Ship’s Bridge

Among other things, the BAU is reminiscent of a ship. This playful curatorial intervention departs from that similarity and refers to the Capitaine-Paul-Lemerle, a converted freighter that evacuated roughly 350 civilians out of Europe in 1941. The ship is remembered for its prominent passengers, many of whom escaped occupied France with the help of American journalist Varian Fry. They included novelist Anna Seghers, revolutionary Victor Serge, surrealists André Breton, Wilfredo Lam, and André Masson, photographer Germaine Krull, as well as anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss.

The Capitaine-Paul-Lemerle departed in March and, after several stops, reached Martinique in April. Its passengers were briefly interned in a refugee camp and then released to their onward journeys to Latin America or the United States. The ship became a symbol of the modernist European intelligentsia’s antifascist convictions and its exodus. In fact, by far not everyone received the necessary papers to cross the Atlantic, nor did all avant-garde intellectuals and artists resist fascism.