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Insiders / Outsiders examines the extraordinarily rich contribution of refugees from Nazi-dominated Europe to the visual culture, art education and art-world structures of the United Kingdom.

In every field, emigres arriving from Europe in the 1930s introduced a professionalism, internationalism and bold avant-gardism to a British art world not known for these attributes. At a time when the issue of immigration is much debated, Insiders / Outsiders serves as a reminder of the importance of cultural cross-fertilization and of the deep, long-lasting and wide-ranging contribution that refugees make to British life.

Insiders/Outsiders is published to accompany a UK-wide arts festival of the same name running from March 2019 until March 2020.

Monica Bohm-Duchen is an independent, London-based art historian, curator and writer. The institutions for which she has worked include the Tate Gallery, the Royal Academy of Arts, Sotheby’s Institute of Art and the Courtauld Institute of Art. In the mid-1980s she acted as researcher and co-curator for the pioneering exhibition Art in Exile in Great Britain 1933-1945. Her many publications include After Auschwitz: Responses to the Holocaust in Contemporary Art (Lund Humphries, 1995 – contributing editor) and Art and the Second World War (Lund Humphries, 2013). She is the initiator and Creative Director of the nationwide arts festival, Insiders/Outsiders: Refugees from Nazi Europe and their Contribution to British Culture and contributing editor of the companion volume, focusing on the visual arts.

Anna Nyburg is an Honorary Lecturer at Imperial College London where she taught German, French and Italian for thirty years. Based on her PhD, her book Émigrés: The Transformation of Art Publishing in Britain was published by Phaidon in 2014. She is a committee member of the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies and in 2017, with director Robert Sternberg, produced the film Refuge Britain: Stories of Emigré Designers. She has contributed essays on the émigré designers and publishers to the Insiders/Outsiders anthology.

Daniel Snowman is a social and cultural historian. Born in London and educated at Cambridge and Cornell, he was a Lecturer at the University of Sussex and went on to work at BBC Radio. A Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research (University of London) since 2004, his books include The Hitler Emigrés: The Cultural Impact on Britain of Refugees from Nazism (first published by Chatto & Windus, 2002) and The Gilded Stage: A Social History of Opera (Atlantic Books, 2009). Daniel is Project Consultant to the Insiders/Outsiders Festival and author of the Introduction to the accompanying book.