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Insiders/Outsiders, published to accompany a UK-wide arts festival of the same name in 2019, examines the extraordinarily rich and pervasive contribution of refugees from Nazi-dominated Europe to the visual culture, art education and art-world structures of the United Kingdom. In every field, migrs arriving from Europe in the 1930s – supported by a small number of like-minded individuals already resident in the UK – 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, the book 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.

Monica Bohm-Duchen is an independent London-based art historian with a longstanding interest in the relationship of art to war, trauma, displacement and cultural cross-fertilisation. The institutions for which she has worked include Tate, the National 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 a pioneering exhibition (held first in Berlin and then at the Camden Arts Centre) entitled Art in Exile in Great Britain 1933-1945. Her many publications include After Auschwitz: Responses to the Holocaust in Contemporary Art (1995 – contributing editor) and Art and the Second World War (2013); and at Birkbeck, University of London, where she is Associate Lecturer, she recently introduced a course entitled The Immigrant Experience in Modern British Art.