Melanie Kent Steinhardt was an aspiring Bohemian Jewish artist who left Europe in 1939 and settled in California in 1941. This diverse and compelling collection of compositions, portraits, and landscapes blends European Expressionism with an émigrè's troubled impressions of two World Wars, a women's place in a male dominated world, and her new life in America.
The artist's residency in Inglewood amid the burgeoning military industrial complex of 1940s Southern California informed some of her most compelling work and provided her an opportunity to reconnect with her estranged family.