In 2008, the art historian Kobena Mercer observed that, compared to literary criticism and cultural studies, art history was relatively late with its attention to exile, migration and diasporic communities. Indeed, it was only from the mid-1990s that scholarly publications and exhibitions started to pay more specific attention to issues related to the displaced artist. An important event was the exhibition Exiles+Émigrés: The Flight of European Artists from Hitler, staged at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1997, which focused on well-known artists who fled the Nazi regime by going into exile in Paris, and who later often set off for New York. As this narrative became an art historical truism, scholars have increasingly sought to explore less canonical artists, practices and contexts. In line with this tendency, a conference was organized in Munich in 2018 by the ERC Research Project ‘Relocating Modernism: Global Metropolises, Modern Art and Exile (METROMOD)’. The conference resulted in this edited volume, which marks the project's first publication in a series on artists in urban exile, focusing on the first half of the twentieth century.

A merit of this volume is that it accomplishes its aim of covering a truly global range of what journalist Doug Saunders once termed ‘arrival cities’, all the way from Buenos Aires to Shanghai. In four sections, the reader encounters a wealth of understudied actors, locations and spaces, with the latter often referred to as ‘contact zones’. Theorized three decades ago by literary scholar Mary Louise Pratt, a contact zone denotes a space where different cultures meet or clash, often in contexts characterized by asymmetrical or unequal power relations, such as those under colonial rule. The editors acknowledge this concept in their introduction and argue that an analysis of its embodiment in urban spaces allows for new interpretations. Throughout the book, authors account for activities of immigrant artists at restaurants, private residences, bars, hotels or art galleries. For instance, Laura Karp Lugo illuminates circles of artists in exile around the Calle Florida (Florida Street) in early twentieth-century Buenos Aires. Karp Lugo describes the area as a contact zone where both local and immigrant artists gathered, yet the notion of contact here remains on the somewhat descriptive level of exchange or collaboration. Similar to several other chapters, the reader is introduced to a multitude of previously understudied actors. Although the complex task of reconstructing such social networks is commendable, some chapters could have dedicated a little more attention to a mapping's meaning. What are the implications, for example, of these revealed connections for discussions about the experiences of urban exile and processes of acculturation on a more fundamental level?

The second and third sections include some of the volume's most thorough and, at times, original contributions on how artists interacted with their arrival cities. The richness of Partha Mitter's chapter on the emergence of Pan-Asian avant-garde art in Calcutta is thanks to numerous of his own publications. In fact, his The Triumph of Modernism: India's Artists and the Avant-Garde – 1922–1947 (2007) can be perceived as prefigurative of the decentralized approach to modernist art that this volume also adopts. Yet, in Mitter's contribution to the book, the urban dimension comes across as an obligatory aside, with the Pan-Asian's avant-garde rebelling against Western academic traditions and creation of alternative visual languages being more the primary focus.

Burcu Dogramaci, Mareike Hetschold and Rachel Lee, all three editors of this volume, discuss the respective urban contexts of Istanbul, Shanghai and Mumbai. Dogramaci points to how the German architect Bruno Taut referred to his self-designed residence in Istanbul, Taut Villa (1937–38), as an ark – not in its formal design, but as an allegory of exile. My assessment, however, is that Taut did visually refer to the ark as a rootless and moveable container of refuge. Looking at the villa, we see that it is partly built on high pillars, providing a direct view from the inside on the river Bosporus. After his exile in Japan, Taut not only integrated Japanese elements into the building's exterior, but also from inside we look into the direction of Asia and, importantly, onto the river. Therefore, the villa does come across as an architectural echo of the inhabitant's repeated relocations because it translates that experience visually and, as a result, provides an argument why the study of particular architects and artists in exile could be so relevant. Hetschold's analysis of the travel book Shanghai (1941) by the German Ellen Thorbecke and Austrian Friedrich Schiff deserves praise for the way she has carefully built up her argument based on only two spreads of the book. Because the author takes time to discuss all of a page's details, the reader is able to really grasp how Thorbecke and Schiff translated their views of Shanghai into words and photographic images. While Hetschold elaborates on how a hotel is described and depicted, Lee accounts for the activities that took place inside the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel in Bombay (now Mumbai). Lee reconstructs how different spaces of this hotel allowed for encounters between the local and immigrant community, which alludes to possibilities for future research on similar locations.

In the concluding round table discussion, the authors reflect on how subsequent studies of artists in urban exile could expand on networks beyond a city's elites. This is a relevant point; multiple cases in the book show that an immigrant artist's success often depends on their ability to gain visual presence through exhibitions, journals or associations. Those who lacked financial means or the right connections upon arrival were not as able to pursue their artistic careers. Consequently, they were doomed to be forgotten by art history before even trying to enter the local arts scene. Arrival Cities: Migrating Artists and New Metropolitan Topographies in the Twentieth Century is a valuable contribution to scholarship on displaced artists, because it adopts both a global and urban perspective. In light of our present era, it would have been worthwhile to delve deeper into practices of exclusion. Why have many immigrants with possible artistic aspirations been overlooked? In what way are urban contact zones more than just spaces of connection, but indeed characteristic of myriad power relations?