in Exile” runs through Dec. 31 at the Yale University Art Gallery, 1111 Chapel St. Click here for hours and more information. Admission is free.