A new manifesto for Europe's artists by Bernard-Henri Lévy

Europe is on the ropes. The rise of extremism and populism; the return of nationalism in various guises; the prospect of Brexit in Britain; the success, in Hungary, Austria, and elsewhere, of illiberal regimes bent on destroying democracy with its own tools—all of these developments threaten the lofty idea of a continent of peace and freedom; all of them cast doubt on the prospect of a community of diverse peoples united by a culture that rose from the ashes of the Second World War, one bound together by shared values and open to the rest of the world.

Three-quarters of a century from the cataclysm, Europe needs touchstones more than ever. More than ever it needs to reaffirm its paradoxical unity, its soul forged from tragedy and pulsing with the invincible life of dreams and ideas. More than ever it needs to remember that it is so much more than a bureaucracy operating under incomprehensible rules and spouting murky directives sometimes worthy of Franz Kafka. We never forget that Europe is also the free circulation of ideas and works of art and thought. Europe is the homeland of philosophers, poets, and artists. Europe encourages the trade of ideas, the flowering of beauty, the freedom to create. And Europe is something else, which we too often forget: it is a shared aesthetic heritage and memory.

Europe was a land in which great catastrophes, perhaps the worst that contemporary humankind has known, were born and spread. But it is also the land in which those catastrophes have been pondered and mourned, deeply, dutifully, unflaggingly. It is the land in which were conceived the institutional and intellectual tools needed to prevent the return of evil. And we must not forget that it is toward Europe, toward its idea of freedom, law, and human rights, toward its project of creating a civilization in which the systematic persecution of bodies and souls has been banished, that persecuted people everywhere turn to escape the savagery of dictatorship.

Yet today this same continent is prey to external powers that would subject and dismember it; to internal forces that would have Europe shed the noble burden of concern for others, of hospitality without borders, and of the sanctity of law; and to Europeans’ own discouragement and lack of faith in themselves, to the “ash of the great lassitude” that a great German philosopher a century ago saw as the continent’s greatest peril.

Europe remains a land ever and always shaped by the arts. It is the continent on a human scale that Georges Steiner described as being one of walks and of reading in cafes. It is the continent of museums in which citizens can surrender to the discovery of ancient art, relive the Renaissance, or celebrate the Impressionists, Bauhaus, or Dada—where they can, in short, connect through thought with the exceptional moments that shaped us all. Inversely, art is one of the glues that hold Europe together.

A major part of the identity that we all share—from Dublin to Budapest, Lisbon to London, and Paris to Prague—was forged by writers, thinkers, and artists.

This Manifesto was born from a simple observation. Writers have spoken out. Thinkers have expressed their fear of the abyss opening at their feet. From Milan Kundera to Salman Rushdie, from Mario Vargas Llosa to Simon Schama and Ian McEwan, from Claudio Magris to Nobel winner Herta Müller, they cosigned a first statement in January that shared with this one an urgent concern at how the current populist thrust was compromising Europe’s values.

Since then, the citizens of Europe, European patriots of probity and conviction, have had a chance to express—in an electoral process concluding this past May 26—their worry at the return of a style of governance characterized by the brutality, kitsch, and closed-mindedness of the new populist international. Yet, to date, Europe’s artists have not made themselves heard. The Europeans by nature and vocation that artists have been for centuries have not had their say. This is regrettable, since perhaps no one has more to tell us in this time of great malaise in our civilization.

For who, in fact, is more essentially and spontaneously European than a painter or a sculptor, whether living in Italy or Germany, whether working in Spain or France, whether dreaming in Czech, English, Portuguese, or all three at once? Is it not the very definition of a European to have one’s work irrigated by what one discovers in one’s imaginary museum as well as by what one encounters in wandering, in seclusion, and in exile? Who knows better than an artist that territory is a point of departure more than a place of confinement and that the most authentic dialogues of the spirit and of the hands that wield the pens and brushes, the truest horizons of the world, both real and dreamed, pay little heed to borders? Who better than the artist, then, to defend the Europe of wisdom and whimsy, of fact and fancy, that the nationalists, populists, and xenophobes seek today to seize and destroy?

In signing this appeal, artists living and working on the continent, Europeans of Italian, British, German, Belgian, Serbian, and Danish origin, along with others from Africa, Latin America, and elsewhere who have chosen Europe for their workshop, declare that Europe, too, is their homeland; by this statement they tell the world that Europe is the air they breathe, the air they need to live, a part of the heritage which they embody and to which they are indebted; Europe is a precious asset worthy of being defended against those who would squander it, discredit it, and forget it.

Signed:

Bernard-Henri Lévy - Adel Abdessemed - Marina Abramovic - Claire Adelfang - Jean-Marie Appriou - Ron Arad - Miquel Barcelo - Daniel Buren - Francesco Clemente - Shezad Dawood - Richard Deacon - Marlene Dumas - Elmgreen & Dragset – VALIE EXPORT - Jan Fabre - Sylvie Fleury - Douglas Gordon - Antony Gormley - Julio Le Parc - Ross Lovegrove - Yan Pei-Ming - Giuseppe Penone - Grayson Perry - Marc Quinn - Gerwald Rockenschaub - Pascale Marthine Tayou - Juergen Teller - Morgane Tschiember - Luc Tuymans - Xavier Veilhan - Bernar Venet - Francesco Vezzoli - Erwin Wurm

A selection of thirty artworks donated by contemporary artists and performers will be auctioned on June 3 with funds raised donated to European cultural projects