Passover and the Easter holidays mean that this month is a quiet one for Insiders/Outsiders. But rest assured that May and June will see a resumption of a more intensive programme of online events.
Thus, the main event taking place is on Monday 11 April at 6pm, when poet and sculptor Stephen Duncan FRSS, son of poet Beata Duncan and grandson of Weimar playwright Hans Rehfisch, both Berlin-born refugees who found sanctuary in the UK, will talk about the influence on his career of Michael Werner, Willi Soukop and Riccardo Priulli Bon – all refugees and émigrés and all interned as ‘enemy aliens’ in 1940. Feeling himself to be as much a product of a European tradition as of a British one, he will reflect on how the success of Modernism in the UK can be seen as emerging from these cross-cultural energies.
For further details and to book, click here.
Image: Stephen Duncan, Waiting for the Wind, 1995
Looking Ahead
Unfortunately, the talk by Marjorie Downward about ‘Schools on the Move’ has had to be postponed until later in the year. However, to mark the publication on 28 April of The School that Escaped the Nazis, a new book by Deborah Cadbury that tells the remarkable story of Bunce Court, the progressive school brought over to the safety of England by Anna Essinger, we’re planning a talk by the author in the near future. Details will be announced soon
Image: Bookcover (detail)
On Wednesday 4 May at 6pm UK time, Lydia Goehr, Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, NYC and part of an eminent émigré musical family, will be in conversation with Steven Gerrard, Professor of Philosophy at Williams College, Massachusetts and Daniel Herwitz, Professor of Philosophy, History of Art and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan, about her startlingly original new book Red Sea – Red Square – Red Thread. A Philosophical Detective Story.
To book, click here.
Image: Bookcover (detail)
On Monday 16 May and Wednesday 18 May, both at 6pm UK time, US-based clinical psychologist Irit Felsen will give two talks for Insiders/Outsiders in partnership with the Association of Jewish Refugees. The first of these will focus on the role played by art in the work of first generation survivors of the Holocaust, and the second on the function of art for members of the second generation.
Booking details to follow.
Image: Irit Felson
Monday 30 May at 11am, outside No.3 Golden Square, London WIF 9HR, the ceremony to lay a Stolperstein for Ada (Anna) van Dantzig, at the initiative of Morwenna Blewett and several times delayed due to Covid, will finally take place. The first Stolperstein ever to be laid in the UK, it commemorates a young Dutch-Jewish paintings conservator who came to this country in the 1930s to work, but in 1939 decided to try to rejoin her family in the Netherlands. She was murdered in Auschwitz on 14 February 1943. For further details, click here.
Image: Ada (Anna) van Dantzig