Untitled - from the International Rescue Committee portfolio

 

Joan Miro

  1893 - 1983 (biography)

1966  

color lithograph 

13 5/8 x 19 5/8" image size 

pencil, lower right 

239 of 250  

pencil editioned, lower left 

Mourlot 459 

cream Arches vellum wove 

published 

International Rescue Committee, Washington, D.C. 

22376 

SOLD

In 1940, after Hitler’s Army swept through Europe and seized France, a New York journalist named Varian Fry was dispatched to Marseilles by the Emergency Rescue Committee, later to become the IRC. There he initiated a clandestine operation to rescue some of Europe’s most important cultural leaders whose names were on the Nazis’ list of most wanted. Often called the “American Schindler,” Fry was able to rescue over 1,500 writers, artists and intellectuals, including Hannah Arendt, André Breton, Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Wanda Landowska, Jacques Lipchitz, and Heinrich Mann. In the 1960’s, Fry sought to raise funds for the expanding efforts of the IRC. The sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, one of the artists rescued by Fry and his colleagues, suggested that they assemble and sell portfolios of artwork based on the theme of “flight,” to reflect the refugee experience. Three hundred original portfolios were produced, fifty of them deluxe editions. The prints were hand-pulled and the artists then destroyed the plates. The collection consists of eleven lithographs and one serigraph and includes the work of Marc Chagall, Jacques Lipchitz, André Masson and Joan Miró, who were all rescued by Fry and owed their lives to him, and also Eugene Berman, Alexander Calder, Vieira da Silva, Adolph Gottlieb, Wifredo Lam, Robert Motherwell (the serigraph), Edouard Pignon, and Fritz Wotruba. Text from Rescue.org: "IRC Portfolio on Display at Oglethorpe", September 22, 2016