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 catalogue we are thus recalled to a period that effected one of the greatest transformations in the life of art in this country—including its public life in the museums, the schools, and the media—in our entire history. There is a sense in which it can truly be said that it wasn’t until the age of the émigrés in the Thirties and Forties that American cultural life was brought into alignment with the imperatives of the kind of intellectual modernity that had dominated the high culture of Europe since the turn of the century.

The age of the émigrés was also a period that eventually brought an enormous change in the