Abstract

This talk examines the transatlantic migration of European modernism into the US after the Second World War. Reading journalism, documentary evidence, and memoirs, it traces the implications of the work of the so-called "sifting committee" led by the American modernist writer and journalist Varian Fry, based in Marseilles, instrumental in arranging visas and passages for refugee writers, artists and intellectuals in the late thirties and early forties. In the twenties, while still an undergraduate at Harvard, Fry helped establish Hound and Horn as one of the first beachheads for expatriate American modernist poets like Gertrude Stein and T.S. Eliot to reach a home leadership. Working with lists supplied by Alfred Barr, the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, Thomas Mann, and his ad hoc committee of readers and art critics, Fry's choices helped shape the fate of modernism in the post-war United States.