The man behind a covert WW2 operation

He flew to Lisbon and took trains to Marseilles, where he created an office at the Hôtel Splendide, overlooking the city's harbour – a location that is evocatively recreated in Transatlantic. Straightaway, Fry began to establish a network of allies who could hatch escape plans, forge documentation and exchange money on the black market. Fry became renowned among the underground network of refugees in France and was soon deluged with requests for repatriation. He received 25 letters a day, and the phone was constantly ringing. A typical day could involve up to 120 interviews. He was also squeezed between a hostile Vichy police force who were constantly hounding him in Marseilles and a tetchy US State Department, which at this point were intent on keeping the US out of the war and saw Fry's work as illegal and a threat to their neutrality.

Fry was driven by political convictions and by his love of the arts. But he also helped all kinds of persecuted minorities – anti-Nazis, activists, writers and intellectuals who publicly resisted Hitler's policies – and even British soldiers marooned in France. The Emergency Rescue Committee was increasingly frustrated by Fry's ever-expanding list of refugees and their relationship became fraught. But Fry continued his mission. The danger and high stakes of the operation provided an adrenaline high that was hard to walk away from. "The truth is that I like this job better than any I have ever had in my life," he wrote to his wife.

Fry and his team rented a villa – Air Bel – on the outskirts of Marseilles, which came complete with frescoed walls, antique fireplaces, and a grand piano. This would be where many artists stayed while Fry worked on their exit visas and transport options. Temporarily it became home to a high-spirited bunch of Surrealist artists who stunned Fry with their imaginative discussions, open-minded love affairs and bizarre games. Transatlantic comes alive with the fancifully recreated scenes of Surrealist parties at Air Bel, and even has segments of black-and-white Surrealist-inspired cinema (modern homages, made in a Surrealist style) to evoke the flavour of creative anarchy. Among the artists and intellectuals who stayed there were titanic figures in the arts like German-born painter Max Ernst, the Cuban artist Wifredo Lam, the Spanish painter Remedios Varo, and the French father of Surrealism, André Breton. They all needed exit visas, affidavits to mollify the US immigration authorities, and transport tickets – a labyrinth of bureaucracy which Fry and his team navigated to ensure their safe route away from Europe.

Ernst departed for New York via Portugal with a newfound lover, Peggy Guggenheim. Lam and Breton waved farewell to Marseilles onboard a converted freighter bound for Martinique. Varo emigrated to Mexico from Casablanca. After Fry had worked out an escape route for the Russian-born Jewish painter Marc Chagall, the artist gave him a small drawing as a thank-you: it depicted a female goat in a fur holding a violin. Chagall and his family arrived by boat in New York in June 1941.

Transatlantic is a lively reimagining of historical events, giving prominence to the host of supporters who assisted Fry in his mission and their intertwined relationships. In reality, how pivotal was the work of Varian Fry and the ERC in shaping the history of art?

A new cultural hub

In December 1941, Fortune magazine described the influx of artists to New York City as "the greatest migration of intellectuals since the Byzantine". The US was now home to a golden generation of European culture. But the key impact was, as Robert Hughes observed, for US artists to see the great European cultural heroes, "not as remote demigods or intellectual father figures on the other shore of the Atlantic but as regular presences on the scene." The mere presence of people like Breton, the founder of surrealism, confirmed New York as the new world's new cultural hub. It imbued a generation of New York artists with a powerful new self-confidence, and beckoned international artists to live and work there. Ai Weiwei, Shirin Neshat, and Yoko Ono (to name just a minuscule selection) were part of a vibrant new generation of artists who were attracted not to Paris – the globe's previous capital of the arts – but to the Big Apple.

Ernst was one of the most influential of the cultural émigrés. Once in his new home city of New York, he began to experiment with a 'drip' technique of painting, first used in his painting The Bewildered Planet. He hung a can of paint above a canvas from three lengths of string and punctured its base, and by swinging it back and forth the trails of pigment autogenerated an abstract painting beneath. The drip technique would have a profound influence on Abstract Expressionism, particularly Jackson Pollock, whose drip method owes a debt to Ernst and the other Surrealist "autonomous" techniques.

But it wasn't just New York that benefitted from the cultural exodus from Europe. Varo, who had been aided by Fry and the ERC to escape Marseilles, ended up in Mexico, a nation that transformed and invigorated her artistic vision. She fell in with an inspirational group of likeminded artists including Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and Leonora Carrington and she discovered the style that would become her hallmark: a brand of hyper-detailed, fantastical Surrealism imbued with subtle feminist subtexts. We can look forward to a major retrospective of her art opening at the Chicago Institute of Art on 29 July, 2023, a show that affirms her status as one of the most imaginative artists of the late 20th Century.

Wifredo Lam, the Cuban-born painter who had fought in the Spanish Civil War and been taught by Pablo Picasso, eventually returned to his native Cuba, via Martinique, in 1941 thanks to Fry and the ERC. In Cuba, he was inspired by the intertwining cultures and identities of his homeland, expanding the European-born language of Surrealism to incorporate themes like social justice, racial identity and post-colonial politics and leaving behind some of the most powerful paintings to be produced in the late 20th Century.

All these artists and so many more owe a debt to Varian Fry. But while they thrived in their new homes, Fry's own life suffered when he returned to America. He struggled to adjust to civilian life after his high-octane operations in occupied Europe. His wife divorced him, he was rejected from the US army and even the ERC distanced itself from him. Tragically, his wartime work was only recognised many years after he died in 1967: in 1994, he was named "Righteous Among the Nations" by Yad Vashem (commemorating non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust), and in 1997, the French Government awarded him the Légion d'Honneur.

In Transatlantic, Fry is a diligent problem-solver rather than a hero, and the light of glory is cast on a host of other important personalities in his clandestine network. We don't see the flowering of so many artistic careers that was enabled by his actions, or the effect those artists then had on New York in making it into a cultural centre in the later 20th Century. But at least his valuable and brave wartime work is getting a portion of the mainstream credit it so fully deserves.

Transatlantic is streaming on Netflix from 7 April.

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