Artists and rootlessness : the case of Mark Rothko

Exodus, exile, asylum

In the face of the "migrant crisis" that is testing Europe's security defenses, the case of artists is particularly edifying. Since the time of Vasari, we have known that geographical displacement is crucial in the artistic profession, a place of interculturality par excellence. Indeed, in the twentieth and ^twenty-first centuries, under the impact of wars and totalitarian regimes, "contacts between migrants and societies" have inescapably altered the art scene, prefiguring the cosmopolitan cultural forms that are our own.

For the painter Mark Rothko (1903-1970), who emigrated to the USA in 1913, the experience of uprootedness provoked violent experiences in his relations with institutions and in his interactions with certain players in a triumphant capitalist society - a hostile context, in which he produced a pioneering body of work that is still vibrant today.

The enduring nature of Rothko's message once again underlines the urgency of carefully considering the function of the émigré or exiled artist. How do artists such as Pablo Picasso, Sheerin Neshat, Anish Kapoor, Huang Yong Ping, Christo Javacheff and Adel Abdessemed, faced with the challenges of spatial displacement, negotiate their own uprootedness to configure new lexicons or draw political, ethical and anthropological spheres that explode visions of identity and national borders? In this sense, in the vanguard, escaping the determinations imposed by power, don't they propose new social and civic dynamics as much as aesthetic mutations?