An essential examination of how emigration and resettlement defined modernism

In the fraught years leading up to World War II, many modern artists and architects emigrated from continental Europe to the United States and Britain. The experience of exile infused their modernist ideas with new urgency and forced them to use certain materials in place of others, modify existing works, and reconsider their approach to design itself. In Objects in Exile, Robin Schuldenfrei reveals how the process of migration was crucial to the development of modernism, charting how modern art and architecture was shaped by the need to constantly face--and transcend--the materiality of things.

Taking readers from the prewar era to the 1960s, Schuldenfrei explores the objects these