Marc Chagall (1887-1985) Fiddler Woodcut Gift of Elizabeth Boyd (MA 1933) and Dorothy Cogswell

Prior to World War II, leading figures in the arts and humanities in Europe met at the Abbey of Pontigny in the Burgundy region of France every summer to discuss matters of intellectual and cultural importance. With the outbreak of war and the flight of Jewish and other intellectuals from Nazi-occupied Europe, these annual gatherings, of necessity, came to an end.

However, in 1942 under the leadership of French professor Helen Patch, Mount Holyoke College became the center of European intellectual life as the Pontigny Colloquia were reinstituted on its South Hadley campus. This quiet sanctuary in western Massachusetts provided a setting in which refugee intellectuals could continue the conversations begun before the War. For the Europeans, participation in the Pontigny Colloquia constituted an act of resistance to Nazi ideology and its Vichy handmaidens. While the earliest of the South Hadley gatherings hosted mostly those who had participated in the original discussions in France, subsequent meetings brought the Europeans together for the first time with their American counterparts in a dialogue on the future of Western civilization in the face of Fascism and world crisis.

Participants in these dialogues over the years included leading figures such as philosophers Jean Wahl, Rachel Bespaloff, and Suzanne Langer; social scientists Claude Levi-Strauss and Hannah Arendt; composer Roger Sessions; poets Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore; critics Lionello Venturi and Robert Goldwater; and many artists. Marc Chagall, André Masson, Robert Motherwell, Stanley William Hayter, Ossip Zadkine, and Mount Holyoke's own Henry Rox all attended the gatherings on campus and presented papers or led discussions. Contemporary works of these artists from the Five College collections and friends of the Museum are featured in the exhibition.