The International Rescue Committee (IRC)

This portfolio includes twelve hors d’commerce deluxe edition lithographs and serigraphs by artists Eugene Berman, Alexander Calder, Marc Chagall, Vieira da Silva, Adolph Gottlieb, Wifredo Lam, Jaques Lipchitz, André Masson, Joan Miró, Robert Motherwell, Edouard Pignon, and Fritz Wotruba.

It was created in the late 1960s to early 1970s at the behest of Varian Fry to raise awareness and funds for the IRC. Fry was a New York journalist who was sent to Marseilles 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 Nazi’s 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.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.