LONDON.- Coinciding with the 80th anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War, a new book honours the deep impact of refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe on British culture.

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, émigrés 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.

Edited by Monica Bohm-Duchen: Monica Bohm-Duchen is an independent, London-based art historian, curator and writer. The institutions for which she has worked include Tate, 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 (held first in Berlin and then at the Camden Arts Centre, London). At Birkbeck, University of London, where she is Associate Lecturer, she teaches a course entitled The Immigrant Experience in Modern British Art. 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).

Contributions by: Richard Aronowitz, Harriet Atkinson, Michael Berkowitz, Morwenna Blewett, Monica Bohm-Duchen, Charmian Brinson, Andrew Chandler, Hans Christian Hönes, Leyla Daybelge, Rachel Dickson, Keith Holz, Amanda Hopkinson, Swantje Kuhfuss-Wickenheiser, Simon Lake, Sarah MacDougall, Anna Müller-Härlin, Sir Norman Rosenthal, Anna Nyburg, Michael Paraskos, Antony Penrose, Alan Powers and Daniel Snowman.