This symposium will draw inspiration from our current archive display Together on this Island: Émigré Art Networks in Britain to present the work of art world figures who migrated to Britain from continental Europe in the mid-20th century, many fleeing Nazism, and to consider their contribution to British culture.
Drawing on archival research and case studies of individual figures, the programme will explore how émigrés shaped British artistic, intellectual, and public life, while addressing questions of displacement, identity, and belonging. It will also examine the role of institutions and support organisations in fostering cultural exchange and professional networks.
Full schedule coming soon.
Together on this Island: Émigré Art Networks in Britain will be on display in the Marie-Louise von Motesiczky Archive Gallery, Tate Britain until 20 June 2027.
This event is generously funded by the Marie-Louise von Motesiczky Charitable Trust.
10.00–10.30 | Registration and tea & coffee
10.30–10.40 | Welcome and Introduction, Emilie Bell, Symposium organiser
Morning session
10.40–11.00 | Fabian Macpherson (Tate archive cataloguer), Émigré Art Archives digitisation highlights
11.00–11.20 | Harriet Atkinson, ‘Showing the Underground Struggle Against Hitler: Solidarity Exhibitions in Britain During World War Two’
11.20–11.40 | Nicola Baird, ‘From Émigré to Englishman: Fred Uhlman ‘Painter of Dreams’’
11.40–11.50 | Break
11.50–12.10 | Ines Schlenker, ‘In Each Other’s Orbit: Marie-Louise von Motesiczky and Milein Cosman’
12.10–12.30 | Rebecca Harris, ‘Writing the Creative Self: on Émigré Women Artists, Networks and Friendship’
12.30–13.00 | Q&A
13.00–14.00 | Lunch
Afternoon session
14.00–14.20 | Rachel Dickson, ‘Morley College for Working Men and Women and its émigré artists and art historians, 1933-1953: Traces in Tate Archives’
14.20–14.40 | Dr Rosamund West, ‘Uli Nimptsch’s sculptures and the post-war rehousing of Londoners’
14.40–15.00 | Owen Hatherley, 'Against Urban Doom - Ruth Glass' everyday socialist urbanism, from Berlin to London'
15.00–15.20 | Q&A
15.20–15.50 | Plenary discussion
15.50–16.00 | Break
16.00–17.00 | Screening of short films, including award-winning FHK Henrion documentary Designing from Home.
Dr Nicola Baird, ‘From Émigré to Englishman: Fred Uhlman ‘Painter of Dreams’’
On 3 September 1936 Manfred [Fred] Uhlman immigrated to the English capital; he had no money and was little able to speak English. Two years later he and his wife Diana, née Croft’s Hampstead home at 47 Downshire Hill became the site of the foundation of both the Artists’ Refugee Committee – which assisted the flight of many artists from Czechoslovakia in the wake of the Munich Agreement – and the Free German League of Culture, an anti-Nazi refugee organisation whose members included Oskar Kokoschka and Stefan Zweig. In fact, the Uhlman’s home became a veritable haven for exiled émigré artists including pioneer of photomontage, John Heartfield and his wife Tutti, with German speaking refugees from Prague arriving almost daily, and meetings of the artists’ section of the Free German League of Culture taking place there until at least May 1940. And yet, despite his role in the co-founding of the Artist Refugee Committee, his co-leadership of the artists’ section of the Free German League of Culture, his membership of the London Group as well as active involvement in the activities of the Artists’ International Association, his contribution to British art and cultural life has been largely overlooked and thus demands greater critical recognition.
Having been celebrated in Paris as a ‘naïve’ artist for his ‘pictorial fantasies’ and ‘poetic’, ‘childlike vision’, in London Uhlman exhibited successfully as a ‘Romantic’ artist from the late 1930s up until the late 1950s, his work also included in the Exhibition of Twentieth Century German Art at the New Burlington Galleries in 1938 – the first and last major exhibition in which art produced in Nazi occupied countries was displayed (until the end of the war) – under the heading ‘artists now working in this country’. Inherent in his paintings is a peculiar sense of unreality which, by evading exact periodisation, allow them to function as mythic histories unbound by time. A selection of the extraordinary drawings he produced while interned as an ‘enemy alien’ on the Isle of Man during the Second World War were published by Jonathan Cape, under the title Captivity, in 1946. In addition to being an increasingly well-connected orchestrator and visual artist, Uhlman is also the author, among other things, of The Making of an Englishman, 1960 and the enduringly popular novella, Reunion, 1971 (adapted for film by Harold Pinter in 1989 and for stage by Ronan Wilmot in 2010), along with No Resurrection, Please and No Coward Soul, as well as the donor of a 72-piece collection of African sculpture to the Hatton Gallery, Newcastle.
Dr Harriet Atkinson, ‘Showing the underground struggle against Hitler: solidarity exhibitions in Britain during World War Two’
Drawing on material in my book Showing Resistance: propaganda and modernist exhibitions in Britain, 1933-53 (Manchester, 2024), this talk traces how exhibitions mounted in Britain during World War Two became the focus for expressing political solidarities. They acted as a shared project, denoting fellow membership of groupings to form cohesive social contacts and providing a voice to newly arriving refugees who were rebuilding their lives in Britain. I will discuss how such World War Two solidarity exhibitions were mounted in unlikely places: from car showrooms to shop windows and bombsites; focusing on Allies Inside Germany, 1942, an exhibition mounted in an evacuated West End store in London and designed by refugee artists René Graetz, Heinz Worner, Hans Fladung and John Heartfield. The exhibition showed people playing a key role in anti-fascist resistance from inside Nazi Germany – ‘the underground struggle of the German Anti-Nazis against Hitler’, as its flyer explained – and raised money to produce propaganda material to be dropped over Germany.
Ines Schlenker, ‘In Each Other’s Orbit: Marie-Louise von Motesiczky and Milein Cosman’
The Austrian artist Marie-Louise von Motesickzy (1906-1996) and the German artist Milein Cosman (1921-2017) both emigrated to England in 1939. Meeting in 1950 they developed a close friendship that lasted until Motesiczky’s death. Despite the different media they favoured, they also formed a strong professional relationship. Occasionally working together, they created each other’s portraits and found artistic inspiration in each other’s families, circles of friends and fellow émigrés. Motesiczky had already forged links to artists such as Max Beckmann and Oskar Kokoschka, who would both later go into exile, while living in Vienna and stayed mainly within émigré circles in London. Cosman, in contrast, built up a vast network of contacts in the UK that, besides émigré artists such as John Heartfield, also included many British cultural creatives.
Rebecca Harris, ‘Writing the Creative Self: on Émigré Women Artists, Networks and Friendship’
In correspondence, a voice is given to writing, articulating on several levels with autobiographical moments written into the layers of the text. To study artists in the J.P Hodin archive involves witnessing individuals reconstructing lives resulting from displacement, experiences coming forth in the artist’s writing. Ideas - philosophical elements even- are immersed with a criticism and celebration of art and culture. Works of poetry, diary entries, also letters and seemingly ephemeral notetaking, can shift our perspective when encountering artworks, as well as disrupt the assumptions and conventions of reading around art.
In the archive we encounter the territory of non-belonging, the cultivation of distinct voices and “a plurality of vision outside the habitus.”[1] J.P. Hodin’s Way of Life: Life and Work of the Painter Hilde Goldschmidt, 1976 contains the artist’s anecdotes- diary entries bear witness to a belief that “One’s inner world is the true homeland.”[2] As if portraying Else Meidner herself, Hodin describes her art containing “inner reserve” and the artist of another time. Yet, her poetic prose on Beethoven and Mozart recall contemporary writings of Anton Ehrenzweig[3], both artists representative of the shifting spaces that existed in the visual arts in the second half of the 20th century.
This paper begins with a focus on Hilde Goldschmidt and Else Meidner to consider a broader analysis of materials, aesthetics, and concepts in the art of émigré artists, reframing creative practice as a dialogue with history, literature, and broader diasporic experience through artist writing.
[2] J.P. Hodin, Way of Life: Life and Work of the Painter Hilde Goldschmidt (Portland, OR Encore Publishing, 1976), 5. Written 16 July, 1950.
[3] Together on This Island: Émigré Art Networks in Britain, Tate Britain, London. Until 20 January 2027.
Rachel Dickson, ‘Morley College for Working Men and Women and its émigré artists and art historians, 1933-1953: Traces in Tate Archives’
Recent scholarship has explored the important contribution made by the Hitler émigrés to London art institutions (see Insiders/Outsiders, ed. Monica Bohm-Duchen, Lund Humphries, 2019). However, attention has largely ignored Morley College for Working Men and Women, a progressive and liberal adult education institution in Lambeth (not far from Tate) which provided employment for refugees across multiple disciplines, including art history, theory and practice, and German language. Its extended hours and wide range of courses enabled both men and women to learn - and to teach - while continuing other commitments. Refugee art tutors included early arrival, Nikolaus Pevsner, who taught ‘British painters from 17th-20th Centuries’ in session 1934-35; Gerard Frankl, artist, art historian and picture restorer ('Drawing and Painting', 1949); German sculptor, Else Fraenkel ('Portrait making in sculpture and drawing', 1949); and Czechoslovaks, Francis (Frantisek) Littna and Nicholas Egon, offering art history and theory in the late 1940s and early 1950s (Littna in particular, introducing aspects of European modernism). Married German sculptors, Erna and Hermann Nonnenmacher, jointly taught ‘Modelling and Pottery’ postwar, while Austrian exile couple, Robert Spira (who studied at the Courtauld) and his wife, writer/painter, Mela, taught German. Given the lack of Morley archives, due partly to wartime destruction, traces of these individuals within Tate archives help to illuminate neglected narratives. Drawing on archives from pivotal figures,such as Kenneth Clark, Lady Peter Norton, and Marie Louise von Moteciszky, as well as from Morley and Ben Uri, this presentation foregrounds Morley’s refugees, their informal networks and roles in art education and cultural exchange, joining the better-known cohort who so enriched the College's Music department.
Rosamund West, ‘Uli Nimptsch’s sculptures and the post-war rehousing of Londoners’
In the post-war period, Berlin-born Julius Nimptsch (1897-1977) produced two sculptures as part of the London County Council’s patronage of the arts scheme installed in housing settings. Both now missing, Boy on a Dolphin (1961) was installed at Roupell Court Old People’s Home and Neighbourly Encounter (1961) was installed on the Silwood Estate. These were installed as part of the LCC’s wider rebuilding of London and subsequent rehousing of Londoners.
Nimptsch was one of many artists who emigrated to Britain in the years between 1933 and 1945, a number of which were Jews and left-wing political refugees. Several of the sculptors the LCC used in its patronage of the arts programme were such émigrés, such as Peter Laszlo Peri, Franta Belsky, Siegfried Charoux, Georg Ehrlich and Willi Soukop. This paper will closely analyse these two Nimptsch works to discuss their subject, Nimptsch’s position as a German working in post-war London and the relevance for London’s post-war reconstruction and rehousing.
Owen Hatherley, 'Against Urban Doom - Ruth Glass' everyday socialist urbanism, from Berlin to London'
'The German-Jewish emigre and adoptive Londoner Ruth Glass was one of the most cited people in history, and her work is entirely out of print. Known for coining the term 'gentrification' in her pivotal 1964 London - Aspects of Change, Glass is worth remembering for much more than being the unread underpinning of a thousand theses and hot takes. The Berliner, sociologist, anti-imperialist and socialist thinker created, over her long, if hardly prolific career, one of the few analyses of cities in the post-war era that still stand up today. Rather than the urbanophobia of an E.F Schumacher or the flimsy urbanophilia of Jane Jacobs and her followers, her work combined an obvious enjoyment and pleasure in moving through and living in the urban landscape - from the industrial panorama of Middlesbrough to bus journeys in west London - with a constant attention to the realities of class, race and capitalism and the ways in which they shape and distort lives. In this contribution to the symposium we will ask who Glass was, how she fits, or doesn't fit, in the wider cultural emigration to London, what her ideas were, and why it is that none of her books are available today when many lesser thinkers remain part of the textbooks and policy kits of urban studies and urban planning.'
Nicola Baird
Dr Nicola Baird is an independent scholar and curator specializing in twentieth-century and contemporary British and European art and cultural history. Previous exhibitions have included Fred Uhlman (Burgh House; Hatton Gallery, 2018), Czech Routes to Britain (Ben Uri Gallery, 2019), Becoming Gustav Metzger (Ben Uri Gallery, 2021), Knots: Jonny Briggs x Burgh House- Contemporary Interventions into an Historic House (Burgh House, 2021-2022), 'The line is an unreal thing': Dorothy Mead and Edna Mann (LSBU, 2024) and Tereza Buskova: Mothers without Hands (The New Art Gallery, Walsall, 2026). She is a Section Editor for Open Cultural Studies & an Editorial Assistant at The International Yearbook of Futurism Studies (De Gruyter).
Harriet Atkinson
Dr Harriet Atkinson is a historian of art and design at University of Brighton’s Centre for Design History, where she leads the MA Curating Collections and Heritage. Her books include Showing Resistance: propaganda and modernist exhibitions in Britain, 1933-53 (Manchester University Press, 2024), winner, 2026 Historians of British Art Book Award for Exemplary Scholarship 1800-1960, and The Festival of Britain: a land and its people (I.B. Tauris, 2012). She has made two films, both focusing on emigre artists and designers : Art on the Streets (2023, co-directed with Jane Dibblin) and Designing from Home (2025, co-directed with Dr Sue Breakell), winner, Best Short Documentary, London Independent Film Festival 2026.
Ines Schlenker
Ines Schlenker is an independent art historian with a research focus on National Socialist, ‘degenerate’ and émigré art. Hitler’s Salon, her study of the officially approved art in the Third Reich as shown at the Great German Art Exhibition, was published in 2007. She wrote the catalogue raisonné of the paintings of the Vienna-born émigré Marie-Louise von Motesiczky (2009) and co-edited the artist’s correspondence with the writer Elias Canetti (2011). Recent publications include Capturing Time, a study of the life and work of the émigré artist Milein Cosman (2019), and Chagall (2022). She is a member of the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies.
Rebecca Harris
Rebecca Harris is at Royal Holloway, University of London, developing her PhD titled Material Thinking, Translation, Unmaking History: Reinterpreting Traumatic Resonance in Postwar Jewish Women’s Art and Literature. She has presented at cultural and arts organisations (ICA, JW3 and Wiener Holocaust Library), collaborating with researchers and artists at Charles University, Prague and Humboldt-University, Berlin. Rebecca’s research and pedagogical practices crossover through a consideration of multivariate creative practices and critical frameworks. She co-curated an exhibition/talk series at the MSA Conference, Newcastle University (2023) and [Opening the Brackets] of Memory at Fundación Cazadores and ZonderFlag Centro de Art Contemporáneo, Buenos Aires (2026).
Rachel Dickson
Dr Rachel Dickson is Consulting Editor, Ben Uri Research Unit, formerly Head of Curatorial Services, Ben Uri Gallery and Museum (2011-2020). Her research and curatorial projects focus on émigré artists and designers in 20th-21st century Britain, particularly those who fled Nazi-occupied Europe, and she has published and spoken widely on this topic. A committee member for the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies, University of London, she has contributed to several Yearbooks and was contributing co-editor for Yearbook Vol. 19: The Applied Arts in British Exile from 1933 (Brill, 2019).
Rosamund West
Dr Rosamund Lily West is a lecturer and architectural historian. She currently leads Contextual Studies at KCL School of Design, West Dean; is a Research Fellow at the Survey of London, UCL and an Associate Lecturer at the University of the Arts London. Before entering academia, she worked in museums for 15 years, holding curatorial positions at London Transport Museum, Kingston Museum and as Paul Mellon Research Curator at the Royal Society of Sculptors.
Owen Hatherley
Owen Hatherley writes regularly about aesthetics and politics for the Architectural Review, Jacobin, the London Review of Books, the New Statesman, Sidecar and Tribune. He is the author of seventeen books, most recently The Alienation Effect – How Central European Emigres Transformed the British Twentieth Century (Penguin, 2025). He presented the Inter-Cities podcast for Open City, and was the writer and presenter of The Story of Solent City, a one-off documentary for Radio 4. He is currently working on a book about the modernist city in East Asia.
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