Catalogue of an exhibition held at Marlborough Fine Art (London) Limited, 2-31 October 1981.

The Building Studies series examines important buildings through original documents, detailed text, photography, and drawings in an affordable format.

This book explores the image and identity of émigré painters, sculptors and graphic artists from Nazi Germany in Britain between 1933 and 1945. It focuses on a neglected field of Exile Studies, that of exiled artists in Britain. Methodologies used in this study have been developed by Exile Studies and History of Art, but also by Postcolonialism, scholars of which usually apply their ideas to the Afro-Asian emigration of the second part of the twentieth century. Thus this study represents methodologically a new way of looking at the emigration from Nazi Germany. Identity and Image is divided into five chapters: After an introductory Chapter One (historiography of the topic, methodology of the study, structure of the book), Chapter Two establishes socio-political patterns of emigration and provides an historical framework for Chapters Three and Four, which concentrate on the image and identity of the refugee artist, the former based on written sources and the latter on visual material. In detail, Chapter Three analyses the British image of the refugee artists and their works on the one hand and the émigrés' self-representations on the other, the latter exemplified by refugee organisations (the Free German League of Culture/Freier Deutscher Kulturbund, the Austrian Centre, the Anglo-Sudeten Club and the Czech Institute) and institutions founded by émigré artists (Jack Bilbo's Modern Art Gallery and Arthur Segal's Painting School). Chapter Four examines the works produced in internment and those exhibited and produced for the refugee organisations discussed in Chapter Three. Chapter Five discusses the results of this study in the light of three postcolonial concepts: diaspora communities, the notion of home and the gendered identity of the refugee. The appendix lists all painters, sculptors and graphic artists from Nazi Germany in Britain with biographical details. Apart from visual and written sources discussed for the first time, there are two major results of the study: First, although the artists were united as refugees, this unity did not lead to a unity in art - "refugee art" is a construction put forward by the British press and the refugee organisations, particularly the Free German League of Culture. Second, contrary to claims that modern art was international and formed a universal unity that "transgressed" nationality, neither the West/Europe nor modernism form unities; instead, in the 1930s and 1940s, cultures in Europe constructed conceptions of other European cultures on the basis of nation-state identities.

From the contents: Charmian BRINSON: Autobiography in exile: the reflections of women refugees from Nazism in British exile, 1933-1945. - Alexander STEPHAN: Hetz- und Greuelpropaganda. Die Uberwachung der deutschen Exilschriftsteller in Grossbritannien durch das Auswartige Amt. - Jorg THUNECKE: Die Isle of Man-Lagerzeitungen The Camp und The Onchan Pioneer: Kultur im Ausnahmezustand."

Abstract:

These essays deals with a variety of theatrical activities of refugees from Nazi Germany in Britain, approached from a British standpoint. The problems inherent in any cultural transfer from one country to another are discussed as well as the impact of Central European traditions on the industry.

German artist Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948) is best known for his pioneering work in fusing collage and abstraction, the two most transformative innovations of twentieth-century art. Considered the father of installation art, Schwitters was also a theorist, a Dadaist, and a writer whose influence extends from Robert Rauschenberg and Eva Hesse to Thomas Hirschhorn. But while his early experiments in collage and installation from the interwar period have garnered much critical acclaim, his later work has generally been ignored. In the first book to fill this gap, Megan R. Luke tells the fascinating, even moving story of the work produced by the aging, isolated artist under the Nazi regime and during his years in exile. Combining new biographical material with archival research, Luke surveys Schwitters’s experiments in shaping space and the development of his Merzbau, describing his haphazard studios in Scandinavia and the United Kingdom and the smaller, quieter pieces he created there. She makes a case for the enormous relevance of Schwitters’s aesthetic concerns to contemporary artists, arguing that his later work provides a guide to new narratives about modernism in the visual arts. These pieces, she shows, were born of artistic exchange and shaped by his rootless life after exile, and they offer a new way of thinking about the history of art that privileges itinerancy over identity and the critical power of humorous inversion over unambiguous communication. Packed with images, Kurt Schwitters completes the narrative of an artist who remains a considerable force today.

Catalogue of an exhibition held at Marlborough Fine Art (London) Limited, 2-31 October 1981.

"Expressionism reassesed focuses on the multi-disciplinary development of Expressionism, setting it in a cultural, political, and historical context. The international team of specialists cover painting, music, theatre, sculpture, film opera, architecture, and dance." -- Back cover.