“An epic tale of Bernstein’s passionate search for Magda Nachman, an artist whose life was an achievement on the order of her marvelous painting. Biography at its finest, Magda Nachman: An Artist in Exile draws the reader along on a gripping and rewarding saga that takes the teller from Russia to Berlin to London to Bombay, to find an artist who persevered in her art despite almost insurmountable odds...” — Mary V. Dearborn, author of Hemingway: A Biography and Mistress of Modernism: The Life of Peggy Guggenheim

The political and social turmoil of the twentieth century took Magda Nachman from a privileged childhood in St. Petersburg at the close of the nineteenth century, artistic studies with Léon Bakst and Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin at the Zvantseva Art Academy, and participation in the dynamic symbolist/modernist artistic ferment in pre-Revolutionary Russia to a refugee existence in the Russian countryside during the Russian Civil War followed by marriage to a prominent Indian nationalist, then with her husband to the hardships of émigré Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s, and finally to Bombay, where she established herself as an important artist and a mentor to a new generation of modern Indian artists.