The Flight Portfolio

[Marc] Chagall was among those ferreted to safety, though not without some hesitation. As Fry wrote in his memoir, Surrender on Demand, the painter of bucolic scenes nervously asked if there were cows in America. He was visibly relieved to hear that there were.
~The IRC

A print from the Flight Portfolio today.

[The Flight Portfolio] was created in the late 1960s to early 1970s at the behest of Varian Fry to raise awareness and funds for the IRC [International Rescue Committee]. Fry was a New York journalist who was sent to Marseilles [in 1940] with the Emergency Rescue Committee (later renamed the International Rescue Committee).

Often called the “American Schindler,” Fry conducted a covert rescue of more than 1,500 of Europe’s cultural leaders, many of who were on the Nazis' list of most wanted, such as Hannah Arendt, André Breton, Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Jacques Lipchitz, Heinrich Mann, Alma Mahler, Gropius Werfel, and Nobel laureate Otto Meyerhoff.

Today, more than 40 years after the portfolio was produced, it is still raising funds and awareness, and celebrating the vital work of the IRC.

Untitled
by Eugene Berman

The International Rescue Committee