New York Invasion (Solomons)

Few years in American art were quite as lively as 1942, in part because its leading figures were not American at all. Rather, they were the Europeans who had recently arrived in New York amid the general exodus of artists and intellectuals after the fall of France. Some of them had visited earlier, including Marcel Duchamp and Salvador Dali. Now they were joined by Andre Breton, Surrealism’s stern founder, who moved into a small walk-up on West Eleventh Street; he notoriously refused to learn even a few phrases of English for fear of dulling his intellectual edge. Fernand Leger could often be spotted herding groups of friends to restaurants in Chinatown. Piet Mondrian, a jazz buff, liked to visit the dance halls of Harlem. Max Ernst was living in a deluxe townhouse on East Fifty-first Street with the expatriate American heiress Peggy Guggenheim, who had helped him escape from occupied France and then demanded that he marry her (“I did not want to live in sin with an enemy alien,” she explained in her chatty autobiography). Not everyone had sailed over; the big three—Picasso, Miro, and Matisse—had stayed in Europe, finding safety behind the walls of their reputations.- "Voice from Abroad, 1942." Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell by Deborah Solomons