Although the role played by European émigrés in reshaping American cultural life in the 1930s and 1940s has long been recognized in this country as an historical development of immense intellectual consequence, the exhibition which Stephanie Barron has organized at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art this spring under the title “Exiles and Emigrés: The Flight of European Artists from Hitler,”[1] is the first event of its kind to concentrate on the work these artists produced during their period of exile and its impact on American thinking about art. In the exhibition’s book-length catalogue, the scope of the inquiry is expanded to encompass some of the émigré writers, musicians, art historians, art dealers, and museum curators who also exerted a significant influence on modern cultural life in this country. In both the exhibition and its ambitious catalo ...