Insiders/Outsiders Monica Bohm Duchen Ed. (Lund Humphries, £40)

You may not have noticed, but there’s a year-long nation-wide festival taking place, consisting of art exhibitions, films, dance and theatre performances, talks and discussions and much else, celebrating and exploring the contributions made to British art and culture by the refugees from Nazi Europe. 

The driving force behind this is Monica Bohm Duchen, the art critic and scholar, and it is backed by a long and distinguished list of sponsors. The present, lavishly illustrated book, edited by Bohm Duchen, with a preface by Norman Rosenthal and an introduction by Daniel Snowman, consists of a series of commissioned essays on every aspect of the topic, exploring émigré contributions to the visual arts, architecture, design, photography, art history, publishing, collecting and much else. 

There are also contextualising essays on Hampstead in the 1930s and ’40s as a Modernist sanctuary; on artistic life in the British internment camps in which many of the refugees were at first locked up; and on key British supporters, such as Roland Penrose, Herbert Read, and George Bell, Bishop of Chichester.

The idea is to enrich our understanding of the complex interplay between refugees fleeing for their lives and needing to make a living in the country they found themselves in, yet with strong and sometimes obsessive views on how to do things, and the host country with its own, long-held convictions and practices, and whose views on the refugees ranged from delighted welcome to arrogant dismissal. Too often, however, the essays overwhelm us with long lists of names and a plethora of facts with little sense of critical engagement. The best essays are those which are not afraid to pass judgment. Thus Hans Christian Hönes points out that the Warburg School of art history, with its antiquarian spirit and methodological conservatism, which, to most people, still by-and-large represents German art history, was far from representative, and some of the most important schools of art historical thought, formalist or Marxist, for example, “held no sway for those advocating the teaching of an intellectually ‘rigorous’ art history at British universities.”

The most interesting contributions tend also to be those on the least obvious topics, such as Amanda Hopkinson’s account of the importance of Picture Post, with its array of brilliant and mainly émigré photographers, or Sarah McDougall’s of the way minor émigré artists made their way into teaching positions not just in art colleges but in schools, where they inspired a new generation of artists, such as the native-born Elizabeth Frink and Gillian Ayres and the “foreign” Lucien Freud, Frank Auerbach and Eduardo Paolozzi.

As both Rosenthal and Snowman remind us, this book may be about the past but it is also about the present. Refugees always enrich the societies they settle in but we should not be naïve about the problems they bring with them. 

In October 1945, Bohm Duchen reports, when the full extent of the Nazi atrocities was well-known, “members of the Women’s Guild of Empire, in collusion with several other right-wing organisations, circulated an ‘anti-alien’ petition with 3,000 signatures, calling for foreign refugees to be evicted from their Hampstead homes to make room for returning British people”. Plus ça change…

Gabriel Josipovici’s latest book ‘Forgetting’ is published this month