The Golden Door [antikvár]

Preface and Acknowledgments ABRAM LERNER DIRECTOR The existence of an American art of international stature sometimes blinds us, either through ignorance or ignoble provincialism, to the fact that many of America's most illustrious and generative artists were foreign-born. Considering that immigration is a shared American heritage, this oversight may come as a surprise. Even the word "immigrant" itself has fallen into benign disfavor, and a number of otherwise enthusiastic supporters of this exhibition were wary of using it in the title, insisting that it conjured up images of push-carts and dirty tenements that were alien to the precious ambience of art. Such unease on the part of descendants of immigrants may be due in part to the desire shared by most immigrants to become fully "Americanized" as quickly as possible, to forget that they were once part of those "huddled masses" of Emma Lazarus's poem. The fact is that while we can reassemble, mainly from written documents, the history and somewhat romanticized view of our early immigrants, it is the visual record of the past loo years of immigration, with its countless photographs and motion pictures, which documents that period as we know it. It is not surprising that one of the greatest photographs made by an American in the 20th century should have been of these very immigrants—Stieglitz's The Steerage of 1907—and that image prevails. But it is not the purpose of this exhibition to touch on such provocative social and historical issues. Clearly they are not in the domain of a museum of art. We have selected our theme in the spirit of the Bicentennial celebration and, because we are a museum of modern art that reflects the aesthetic efliorts of the past 100 years, have restricted ourselves to those foreign-born painters, sculptors, architects and photographers whose contribution to American art within that period has had a powerful and irradicable effect on our native art. Modern American art is inconceivable without the contribution of such giants as Josef Albers, Marcel Duchamp, Mark Rothko, Jacques Lipchitz, Mies van der Rohe and Hans Hofmann, all of whom were born abroad and immigrated to the United States. Rather than attempting to encompass the entire range of this rich and complex history, the present exhibition and catalogue focus on a small group of foreign-born artists, examine their achievements and look at the circumstances of their arrival in the United States. We could not hope to reflect their total oeuvre and contribution, but rather have attempted to place this contribution within the context of the exhibition and to suggest the artists' impact on American art and the influence of the American experience on their imported styles. All the individuals represented in the exhibition settled permanently in the United States or became U.S. citizens. In addition, all were old enough at the time of arrival for the experience of transplantation to affect the development of their art. What do we know of the circumstances of these artists' arrival in the