ABSTRACT
California’s history and development have long been shaped by migration. The 1848 Gold Rush led to dramatic social and demographic changes, with large-scale immigration from the East and abroad and an accompanying economic boom. During the period between the Civil War and the First World War, the state’s population exploded from about 400,000 in 1860 to nearly 3.5 million in 1920, drawing in immigrants from Latin America, Asia, and Europe as well as from other parts of the USA (Paddison 2015). During the 1930s, another 1.3 million individuals from the Midwest and Southwest migrated to California, boosting the state population to more than five million (“Farm Labor in the 1930s” 2003). Faced with a need for leadership and professional guidance in the fields of culture and the fine arts, the tendency was to look to Europe for direction. The artists, intellectuals, and scholars who came to California in the 1930s and 1940s as émigrés from Europe, however, were unusual among immigrants. The USA initially held little appeal for them as a destination; those forced to leave Germany after 1933 usually attempted to settle in other European countries first. In many cases, only the imminent threat of death led them to give up their deeply held bond to the European continent-by which time it was frequently too late. Of those who came to the USA, many met with favor, but they faced language barriers and increasing competition for a diminishing number of permanent appointments. This chapter looks at these circumstances through the example of Mills College in Oakland, California. Mills summer programs consisting of fine arts workshops and seminars in the 1930s and 1940s were largely led and taught by European émigré artists and teachers. While other chapters in this volume deal with European migrations before and during the Second World War, this chapter provides a distinctive example of the connections between art and exile during the time, as well as of temporary migrations. Like the Shanghai Jewish exiles described in chapter 11, this group brought European culture that enriched local life. But while few of the Jews who escaped to Shanghai returned to Europe, many of these artists did return home.
