Bombsites, shop windows and ticket halls

For the two decades from 1933, exhibitions were mounted in station ticket halls and factory workers’ canteens, in the windows of high street grocery stores, evacuated department stores and on newly bulldozered bombsites. Their themes were diverse – from the nature of freedom to the culinary possibilities of the potato – and used for myriad functions. They communicated urgent, persuasive messages and practical information, intended to change people’s personal behaviours. They signalled international alignments and solidarities, and acted as fundraising vehicles for important causes, inspiring social change. They gave voice to the voiceless: empowering working-class people living in poor housing conditions, recently arrived refugees, those suffering demeaning employment conditions, women taking up the struggle for equality and people exasperated by the British government’s failure and inaction in the face of the rising fascist threat. This is the first extended study of such persuasive exhibitions, mounted from the interwar period to the early Cold War in Britain. It spotlights a twenty-year period – 1933 to 1953 – when artists and designers developed a form of exhibitions suited to communicating ideas and ideals, a form then taken up by politicians and bureaucrats as a means for direct political intervention.

1933 is my chosen starting point, principally because it was the date when Hitler came to power in Germany, supported by a powerful cultural propaganda machinery, including a preponderance of impactful propaganda exhibitions. 1933 is a logical starting point for this study, being the formation date of three significant artists’ and architects’ groups in Britain: Unit One, the Artists International Association (AIA) and the Modern Architectural Research Group (MARS), as I discuss in subsequent chapters. Each of these groups embraced exhibitions as key forms of representation for their ideas and ideals. 1953 is this book’s end-point as it marked the waning of the British government’s very frequent use of exhibitions to communicate policy and progress to home audiences. It was the year that the AIA – a group central to this study – dispensed with its clause requiring members to be aligned with its Leftist political aims.

This book analyses exhibitions as propaganda across many sites and scales in Britain in the years from 1933 to 1953.¹ Each chapter draws on a series of examples that allow me to present the different paradigms through which exhibitions were conceived in these years: as vehicles for projection, promotion and publicity; as activism; as manifestos; as demonstrations; as counter-arguments; as weapons of war; as solidarities; and as welfare. It looks at how exhibitions described both at the time and since as ‘propaganda’, focused towards communicating partial, persuasive messages, were produced by small activist groups, commercial organisations and companies, and by the British government alike.

Common elements were transmogrified across these contexts, all linked by their intention to build consent around particular ideas, issues and experiences, despite their strikingly different social and political impetuses. The term ‘propaganda’ is often associated now with extremist political messages, because of its use by various totalitarian regimes, but in the 1930s and 1940s the term was used to signal acts of persuasion and information-sharing considered socially beneficial and benign – a way of maintaining a peaceable and unified society. Sociologist Jacques Ellul’s 1965 analysis of how propaganda operates in different political contexts underpins this study of British propaganda. Ellul contrasts the ‘propaganda of agitation’, as used most aggressively and conspicuously within authoritarian states, and the ‘propaganda of integration’, described as ‘the propaganda of developed nations’ and a ‘propaganda of conformity’, calling for ‘total adherence to a society’s truths and behavioural patterns’. It is ‘the propaganda of integration’ and conformity that is the focus of this book, rather than the ‘propaganda of agitation’ (although agitation inevitably shaped the wider context).²

In carrying persuasive messages, the exhibitions in this book can be described as ‘propaganda exhibitions’, created to persuade people, although the propagandists were not always in positions of power or authority. The people pivotal to this study of exhibitions beyond galleries were artists, architects, designers, scriptwriters, business managers and bureaucrats (note that curators were not amongst them). At times there was divergence, sometimes straight-out contradiction between the ideas of these makers of ‘political’ exhibitions – that is to say, exhibitions made by those engaging with explicit political agendas, who took particular political positions and aligned themselves with one side in struggles. They were almost overwhelmingly either on the far Left (aligned with the Communist Party of Great Britain or the Independent Labour Party) or more centrist (in the case of exhibitions organised by the Ministry of Information and then the Central Office of Information). This did not stop them from borrowing forms across ideological lines, given that the political imperative, not stylistic orthodoxy, was the overriding concern.

I have searched hard for evidence that the organised Right in Britain, particularly Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists (BUF), used exhibitions to represent their political vision but have found none accounted for in the literature, such as Action, the newspaper of the BUF published from 1936 to 1940.³ The BUF did, however, use all manner of other means of communication including Action, monographs, pamphlets, fortnightly bulletins, radio broadcasts, uniforms, insignia and banners, picnics, youth camps, marches and rallies at major venues (both in London at the Royal Albert Hall, Earls Court and beyond). I can only conclude that the BUF’s focus away from using visual means through which to raise their cause was related to the limited number of artists aligned with the British fascists who were available to take on this work. Cyril Connolly’s comment of 1938 comes to mind here: ‘We are having to choose between democracy and fascism, and fascism is the enemy of art. It is not a question of relative freedom; there are no artists in Fascist countries’.⁴ Connolly’s formulation was wishful thinking, as we know from much excellent scholarship referenced across this book, which explores the flowering of art and exhibitions supported by fascist regimes in Italy, Germany and Spain.

While explicitly articulated political positions are the overt focus of this book, Tony Bennett’s well-known discussion of ‘the exhibitionary complex’, in which he casts all exhibitions as inherently political, ‘vehicles for inscribing and broadcasting the messages of power’, is an important formulation for considering the panoptic visual control and power dynamics operating in all exhibitions. Bennett – channelling Foucault –provides the gateway to another orthodoxy that this book takes up and extends: that exhibitions are not – and never were – neutral.⁵ Instead, they are the potent context in which ideologies take shape as modern myth, thereby affecting wider culture.⁶ Exhibitions, as ‘acts of exposure’, are inherently persuasive, as cultural theorist Mieke Bal suggests, even when they are not being developed as propaganda. This makes political exhibitions double-layered propaganda: being implicitly persuasive, expository forms that, at times, take up explicitly political arguments.⁷

Terms used in this book

I use many overlapping, interlinked terms in this book to describe these exhibitions, which I will expand on over the course of this and subsequent chapters, but introduce briefly here. The one term that covers all of the many manifestations of this form across this period and contexts is propaganda exhibitions, describing exhibitions used as persuasive devices across contexts and political traditions. Other terms I use include exhibitions as communications to assert exhibitions’ emergence alongside other forms of early twentieth-century media and their connection with the ‘communications paradigm’ through which this form emerged.⁸ Exhibitions as demonstrations takes up a phrase used by activist artists in the 1930s to describe exhibitions used for protest, evoking the idea of exhibitions as active, performative, provocative and participative forms for manifesting solidarities.⁹ Manifesto exhibitions describes exhibitions mounted in Britain in the 1930s to present the ideas of avant-garde artists’ groups. Political exhibitions describes exhibitions that explicitly addressed political issues, often taking anti-fascist or anti-imperialist positions. Modernist exhibitions describes exhibitions either made by Modernist designers or which adopted forms, tropes or ideas associated with Modernism.¹⁰ Didactic exhibitions takes up photography historian Olivier Lugon’s phrase to describe exhibitions that were spatially and textually constructed to teach their audiences.¹¹ Factographic exhibitions takes up the term ‘factography’, which art historian Benjamin Buchloh used to describe an art tradition concerned with rendering aspects of reality visible without interference or mediation, and suggests that it can be used to describe the qualities of exhibitions in this book.¹² Useful exhibitions is a play on Charles R. Acland and Haidee Wasson’s phrase ‘useful cinema’, to describe films more involved with functionality than beauty, which I use to describe exhibitions that were put to ‘work’, with functionality the guiding concern.¹³ Documentary exhibitions describes the overlap between exhibitions and other forms, such as photography and film, which evolved within the British documentary tradition. Information exhibitions is a phrase used to describe exhibitions that functioned to communicate practical, everyday advice to the public. To consider any of the exhibitions in this book merely as ‘information’ is somehow to suggest their neutrality, rather than situating them within the ideological and economic complexities of the period, so this is not a phrase that I find useful, except in distinguishing exhibitions as communication from exhibitions of ‘original’ or unique objects (such as art and artefacts). I distinguish the forms of exhibition above from displays, trade fairs or commercial exhibitions, which were focused on showing and selling things with a profit-making motive, and use exhibits to signal small sub-sections of wider exhibitions.

My overall intention is to show that the exhibitions featured in this book were more than platforms or envelopes for presenting objects or images; instead, they were a calculated and didactic means of communication for war and peacetime, a form through which to teach conformity and adherence to appropriate truths and behavioural patterns and an affective form intended to provoke emotional responses.

The remit of this book

These exhibitions were marked by a complex visual, textual and spatial hybridity; they were a way of representing ideas and a collective endeavour through which to meet, build relationships and share ideas about life, work and beliefs in modern Britain. For marginalised people in Britain on the eve of the Second World War, the process of making exhibitions provided opportunities to build social and cultural capital. This was particularly true for commercial artists and designers who came to exhibition making with limited money or institutionalised capital, given that in the highly class-ridden British art school system their work or their training in technical colleges or apprenticeships was considered of low status (as discussed in Chapter 1).¹⁴ For those who had arrived in Britain during the years immediately preceding the Second World War following training elsewhere, there was work to be done to achieve recognition by joining emerging professional organisations, forming collaborations in practice, building up bonds of friendship and experiencing conviviality in the midst of trauma. Exhibition making provided the points of contact through which such relationships could be built.¹⁵ It allowed artists, designers and architects, some of whom were marginalised after arriving in Britain with limited financial means and few contacts, to meet, share concerns and make a collective, public response. They built shared solidarities that connected them with the world beyond. Exhibition networks acted as connective tissue within communities, as crucial stepping-stones within careers and as a micro model of formation for the developing creative professions. Some artists’ networks, such as the AIA, provided a crucial platform and voice to women who, while marginalised in more established artistic circles, became centrally important. Sculptor Betty Rea – ‘dynamo’ of the AIA, as Misha Black later described her role as AIA Secretary¹⁶ – was one such woman, declaring in 1935, ‘It is time the artists began to think what kind of future they want and what they can do to get it’, recognising their agency to create a direction.¹⁷ Exhibition making was one route by which artists could think through the future and give form to it.

For the politically engaged artists and designers central to this account, exhibitions operated as nodes of ideological resistance for political dissenters and subordinated groups, offering shelter and collective activities for newly arrived people seeking refuge from the Nazis, as well as for people on the Left actively seeking to create and to defend anti-fascist and anti-imperialist social spaces (as discussed in Chapters 3, 4 and 5). Exhibitions were versatile enough both to document and to make manifest invisible values and truths. Occasionally exhibition making operated as pretext, the basis on which refugee artists and architects were allowed to enter Britain when their work was due to be exhibited (as discussed in Chapter 3).¹⁸ They were an acceptable reason for activist-makers to come together in public spaces, at a time when public gatherings were contentious and curtailed by legislation (as discussed in Chapter 4).

They offered a channel for eloquent interventions into contemporary discourse, enabling activists to protest the British government’s policy of non-intervention during the Spanish Civil War, for instance (as discussed in Chapter 3). In the context of the Second World War, this particular form of exhibition-as-communication was repurposed for a different ideological context by the British government, becoming part of their armoury of propaganda (as discussed in Chapter 5), and in the postwar period exhibitions became naturalised once again as one amongst many forms of communication in the service of the embryonic welfare state (as discussed in Chapter 7).

This book features many artists and designers over the two decades of its focus. The key exhibition makers central to this book had diverse origins, united by an internationalist, democratising collective vision, mostly living and working in exile within a limited geography, in Britain’s capital city, London. This intersects with recent histories of the lives and careers of artists, designers and architects, who settled in London in this period from Central and Eastern Europe, including artists Naum Gabo, László Moholy-Nagy, John Heartfield, Ludwig Meidner and Oskar Kokoschka and architects Serge Chermayeff, Walter Gropius and Ernö Goldfinger, living for a short period of the war close together, within a small area of north London.¹⁹ We can consider the work of these artists and architects, existing in exile in London, in relation to art historian T. J. Demos’s proposition of ‘modernity-as-exile’, which he describes as ‘defined by the dislocating ravages and alienating effects of capitalism and nationalism as much as by the psychic disequilibrium of traumatic unheimlichkeit, as it is comprehended by Marxist and Freudian thought’. The particular mobilisation of exhibitions as forms by this group was inextricably related to their vilification in home contexts, displacement from home and alienation from previous contacts. Regardless of the geographic displacement of many of this book’s subjects, Demos suggests Modernism’s epoch is defined more generally as one of ‘transcendental homelessness’, making migration the ongoing counternarrative to nationalisms and other overarching narratives.²⁰

Much of London, during the period of this book, was drab and run-down, its restaurants noted for their poor food and much of the city’s population living in deteriorating Victorian housing stock.²¹ In this context, exhibitions-in-progress acted as nodes and spaces of convergence, contact and transnational encounter for incoming artists, rendering the practices, designers and spaces of production cosmopolitan. In thinking about British exhibitionary practices of this period as cosmopolitan, I look to design historian Zeina Maasri’s discussion of the intersection of visual culture, design and politics in Beirut from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s in her recent book Cosmopolitan Radicalism. Maasri, in focusing on the city of Beirut rather than on the nation of Lebanon, adopts a non-essentialist understanding of place that takes into account, using geographer Doreen Massey’s phrase, a ‘global sense of the local’; a place formed by networks of social relations.²² In doing so Maasri seeks ‘to trouble any putative binary between the “West” and the “non-West”’.

Taking up this idea, in a different time and place, I show the complexities of discussing the work of designers who were based, often briefly, in London during these years. Through the lens of exhibitionary cultures, this book traces the roots of change in Britain from the 1930s, building on the work of historians like Marc Matera and Priyamvada Gopal, who discuss the work and impact of anti-colonial campaigners centred in London from the early twentieth century.²³ The role of refugee artists and designers in giving shape to British exhibitionary cultures in these decades is a fulcrum of this study, as is the key role of anti-colonial activists in identifying exhibitions as spaces of counter-argument. Literary theorist Rebecca L. Walkowitz’s reflections on negotiations of distance and proximity, interconnections of the personal and international, in relation to the concept of ‘critical cosmopolitanism’ are useful when considering the geographies covered by this book.²⁴ The initial focus of this book is ‘British’ exhibitions only in so far as the events happened in and from Britain, but many of the events central to this book described or connected with other geographies, through diaspora communities and the transnational networks of artists and designers who worked on them, or through the influences, ideas and ideologies gleaned through education and political activities that shaped their visual and material forms and imaginaries. But, as the book shows, the geographies of the exhibitions analysed here changed during the twenty years the book covers, from predominantly being mounted in sites in London before the Second World War to being dispersed across the United Kingdom and beyond, once they became instruments of the wartime British government and the postwar welfare state. The psychic geographies of the artists and designers who mounted the exhibitions were transmogrifying, as this book shows, from internationalist interests connecting them with Russia, China, the popular front in Spain and inter-Imperialist battles to more solidly nationalist visions, as they were drawn further into working and performing in the national interest. In this sense, ‘Britain’ is the most accurate description of this book’s geography, not ‘London’, and this is reflected in the book’s title, but many of its endeavours were pursued in the interests of transnational connections and solidarities.

There has been significant historical focus on migration to Britain from the late 1940s, centring the major cultural shift brought about by migration after the Second World War.²⁵ This is reinforced by accounts like V. S. Naipaul’s autobiographical novel The Enigma of Arrival where he recalls: ‘Because in 1950 in London I was at the beginning of that great movement of peoples that was to take place in the second half of the twentieth century … Cities like London were to change. They were to cease being more or less national cities; they were to become cities of the world’.²⁶ This book locates the start of such changes within the consciousness shown through exhibitions from the early 1930s.

Central actors in this account, in addition to those cited above, are artist and gallerist Roland Penrose; critic Herbert Read; painters Nan Youngman and Betty Rea; photographer Edith Tudor-Hart; and designers Misha Black, F. H. K. Henrion, Richard Levin, Hans Schleger and Milner Gray. In a sense, this book acts as prosopography, a collective account, of makers who lived at close quarters; with exhibition making as the significant point of contact, a collective means of expression and acceptable subterfuge for expressing challenging opinions. Their interests and beliefs were amplified through membership of a collection of overlapping and interlocking international artists’, designers’ and architects’ organisations, including the British-based Artists International Association (AIA) (introduced in Chapter 4) and the Free German League of Culture (FGLC) (introduced in Chapter 6), as well as through alignment with the International Brigades. These were not bounded by national preoccupations but connected with transnational concerns coalescing around anti-fascist and anti-colonial causes.

This account of Modernist exhibitions centres on the work and imagination of refugees who took up residence temporarily in Britain during these years. It offers exhibitions as a form of provisional ‘home-from-home’ and a vehicle for critiquing society. It differs from accounts that separate Britain’s avant-garde from radical politics or commerce in this period. Instead, it expands the focus on Modernist cultures in Britain to include commercial art and culture, practices of packaging design and advertising, shop window displays and trade fairs, and cultures of lecturing, writing and publishing, linking these with activist political work, which often ran alongside each other concurrently in careers. Rather than seeing these activities as marginal and subservient to more highly prized creative practices, this book foregrounds and centres such creative labour, understanding exhibition making as connected with – and integral to – art, design and architectural practice.

It shows the wider cultures of British Modernism as developed in and through meetings, articles, speeches, posters, leaflets and magazines, as much as through works of art, design, architecture and literature. It takes the focus beyond the formal qualities of Modernism and traces how Leftist radicals in the 1930s, activated by their identification with the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War and displaced by rising authoritarian states in their home countries, increasingly became identified with and worked for the British establishment, helping create the visual and material representation of the early welfare state, with exhibition making central to each of these moments. In this sense, the geographical imaginary changes through the twenty years of this book, from local and international in the interwar period to national and nationalist from the Second World War until the end of the book in 1953, when the Cold War was unsettling political beliefs and certainties.

Continuing to address these histories has been given added impetus by the recent resurgence in Britain of chauvinist nationalism, with its associated anti-immigration rhetoric in the wake of the Brexit vote, as expressed through regular alarmist headlines about the ‘migrant crisis’ in right-wing newspapers like the Daily Mail. In that sense, this book contributes to literatures providing a longer view on refugees in Britain (or people whose context has, at times, been de-politicised by being described as ‘émigrés’). It intends to highlight the refugee experience in Britain, showing how designers who had arrived under duress in Britain in this period became pivotal to the nation’s visual, material and architectural cultures despite what was, at times, harsh and inhospitable treatment.²⁷ The particular form of exhibitions that are the focus here were very emphatically the product of a cosmopolitan imaginary, having more in common with designs evolving from the 1920s onwards in Germany, Russia, Italy and France, as this book shows.²⁸

Exhibitions as the ‘materialisation of persuasion’

By the early 1950s in Britain, the end of the period of this book, it was well established that exhibitions existed within a complex system of communication modes, entangled with information, publicity and public relations.²⁹ Exhibition makers, with their deep understanding of principles of persuasion and of commercial advertising, were part of the ‘invisible government’ shaping and manipulating society, as US proponent of public relations Edward Bernays had described the work of publicists in the late 1920s.³⁰ By 1949, influential British designer Misha Black (introduced more fully in Chapter 1) was alive to his participation in this ‘invisible government’. He described the hybrid exhibitions he created as ‘propaganda in three dimensions’.³¹ ‘[T]he essential function of a propaganda exhibition’, Black wrote, ‘is to implant or sustain a general idea in the mind of the visitor … which may later affect his actions’. Black did not distinguish between exhibitions for commercial or official contexts, believing they existed on a continuum. His experience of working with exhibitions as publicity and propaganda had been honed through earlier commissions for advertising and commercial stands. All were, he thought, elements in ‘the materialisation of persuasion’.³² This evocative phrase of Black’s was the title of the AHRC Fellowship from which this book came. ‘Materialisation’ is a useful term for discussing this kind of exhibition because of its lack of formal specificity, reflecting the multiple forms that exhibitions took during these years: reflecting function, rather than stylistic orthodoxy.

Exhibitions were a key element in Britain’s evolving public relations culture, which is the focus of Chapter 2. Government-funded bodies shaped public relations culture in Britain, including the Empire Marketing Board (EMB), the General Post Office (GPO), the Underground Electric Railways Company of London (UERL) and its successor the London Passenger Transport Board (LPTB), all of which used exhibitions to promote their work and ethos. Publicity and propaganda exhibitions emerged in Britain while the science of persuasion was being honed in the profession of publicity and public relations.³³

A major conundrum for all involved with the business of publicity in Britain from the 1930s was how to create impactful propaganda, appropriate to a social democracy, that mirrored the undoubted strengths and qualities of the ‘agitation’ being created by Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. Editor of BBC Listener magazine Richard S. Lambert acknowledged the problem in his 1938 book Propaganda. Whilst naming exhibitions as part of the wider media of propaganda, Lambert acknowledged that artists and designers were in a bind, attracting suspicion if considered to be producing propaganda.³⁴ The conundrum as to how to deal with what had become regarded as deceitful mechanisms used by totalitarian regimes was acknowledged by Misha Black. ‘Propaganda in a democracy’, Black wrote, ‘must be based on the principle of persuasion, consent and participation’.³⁵ Essentially, an exhibition’s job was ‘the manufacturing of consent’, to take up commentator Noam Chomsky’s description of the basic institutional structures and relationships within which the US mass media operates.³⁶ Assessing the success or impact of this material was a long-running interest, though often largely inconclusive.

Modernist exhibitions and exhibitions of Modernism?

This book takes up the idea of exhibition design as a significant strand in Modernism, a practice in its own right. It builds on studies of exhibitions’ political agency, the most notable being Mary Anne Staniszewski’s 1988 The Power of Display, which draws on case study exhibitions from New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) to make the case for understanding installation design as an ‘aesthetic medium and historical category’, to be regarded as significant in its own right, rather than merely providing context for showing works of art and design.³⁷ Innovating in forms of installation was certainly not the guiding principle in all exhibitions in this book, however. Indeed, often the installation was a marginal concern, while the context within which the exhibition was imagined and created, the ideas it espoused or single elements of its design warranted its inclusion here.

Considering the agency of exhibitions as Modernist practice in and of itself, as this book does, has an established lineage. Art critic Brian O’Doherty’s seminal 1976 essay on the gallery space as ‘white cube’ broke with the previous interest in Modernist activities within the exhibition space, shifting the focus so that ‘context’ became ‘content’. O’Doherty wrote:

Art historian Rosalind Krauss took up this re-focus on the agency of exhibition spaces with her suggestion that the ‘space of exhibition’ was, ‘in fact what we know as the history of modernism … within this space it is constituted as a representation of the plane of exhibition, the surface of the museum, the capacity of the gallery to constitute the objects it selects for inclusion as art’.³⁹ For Krauss, writing in the early 1980s, art works had themselves become accounts of the exhibition spaces that they were part of, which she characterised as ‘exhibitionality’. Both O’Doherty and Krauss focused on the qualities of exhibitions as part of the complex ecology of the contemporary art world, a self-referential means in and of themselves, to be conceptualised as Modernist objects rather than merely a series of Modernist moving parts. Given the sites and spaces privileged in this account – from stations to bomb sites – their work begs the question: what is exhibition without the gallery?⁴⁰

Factographic exhibitions

Modernist exhibitions created in Britain outside galleries are the major focus of this book. The exhibitions and activities central here were ensembles created from images and didactic texts, used to communicate political positions. They were more in the tradition of ‘factography’ (concerned with rendering aspects of reality visible without interference or mediation) than of ‘faktura’ (concerned with the condition of the coloured surface), to take up art historian Benjamin Buchloh’s distinction.⁴¹ Frequently assembled from picture library images held, for example, by the wartime Ministry of Information (MOI), the exhibitions’ images were severed from original meanings or contexts; the viewers’ connection with a ‘true’ context made irrelevant.⁴²

Creating exhibitions in community or public spaces was a guiding principle within the authoritarian regimes, by the period of this book. In the Soviet Union, museums had been created in industrial plants, an idea K. I. Vorobyvov discussed in his 1931 essay ‘Museums in Industrial Enterprises’.⁴³ Such exhibitions, highlighting local popular traditions, were realised in a handful of large factories. In Nazi Germany a programme of art exhibitions, the Fabrikausstellungen (‘factory exhibitions’), were staged inside factories between 1934 and 1942. These were modelled on the Italian fascist leisure organisation Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro’s model for Kraft durch Freude (Strength through Joy) (KdF) and their factory exhibition concept, as well as the impetus of the Freunde der bildenden Künste (Friends of Fine Art).⁴⁴ The quasi-display, quasi-performance of Leftist agitational propaganda or ‘agitprop’, as it became known, has parallels in the AIA’s exhibitionary activities of the 1930s, as I discuss in Chapter 4. Agitprop used the street and mass action, reinventing the revolution as carnival. The Berlin-based troupe Rote Raketen (Red Rockets) was one such group, using a mix of theatre and cabaret to develop class-consciousness in audiences during the late 1920s.⁴⁵

Far from being dependent on institutional spaces, most exhibitions in this book were held outside purpose-built galleries, with the official expectations that often circumscribe them, as subsequent chapters show. While some were mounted inside public interiors, others were held in the open air, becoming part of a mutating mosaic of cityscapes in the process of being remade after the devastation of war.⁴⁶ In being held beyond established purpose-built spaces, they were developed with the democratising instinct to take art to where the general public could see it, each focused towards spotlighting a set of political ideas happening beyond the exhibition space, sometimes locally (the need for improved housing stock), often far from home (campaigns in the Spanish Civil War, anti-fascists working underground inside Germany during the Nazi regime or the enslavement of colonised peoples across the world). They operated as three-dimensional manifestos – combining image, text and space – closer to political tracts than to works of art. In locating the appropriate exhibitionary form for communicating such political ideas, artists and designers looked within and beyond Britain.

Common tropes and rhetorical devices for presentation of Modernist exhibitions that occurred and recurred in British exhibitions from the 1930s, as I show over the course of this book, included creating a comparison between past, present and future to argue for a particular way forward; using a problem/solution paradigm whereby visitors were shown the problem then the proposed solution; addressing visitors by speaking direct to them, in the present tense; appealing direct to people by helping them identify with an individual who acted as a proxy for explaining a whole profession; using one family or individual as a kind of avatar to follow through the narrative of a whole exhibition; and using narratives to show progression through scenarios (including sequences of objects or images reinforced spatially through ramps and multi-layered spaces).

Recovering exhibitionary traces

Researching the exhibitions in this book has been slow and challenging: many were held outside archiving institutions, created as immediate responses to current affairs at moments of profound crisis. Many comprised photographic ‘exhibition prints’ chosen for their interchangeability, fleetingness, reproducibility and disposability.⁴⁷ They were displayed for a short period, to highlight an urgent, but now long surpassed, issue and often only very piecemeal visual material remains. Mostly they were not subject to the care and concern shaping the curation of original works of art, to be kept and conserved with pristine traces of provenance. Instead, they were constructed from hastily assembled combinations of reproducible elements: photographs, text, props and architectural elements. Many were principally focused on the ‘argument’ or ‘story’, rather than the means of compelling it.

Their limited archival trace might include as little as a one-line recollection in an artist’s memoir, a passing mention in a contemporary trade journal or a single, grainy press photograph, making the kind of sustained formal, visual analysis of exhibitions of the kind that is so admirable in some art historical accounts of exhibitions almost impossible. This absence has pushed me to be more reliant than I might like on a range of contemporaneous display and trade literature – magazines like Display and Shelf Life – as evidence, meaning that the available appraisals of the exhibitions in my account are necessarily weighted towards questions of comparative technique and promotion of the trade. I have spent much time examining pamphlets and flyers, often the only remaining fragments, bringing to mind poet W. H. Auden’s line from his 1937 poem ‘Spain’: ‘To-day the expending of powers/On the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting’, with pamphlets thankfully less ephemeral and mostly less boring than the poet imagined. Wherever possible, I have tried to counter-balance this with other types of literature, in what was already a long and painstaking research process, made more battle-like during the archive and library closures of the pandemic, the backdrop to the main writing period of this book.

Although many of the protagonists in this book were exercised about how ‘successful’ the exhibitions they were mounting were, being at pains to show through strong visitor numbers or press attention how efficacious they had been, in many ways this kind of success is peripheral to this book, which is much more focused on exhibitions as the materialisation of certain cultural and political debates. A few British exhibitions have achieved mythical status, given how many accounts exist, how many times they provide a historical scaffold as the start or end-point; in Britain, these include the 1851 Great Exhibition, the 1946 Britain Can Make It exhibition and the 1951 Festival of Britain. Their dominance is often enabled by extensive and well-kept archives, amplified by the pivotal point in history that they have come to act as shorthand for. But it is important not to think that the profusion of archival evidence and historical accounts makes these mythical exhibitions somehow of wholly greater significance. Being partially archived makes the exhibitions that are the subject of this book of no lesser significance; it is simply a reflection of their contribution as immediate, functional and short-lived and mounted by groups who did not have particular regard for legacy. The challenge of writing this book has thus been to act as archaeologist, piecing together fragments of material about events largely lost from memory and omitted from history.⁴⁸

On many occasions, the only remaining trace has been a written account in the trade press or periodicals, with visual evidence limited or non-existent. Due to the scarcity of evidence about some of the exhibitions, this book acts in places as a record and reconstruction of these events and I use ekphrasis – the vivid written description of visual and material encounters – as a method for evoking and linking fragmentary details. This is particularly true in my discussion of the Cambridge Anti-War Exhibitions (in Chapter 4), for example, which brought together many of the most talented exhibition designers of their day but for which tantalisingly little visual evidence remains. In his essay ‘Ekphrasis and the Other’, W. J. T. Mitchell discusses the possibilities and limitations of this strategy.⁴⁹ He acknowledges that in a literal sense ekphrasis is impossible: writers can never give their readers sight. But by practising presenting ‘otherness’, this limitation can be overcome. For Mitchell, ekphrasis is a key to difference within language, focusing the interarticulation of perceptual, semiotic and social contradictions within verbal representation.⁵⁰

Researching this book has reinforced my understanding of the complexity and multivalence of exhibitions as objects.⁵¹ As starting point and culmination, their study intersects the disciplinary boundaries of cultural politics, visual culture, art, architectural and design histories. When seen in retrospect, their meanings often appear unfixed and difficult to pin down, their forms ‘promiscuous’, as art historian Michael Tymkiw notes, being adopted and rejected between successive events, across wide geographies and political divisions. This promiscuity, in the case of the exhibitions in this book, came from the porousness created by mass media, which allowed images of certain prominent exhibitions to be shared across ideological divides. Indeed, as the archival research for this book has elucidated, visual examples were exchanged fluidly between Germany and the US and the US and the UK, with designers in Britain ‘borrowing’ from many contexts, including those on the extreme political Left and Right beyond Britain.⁵²

The form of these exhibitions is a major focus of this book but often, during the research process, the relationships that were enabled through an exhibition’s process of making came to preoccupy me as much as its forms and materiality. The question of how, where and by whom creative labour is carried out is an enduring theme of this book and an increasingly central focus of exhibition histories.⁵³ The centrality to exhibitions’ formation of many makers, including designers, artists, writers, organisers and others, means the kind of labour involved in bringing these objects to life crosses creative and disciplinary boundaries. How they were commissioned and financed, through government ministries and voluntary engagements, is also my focus.

Vision in motion

The exhibitions in this book were a complex amalgam of the plethora of associations and influences their designers absorbed through print media, visits, training and beyond. This makes tracing the origins of forms difficult. But the ideas of those associated with the German Staatliches Bauhaus, the school of design, architecture and applied arts generally referred to as the Bauhaus, had a major impact on the evolution and form of many of the exhibitions discussed in this book, as is clear through a formal comparison as well as through the accounts of the exhibition designers themselves and the critical appraisal in the contemporary press, as this book will show. Perhaps the most profound way in which these British exhibitionary practices shared Bauhaus ideals was through their taking up of what design historian Justus Nieland describes as the ‘sweeping communications paradigm’, whereby exhibitions were forced to act as a communications medium, part of an extended ecology of intermedial production.⁵⁴ The work of Bauhaus members was known in Britain in the 1920s and early 1930s through writings, lectures, periodicals, books, window displays and exhibitions. Exhibitions by Bauhaus faculty such as Herbert Bayer, László Moholy-Nagy and Walter Gropius’s much publicised Ausstellungsstand der Baugewerkschaften (Exhibition of the Building Workers Unions), held in Berlin in 1931, were known to British audiences through the pages of magazines like Commercial Art and Industry, Display, Architectural Review and the DIA Quarterly, each of which carried regular reports on developments in Germany.

Hungarian-born László Moholy-Nagy’s ideas were known in Britain through their translation from German into English. His earliest book, Malerei-Photographie-Film (Painting-Photography-Film) of 1925 considered the merging of media across types, introducing the idea of the ‘typophoto’, which he claimed as the ‘visually most exact rendering of communication’: the merging of typography, ‘communication composed in type’, and photography, ‘the visual presentation of what can be optically apprehended’. Going further, he saw that photographs might replace words in the form of ‘phototext’, the potential for ‘poly-cinema’ by experimenting with sequential projections and ‘photograms’ (a photographic image made without a camera by placing objects directly onto the surface of a light-sensitive material) allowing for experimentation with the space–time continuum.⁵⁵ In Von Material zu Architektur of 1928, published in English in 1932 as The New Vision, Moholy-Nagy explained his experiments with kinetics, light and space.⁵⁶ Finally, in Vision in Motion, published posthumously in English in 1947, Moholy-Nagy gave a more general view of his ideas of the interrelatedness of art and life, including paying homage to artists whose ideas had influenced him, such as Dada artist Kurt Schwitters’ use of political collage, photomontage and preoccupation with typography.⁵⁷ An early Moholy-Nagy experiment with art and communication was his act of ‘painting’ three pictures by telephone, achieved by dictating the painting to the foreman of a sign factory, using a colour chart and a piece of graph paper.

Moholy-Nagy’s multi-faceted interests were shared by the creators of British exhibitions discussed in this book in terms of their conception, their experimentation with diverse materials (celluloid, photographs, aluminium, plexiglass, gallalith and more) and, on a more prosaic level, in modelling specific formal qualities (such as peep-holes and port-holes). Ultimately, Moholy-Nagy’s interest in interrelatedness, ‘integration’ and ‘assemblage’ led him to experiment with stretching the bounds of communication; to combine visual, material, spatial and textual means; to experiment with materials; to investigate immersive and experimental modes of cinematic spectatorship and ‘mobile perception’; and bolstered his interest in light, space, time and colour. These experiments informed the culture of Modernist exhibition making that is the subject of this book.⁵⁸

From 1930, Herbert Bayer theorised the impact of exhibition design as working with film and cinematic perception, ‘a new discipline … an apex of all media and powers of communication and collective efforts and effects’, he wrote, which shaped the wider field in which exhibitions were being conceptualised, even if they did not literally deploy film as part of their exhibitionary repertoire.⁵⁹ Bayer’s idea of the extended vision – set out in his well-known ‘Diagram of Field of Vision’ – was an interpretation from Moholy-Nagy’s writings, informed by his regard for the work of exhibition designers like El Lissitzky. Bayer’s work transposed Moholy-Nagy’s visual ideas into three dimensions, making exhibitions into forms of Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art).

Ex-Bauhaus faculty Gropius, Moholy-Nagy and Bayer all eventually settled in the US, where they continued to create multi-image, multi-source media environments suited to conveying the present and future of a social democracy, which art historian Fred Turner calls ‘surrounds’.⁶⁰ Their work, Turner argues, continued the application of ideas originating in 1930s multi-screen displays and immersive theatre. These same makers were influential in the British context. Through living in exile in London in the 1930s, architect Walter Gropius (living in London from 1934 to 1937) and artist László Moholy-Nagy (living in London from 1935 to 1937) had a direct impact on the form of exhibitions in Britain. In London, Gropius’s work and ideas were shown in exhibitions and lectures and through espousal by prominent advocates such as Herbert Read, whose 1934 book Art and Industry explained Gropius’s educational programme to a British audience.⁶¹ While in Britain, Moholy-Nagy worked across a range of commercial projects and was directly involved in creating exhibitions that are the focus of this book, most notably planning the 1938 MARS Group exhibition (as discussed in Chapter 2).⁶² Although Herbert Bayer fled from Germany straight to the US, his work was experienced directly by British audiences in 1943, when a modified version of his 1942 exhibition Road to Victory for MOMA toured Britain under the revised title America Marches with the United Nations (as discussed in Chapter 7).

Designers in Britain, such as Misha Black, shared Moholy-Nagy’s and Bayer’s interests in modes of perception, in the integration of elements in design (visual, textual, spatial) and in the continuities between exhibitions and moving images, which this book explores across many contexts. Showing his awareness of exhibition’s particular appeal to its audiences and its comparative role as media, Black wrote in 1949 that ‘the exhibition takes equal place with the film in completely encompassing the spectator and allowing only those distractions which are deliberately planned to accentuate the effect’, an idea developed in his lectures and writings over several years.⁶³ As subsequent chapters show, other influential visual thinkers spent significant time in Britain during this period, including Kurt Schwitters (from 1940 to 1948), Naum Gabo (from 1936 to 1946) and John Heartfield (from 1938 to 1950), shaping and influencing visual presentation.

Catalogues, as portable elements of an exhibition, were another focus for viewers’ dispersed negotiation between text, image, object and space, allowing for an amplification of ideas within the exhibition space itself and a crossover of these ideas from the public space of the exhibition into the sphere of someone’s private possession. The importance of this element of the designed exhibition entity was borne out in Herbert Bayer’s meticulous printed catalogues for exhibitions in 1929, 1930 and 1933. In his catalogue for the German section of the Society of Applied Arts at the Grand Palais, Paris of 1930 (designed by Gropius, Bayer and Moholy-Nagy), Bayer developed his ideas about ‘extended vision’, while the exhibition catalogue accompanying the Berlin version of Die Camera (The Camera) exhibition of 1933, designed by Bayer, consistently followed the design principles of the Bauhaus (despite the exhibition’s projection of Nazi ideology through sections including a visual ‘history of the Nazi movement’ in sixteen photomurals).⁶⁴ In the interstices between text and image were diagrammatic and pictogram languages, enabling exhibition designers to communicate complex technical information to public audiences at a glance.⁶⁵ In Germany, pictograms and diagrams were used from the 1920s, for example in the 1929 Gas und Wasser (Gas and Water) exhibition designed by Schmidt and Gropius.⁶⁶ In Britain, the best-known visual system of this period was Isotype, an information language pioneered by Otto and Marie Neurath in the 1920s, which was used in many exhibitions designed and mounted during the 1930s and the wartime (as discussed in Chapters 4 and 7).

Documentary exhibitions

The history of documentary exhibitions in Britain is inextricably linked to the development of the documentary film movement, with both occupying a place in the extended network of communication forms in the 1930s and 1940s.⁶⁷ This was not least because several influential designers, such as Moholy-Nagy, worked across film, exhibitions and other commissions while living in Britain, including for the GPO (as discussed in Chapter 2).⁶⁸ The content and focus of exhibitions and documentary films had much in common, sharing a deep functional preoccupation with explaining how everyday life in Britain worked, in both war and peacetime. GPO films like The Horsey Mail (1938), Night Mail (1936) and North Sea (1938) explained how everyday feats were underpinned by social and technological infrastructure, as a way of creating public understanding and gaining support. This was a central endeavour of GPO exhibitions (as Chapter 2 shows).⁶⁹ The GPO Film Unit became the Crown Film Unit in 1940, carrying many of these preoccupations and overlaps into the war effort.

Beyond the GPO, films and exhibitions shared characteristics in common within the documentary movement and, after the outbreak of war, in their common abilities to educate and entertain.⁷⁰ The continuities between British cultures of exhibition and of cinema in this period are striking: exhibitions were often mounted in cinemas (as discussed in Chapter 5) and films were taken outside cinemas, to be shown in other public places.⁷¹ It is no mere coincidence that those who ran cinemas in interwar and wartime Britain were called ‘exhibitors’ and represented in the 1930s and 1940s by the Cinematograph Exhibitors’ Association (CEA). British (film) exhibitors recognised and traded upon the linkage between their films and the environments in which they operated.⁷² The crossover between media was evident in British trade exhibitions, such as the series of Radiolympia exhibitions running through the 1930s and 1940s (after their launch in 1922), which ran in parallel with radio exhibitions such as the New York Radio World’s Fair, held from 1922, and Berlin Funkausstellung, held from 1924.⁷³ All of these put on display novel sound and communication technologies, setting out to help audiences understand the wider cultural and social implications of these devices and ultimately enthusing them towards adopting them.

Many of the events in this book can be described as ‘documentary exhibitions’, given their fit within the well-known definition of ‘documentary’ as ‘the creative treatment of actuality’⁷⁴ and their shared conjunction of photography and text informed by a strong Left social consciousness and inflected with ideology (as will be clear in Chapter 2). These exhibitions emerged at the same historical juncture as better-known manifestations of the British documentary tradition and sat close to documentary film, photography and writing (particularly in its shared wartime iteration within the Ministry of Information).⁷⁵ Indeed, writer George Orwell, whose Road to Wigan Pier of 1936 combined descriptive narrative with photographs and is considered a classic of documentary realist writing, was one of many writers employed to write scripts for exhibitions mounted by the MOI.

John Grierson was central to the establishment of the British documentary film movement, active in the interwar period (at the EMB 1926–33 and then the GPO Film Unit 1933–40) when, as Zoe Druick and Deane Williams note, social liberalism attempted to negotiate a third way between planned economies and free markets, and during the command economies of wartime. Grierson recognised realist documentary as ‘a troubled and difficult art’ but as early as 1933 said he looked upon ‘the cinema as a pulpit and use[d] it as a propagandist’.⁷⁶ As with documentary films, several of the exhibitions discussed here raise questions of authenticity, appearing to show named members of the public going about their everyday lives but creating ambiguity as to whether these were in fact ‘real’ or staged.⁷⁷

Exhibitions and the politics of spectatorship

This book is about spectatorship, in particular how exhibitions, in and from Britain, were designed to arouse the emotions, interests, passions and pride of audiences. This led them at times to question the status quo or, at other times, to accept it. This focus relates not only to the optical and material dynamics of exhibitions but also to the textual and discursive rhetoric found in and around these events (in wall panels, exhibited slogans, catalogues, opening speeches, lecture programmes, magazine articles, radio broadcasts, advertisements and administrative papers) and to the context and relationships within which these entities were made. In this sense, this book focuses on the entire ‘apparatus’, to use Michel Foucault’s term describing the enveloping administrative mechanisms and knowledge structures, rather than merely the finished, exhibited product.⁷⁸

The politics of spectatorship is a central focus of many recent studies of twentieth-century exhibitions, which address questions of perception and attention in exhibition spaces, dominant scopic regimes and how exhibitions enabled individual spectators to engage with ideas of collective culture and responsibility, reflecting the recurring focus of Modernist visual culture studies on the relationship between images and the individual.⁷⁹ Writing in 1936, philosopher Walter Benjamin famously discussed the experience of ‘simultaneous collective reception’, which was possible within architecture and film but not through paintings.⁸⁰ While in his seminal 1984 essay ‘From Faktura to Factography’, art historian Benjamin Buchloh describes how montage in exhibitions was initially presented with a simultaneity of opposing views, rapidly changing angles and unmediated transitions from part to whole, which had embodied the relationship between individuality and collectivity as one that was constantly to be redefined. He traces how this was displaced by unified spatial perspectives, often a bird’s-eye view.⁸¹

More recently, art historian Jonathan Crary, in his study of how perception and attention were transformed from the late nineteenth century alongside the emergence of new technological forms of spectacle, display, projection, attraction and recording, proposes that Western modernity has demanded that individuals disengage from ‘a broader field of attraction’, to isolate ‘a reduced number of stimuli’, in order to ‘pay attention’. ‘Modern distraction’, Crary writes, ‘can only be understood through its reciprocal relation to the rise of attentive norms and practices’. ‘Visuality’, Crary argues, ‘should not be over-emphasised lest it be cut off from richer and more historically determined notions of “embodiment”, in which an embodied subject is both the location of operations of power and the potential for resistance’. Crary continues, ‘Spectacular culture is not founded on the necessity of making a subject see, but rather on strategies in which individuals are isolated, separated, and inhabit time as disempowered’.⁸² Often such ideas, as in Crary’s work, are presented as binaries: concentration versus distraction; visuality versus embodiment.

While exhibitions of the Right have often been understood as spectacle, exhibitions of the Left have commonly been understood within the paradigm of ‘carnival’, to use the phrase of philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin, as in characterised by a mocking or satirical challenge to authority and the traditional social hierarchy. The ‘carnival’, Bakhtin writes, is ‘not a spectacle seen by the people; they live in it, and everyone participates because its very idea embraces all the people’. Emphasising its performative and playful character, Bakhtin states, ‘while carnival lasts, there is no other life outside it’.⁸³ Such binaries of Left (as carnival) and Right (as spectacle) have been disrupted more recently. Art historian Michael Tymkiw, in his 2018 study of Nazi exhibition practices, departs from the idea of visitors stunned into passivity by monumentalised imagery, instead arguing that Nazi exhibitions, particularly those mounted during the mid to late 1930s, encouraged ‘engaged spectatorship’, beckoning visitors to become involved in forms of social and political change upon leaving ‘the highly constructed environment of an exhibition space’.⁸⁴ The Nazis used exhibitions to encourage ‘an empathetic mode of spectatorship’, zigzagging walls articulating the link between visitors and the idealised workers depicted in images.⁸⁵ Subject matter was reinforced through formal qualities, for example in the virulently anti-Semitic exhibition Der ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew) where plunging walls created anxiety and ‘fragmentation’ to signify the chaos, brokenness and disunity of the Other, as well as ‘dissonance’ to elicit aversion among spectators.⁸⁶

Exhibitions, displays, demonstrations

In the twenty-first century, the word ‘exhibition’ most usually connotes a gallery-based show containing art or artefacts, while those ensembles without the auratic pull of original objects mounted to convey information, perhaps in commercial or public space, we might call ‘displays’. Central to this account is another term not immediately associated with contemporary exhibitions but which was coined in the 1930s to describe a particular strand of activist exhibition, that is ‘demonstration’. A group central to this book, the anti-fascist Artists International Association, used ‘demonstration’ to describe their exhibitions mounted from 1933, evoking the performative idea of exhibitions as active, provocative and participative, useful vehicles for propaganda and persuasion.

As I discuss in Chapter 4, from the outset the AIA envisaged fighting fascism through exhibitions, identifying themselves as a radical exhibiting society. In an account of the AIA’s origins they recalled: ‘At first [exhibitions] were used primarily [by the AIA] as demonstrations’.⁸⁷ It is informative to trace the etymology of ‘demonstration’, which comes from the Latin ‘to point out’, to ‘make aware in a clear and public way’, which led in the mid-nineteenth century to a connection with public protest.⁸⁸ By the 1930s, the decade the AIA was founded, ‘demonstration’ was in common parlance to indicate political protest, often used to describe working people’s ‘demonstrations’ of anger about poor conditions they were experiencing during the Depression. Indeed, Hunger Marches and other forms of demonstration were regularly the subjects of AIA members’ artworks. Taking up this language of politics and indicating their vision of audiences being animated by contact with culture, exhibitions as ‘demonstrations’ were key to the AIA’s politically engaged vision, akin to active acts of protest, about making manifest and visible issues that were abstract, invisible or not seen and noticed.⁸⁹

Britain was not the only place where this language of exhibition as demonstration was being used in the 1930s nor was the idea purely the preserve of the Left. Historian Jeffrey T. Schnapp quotes fascist journalist Margherita Sarfatti writing in Italy in 1933, describing Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista, the major exhibitionary celebration of the ten-year anniversary of Mussolini’s March on Rome as a demonstration, which led to his coming to power, as follows:

Sarfatti’s use of an exhibition as ‘demonstration’ was in parallel with the AIA’s, despite her radically different politics.

By using this language, the AIA moved the focus from overly privileging the visual, instead revealing exhibition as bringing ideas closer to the spectator, by being focused on human interactions (in the case of people ‘demonstrating’ processes) and escaping the confines of the gallery and the museum, to liminal spaces suspended between the sites of the everyday – station ticket halls, shop windows, bombsites, factory canteens – spaces encountered during a daily journey to work or a lunch break. In doing so, the AIA adopted the language of working-class labour and the factory floor to create a sense of participatory and collective ‘doing’, rather than top-down ‘instruction’, giving a suggestion of the workings being revealed, so that others could engage, with both the process and the outcome.

Art, design and architectural historians have largely focused in on exhibitions either as ‘surface’, as visual spectacle, as sets of assembled objects, or else analysed their formal, spatial qualities. The way in which they provoke movement, a kinetic process, the dynamics of navigation through exhibition spaces, has been more elusive.⁹¹ This is why ‘demonstration’, associated with movement and interaction (either in the form of demonstrating a process or of demonstration as protest), is useful in suggesting the necessity of movement in order to engage with this subject matter. Exhibitions as demonstrations demand engagement in their hybridity: as image, material, text, space and sequence, as this book shows.

The structure of this book

The exhibitions that form the main focus of this book range across two decades from 1933 to 1953, from tiny and fleeting to major, well-documented events. What they have in common is their engagement with contemporary political themes and issues, their use as propaganda and their role as nodes for artists and designers in interwar, wartime and postwar Britain. The current chapter, ‘Introduction: exhibitions as “propaganda in three dimensions”’, has introduced the major contexts and themes of the book. Chapter 1, ‘Banishing chaos, vulgarity and mediocrity: training as an exhibition designer’, sets out the precedents and the contexts for the particular form of exhibitions, exploring the history and evolution of using exhibitions for propaganda and to promote trade and industry in Britain before 1933. The rest of the book presents a series of interconnected arguments about how exhibitions operated as propaganda in Britain from 1933 to 1953. Each chapter centres on a few exhibitions that speak to a particular propagandistic paradigm or proposition. Designers and groups recur across different times and places. Chapter 2, ‘Exhibitions as projection, promotion, policy and activism in three dimensions’, considers the way that the government, authorities and trade bodies used exhibitions for promotion, projection and for sharing policy during the 1930s, with Charing Cross Station a particularly popular site. Chapter 3, ‘Exhibitions as manifestos’, considers how exhibitions took the form of manifestos in 1930s Britain. Chapter 4, ‘Exhibitions as demonstrations’, considers how exhibitions allowed activists to appropriate public space in order to share their political positions. Chapter 5, ‘Counter-exhibitions’, considers how exhibitions allowed activists to raise visible counter-arguments. Chapter 6, ‘Exhibitions as solidarities’, discusses how organisations beyond central government used exhibitions to share solidarities, in particular for fundraising for Russia; while refugee organisations such as the Free German League of Culture used exhibitions as a meeting point, a form of visibility and a creative outlet. Chapter 7, ‘Exhibitions as weapons of war’, shows how exhibitions became wartime propaganda in the context of the Ministry of Information, where exhibitions as ‘propaganda in three dimensions’ were adopted to build patriotic wartime citizens and to communicate urgent practical information to audiences at home and abroad. Chapter 8, ‘Exhibitions as welfare’, shows how exhibitions were used as a source of public information and propaganda for the embryonic welfare state in the postwar period from 1945 to 1953, charting how exhibitions were used as a source of public information within the embryonic Cold War, becoming institutionalised as part of the communications media of the welfare state. Exhibitions formed the focus for an entangled group of designers, working across many contexts from major commercial clients to activist political groups, making them at different times sites of consumption, sites of conformity and sites of resistance.