To mark the 90th anniversary of the founding of Penguin Books, Dr. Anna Nyburg, author of Émigrés: The Transformation of Art Publishing in Britain (Phaidon, 2014), will pay tribute to the disproportionately large number of former refugees from Nazi Europe who contributed to the company’s extraordinary success.
As a result of exile from their homelands, Jewish refugee educators founded many schools in the UK. The schools were mostly boarding schools based on the principle of ‘Landerziehungsheime’ – ‘countryside educational homes.’
An émigré who moved to the UK with his family at the age of seven from Nazi Germany, Paul Hamlyn (né Hamburger,1926-2001) was an innovative publisher who re-engineered the publishing model and systemised creativity.
To mark the recent publication by Bloomsbury of his book Rogues and Scholars: Boom and Bust in the London Art Market, 1945–2000: James Stourton: Apollo, James Stourton will discuss his chosen topic.
Between 1933-1945, thousands of European refugees escaping Nazi persecution sought refuge in Britain. Due to an apathetic British Government, assistance for refugees was the responsibility of individuals, organisations, and businesses, such as Wedgwood.
In 1939, Leo and Greta Neumann established the fashion business ‘Rima Model Gowns’ at 8 St. George Street, Hannover Square, London.
“She believed in creative energy . . . She has lived, and always with her art and her great energy tried to provoke everybody else to live, in the light of freedom, in the light of spirit; and if, therefore, we could have a way of remembering her, let us always remember her as a prophetess of spirit and of freedom. That is all that she would want from us.”
In his latest publication Austrian-British multidisciplinary artist Hugo Max explores the internment of his great-grandfather as an ‘enemy alien’ on the Isle of Man during the Second World War.
In its first years of existence, the Glyndebourne Festival Opera set out to internationalize English opera culture, both by attracting international artists and leading proponents of a new concept of opera production and by giving émigrés the chance to further hone skills developed in Central Europe and beyond.
To mark the recent publication by the Manifesto Press of Volume 3 of Hans Hess: Selected Writings, Dr. Lucy Burke, Academic Director of the new Hans Hess Foundation, will introduce us to an important but hitherto under-examined art historian, curator and left-wing cultural activist.
In this walking tour we’ll discover the revolutionary Modernist homes and idealistic architecture built in Hampstead in the 1930s onwards
Discover how Hampstead’s war-time artistic scene supported and helped save refugee artists from Nazi Europe enabling them to come to London
In the autumn of 1933 a group of twenty-something largely unknown artists and designers felt impelled to begin organising against the threat of fascism and war. They determined to create a London-based artists’ auxiliary in support of progressive causes.
Sociologist Larry Ray, one of the contributors to the anthology Poverty for Sale: Edith Tudor Hart in Britain, recently published by MuseumsEtc, will give a talk about the life and work of photographer and committed communist Edith Tudor Hart.
Walking across the City, we discover the stories behind the people and sculptures of public art by immigrants and refugees
This illustrated presentation by Michael Lewis weaves together the story of his parents, of his father, a refugee from Nazi persecution and his mother, a Holocaust survivor. It draws on her memoir, A Time to Speak (1992) and Michael’s own book, Flight from Prague – the Making of a Refugee (2025), which for the first time tells his father’s story.
Burcu Dogramaci & Owen Hatherley in Conversation with Monica Bohm-Duchen
This talk examines the career of Paul Hamlyn (né Hamburger) (1926-2001), a story of personal ambition, publishing innovation, and industry change.
Romek Marber is probably most famous for the design of over seventy book covers for the Penguin Crime series in the 1960s as well as for the development of the Marber grid which made the layout of Penguin cover pages consistent across titles.
The Cassirers were a remarkable German Jewish family – highly successful in business and leaders of European culture.