After the successful launch in 2017, the Museum der Moderne Salzburg’s exhibition series exploring the history of artists who experienced life in exile now continues with Resonance of Exile.

Periodicals—newspapers and magazines—are the common thread running through the exhibition. The display opens with the New York Aufbau, a vital source of information, contacts, and guidance for new arrivals. Magazines also offered employment opportunities for immigrants. The photographer Lisette Model (Vienna, AT, 1901–New York, NY, US, 1983), who left for the United States in 1939, was a regular contributor to Harper’s Bazaar from 1941 until 1951, when she was hired to teach at the New School for Social Research. Wolfgang Paalen (Vienna, AT, 1905–Taxco, MX, 1959), who had been a member of the Surrealist circle around André Breton in Paris, escaped to Mexico. The magazine DYN he published in exile is widely regarded as a key source of inspiration for the American Abstract Expressionists. As a teenager, the cineaste Amos Vogel (Vienna, AT, 1921–New York, NY, US, 2012) had drawn short comic strips for himself and family and friends. After studying at the New School of Social Research in New York, he worked as a filmmaker and film theorist. In 1947, he founded the film club Cinema 16, the most important film society in American movie history. Before the war, the illustrator Lili Réthi (Vienna, AT, 1894–New York, NY, US, 1969) created work for the left-wing daily Arbeiter-Zeitung. After relocating to New York in 1939, she specialized in graphic art documenting the progress on major construction projects.

The dancer Valeska Gert (Berlin, DE, 1892–Kampen, DE, 1978) and the fashion photographer Madame d’Ora (Vienna, AT, 1881–Frohnleiten, AT, 1963) were regulars in the pages of illustrated magazines. Both came back home in 1947. Their subsequent work shows the impact of their experiences in exile. Gert’s theatrical sketches included characters such as a concentration camp warden. Madame d’Ora took photographs in refugee camps in Salzburg. Like her works on the abattoirs of Paris, these pictures are grim allegories of her own recent past.