The major focus of this book is the transformation of perceptions of the possibilities of exhibitions as communication in Britain from the 1930s. While exhibitions had long been understood as the focus for acts of diplomacy and for revitalising international trade, as this book will show, it was not until the Second World War that exhibitions’ form and content became used more systematically in Britain for expressing political positions and opinions, in the context of the reinstated Ministry of Information (MOI). The pretext for these changes was the recurring accusation that the British government and its agencies were unable to make exhibitions work in Britain’s favour, despite a national identification with the inception of the international exhibitions tradition in 1851. British attempts to put this failure right, through training and by initiating new organisations to drive up design standards, is the central focus of this chapter.

Implicit in these developments was the seriousness with which exhibitions were regarded by British authorities as potent vehicles for carrying significant public messages. By the early twentieth century, exhibitions were established channels for enacting British diplomatic relations, with the British Pavilion opening at the Venice Biennale in 1909 as one of the Biennale’s earliest national buildings.¹ The British government’s Board of Trade invested heavily in exhibitions to drive up standards and sales in manufacturing. This chapter traces the varying routes through which exhibition designers learnt skills for the job: in training, apprenticeships, and art and architecture schools in Britain, including through the arrival in London of the German Reimann School, offering specific courses on exhibition and display design.

Although focused on attracting audiences to enjoy a day out, early twentieth-century commercial exhibitions were potent platforms for unsanctioned political interventions. The Daily Mail reported a ‘suffragette invasion’ at the first Ideal Home Exhibition of 1908, recounting the moment when a party of women’s rights activists took the opportunity to speak to the predominantly female exhibition crowd about the rights denied to women who made homes.² Although the displays did not themselves serve to reinforce these political messages, the Ideal Home Exhibition served as a powerfully evocative platform from which to speak of women’s discontent with the status quo and to share a vision of emancipation, given that the home was one of the few domains in which female decision-making was influential, through purchasing power rather than political might. Historian Zoe Thomas discusses various early twentieth century exhibitions that did, however, reinforce political messages of the British suffrage movement. These included a grand exhibition of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies staged at London’s Olympia in spring 1914, which taught visitors about suffrage and put women’s needs centre-stage in displays, as well as linking women with organisations that could offer support, such as The Women’s Taxpayers’ Agency and Legal Advice Bureau.³

Driving up standards: the British Industries Fairs

The conviction that trade fairs would boost the national economy, whilst displaying a country’s industrial prowess, drove their evolution from the mid-nineteenth century. Through the early twentieth century, British officials continued to consider trade exhibitions as potent vehicles for commercial displays and promotion, despite Britain being regularly considered to produce inferior products by comparison with international competitors. The drive to improve Britain’s exports was the pretext for several initiatives, including the long-lived British Industries Fair (BIF). Inaugurated by the British Board of Trade soon after the outbreak of the First World War in 1915, BIFs were intended to exhibit samples of British goods, to inspire home manufacturers to emulate them, for the benefit of British industry.⁴ But as they discovered, the act of displaying goods could be counter-productive, risking making their deficiencies all the more apparent. Reporting from Shepherd’s Bush BIF in 1927, Commercial Art noted the ‘weaknesses conspicuous in our industrial output’ compared with the ‘facile ingenuity’ of continental designers, attributing this to the structural separation between industry and ‘first-rate talents’ in British art schools.⁵

Despite the Board of Trade’s best efforts, by the mid-1930s critics still had little positive to say about BIF and the state of British manufacturing. Visiting BIF 1934, Shelf Appeal singled out two Modernist ‘bright spots’. One was commercial artist Edward McKnight Kauffer’s stand for the GPO, with its simple black and white motif and tubular steel furniture. (Kauffer is introduced more fully in Chapter 2.) The other bright spot was Richard Levin’s stand for the BBC, incorporating huge photomontages into the curved, streamlined structure (Figure 1.1). Levin, who had started his career in stage design with Gaumont-British, the largest British cinema chain of the time, was a prolific exhibition designer through the 1930s. He worked for a period with Arundell Ltd, alongside Misha Black, making stands for companies, as well as designing regularly for the BBC home and international service.⁶ Levin was born in Britain in 1910, his Russian father (from what is now Latvia) and Dutch mother had arrived in Britain in 1908. Levin went on to work on exhibitions across many of the contexts in this book, including at the MOI and overseeing a major element of the 1951 Festival of Britain.⁷ He worked regularly alongside exhibition designer Misha Black whose own parents had moved to Britain from Russia (now Azerbaijan) in 1912. Many of the designers that are central to this book shared Levin and Black’s Jewish heritage.

1.1 Review of Richard Levin’s exhibition stands at the British Industries Fair, including his work for the BBC, which was noted by Shelf Appeal of March 1934 for incorporating ‘large photo-montage’. Uncredited photographer. ‘Richard Levin’s Work at the BIF’, Shelf Appeal (March 1934), p. 321 © Gillian Levin. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.

Levin was one of the most distinguished exhibition designers of the interwar period. Speaking about his work at BIF 1934 to Shelf Appeal, he explained that most exhibition stands failed by being overly focused on architectural features, rather than on ‘selling points’, while poster and advertising artists’ stands failed as they were unable to visualise three-dimensional constructions.⁸ Levin’s view was increasingly being recognised by those who agreed that a stand’s formal qualities should be secondary to its message.

Shelf Appeal’s critics continued to decry BIF’s ‘chaos and vulgarity’, as visitors to BIF 1935 paid inflated charges to enter an overly vast space filled with a chaotic series of ‘new firms’ showing ‘gadgets’ and ‘knick-knacks’. Richard Levin’s laminated Bakelite armchair for Bakelite Ltd was another rare high point in an event otherwise dismissed by the design press as ‘easily the worst from every standpoint’.⁹ Editor and designer Noel Carrington, writing in News Chronicle after visiting BIF 1935, declared it ‘utterly obsolete’, ‘tedious, ill-arranged and flyblown as a provincial church bazaar’, vast and seemingly endless.¹⁰ Clearly BIF’s exhibition strategies were failing, as criticisms continued, with Shelf Appeal describing BIF 1936 as ‘a monument to mediocrity’ and noting that enlarged photographs or ‘photomurals’ were for the first time to the fore in displays, with the hope that the general standard of exhibition stands was slowly improving, thus showing the magazine’s criteria for ‘good design’ to be closely aligned with manifestations of international Modernism.¹¹

Instilling ‘a new spirit’: the Design and Industries Association and British Institute of Industrial Arts

For those puzzling over how to improve British exhibitions and the standards of goods in them, two interlinked issues recurred from the 1910s: the question of what constituted ‘good design’ and the nature of ‘appropriate’ national style. How to improve the quality of design in industrial products without losing sight of a perceived character of ‘Englishness’ was a guiding consideration, particularly when Modernism was considered an international import. From its founding in 1915, the same year as BIF, the Design and Industries Association (DIA) aimed ‘to instill a new spirit of design into British industry’, using exhibitions for promotion.¹²

The DIA was formed following the visit of a group of British makers to the German Werkbund (German League of Works) exhibition held in Cologne in 1914. The first major exhibition of the Werkbund, an association of artists, architects, designers and industrialists, it set out to demonstrate to visitors what had been achieved through German government support for design.¹³ German design in general, and German exhibition design in particular, were long-running points of comparison and competition for Britain. The DIA was a response to the perceived successes of the German Werkbund in stimulating better-quality industrial design and enhancing the relationships between manufacturers, consumers and the economy while trying to correct the heavily criticised, lacklustre Arts and Crafts triennial exhibition of 1912.¹⁴ Responding directly to the 1914 Werkbund exhibition, and demonstrating exhibitions’ capacity to inform and inspire across different contexts, the DIA organised an exhibition at Goldsmiths’ Hall, London in March 1915, foregrounding examples of ‘well-designed’ German and Austrian commercial products and acting as a recruiting ground for the DIA.¹⁵

Reporting on the Leipzig Fair in spring 1926, DIA member and businessman Harry Peach noted how impressed he was by Germans employing ‘the best brains they can to help them, whether for shop window display or exhibitions’ and allowing architects ‘a much bigger place in commercial design than with us’. German printing was the area that most impressed Peach, with posters, advertising and packaging particularly ‘gay’, ‘bright’ and ‘full of character’ and posters with ‘character and liveliness’, ‘more individuality’ and ‘brighter colours’.¹⁶ Standards appeared to be improving in Britain in 1927 when the DIA arranged a British section at Leipzig that magazine Commercial Art noted as taking a ‘creditable place’, although offering no information as to its contents or installation.¹⁷ The DIA continued to use exhibitions as propaganda for their work, both at home and abroad: to represent their ideas about ‘good design’, the need for reform of manufacturing practices and to share their censorious vision of acceptable form.¹⁸ The DIA’s efforts were largely ignored by the trade, who refused to be preached to, and it never grew to be a substantial organisation, despite continuing efforts through exhibitions.¹⁹

The short-lived British Institute of Industrial Arts (BIIA), founded in 1920 with Treasury support, was another government-supported exhibiting effort, whose aims at raising standards of design in industry and improving public taste overlapped with the DIA’s.²⁰ The BIIA had a permanent Exhibition Gallery in Knightsbridge from which to showcase exemplars of industrial art and handicrafts including metalwork, ceramics and glassware; however, modes of display and installation were conventional. Three temporary displays of modern products held at the V&A included Industrial Art for the Slender Purse of 1929, focused on cost-saving during the economic slump. The BIIA lasted until 1933, having had limited impact.²¹

The faltering progress of advertising design was another concern for Britain, with British eyes on Germany.²² Commercial Art, reporting on The Advertising Exhibition held at Olympia in 1927, noted the healthy state of German advertising: ‘until recently, industrial exhibitions in [Britain] have suffered by comparison with similar enterprises abroad’, their exhibits displayed in a ‘haphazard’ way.²³ The Regent Exhibition of Advertising of To-day and To-morrow, overseen by architect Joseph Emberton and held at Dorland Hall on Lower Regent Street in 1934, included a section on political advertising, showing how fascist and communist politics were propagated and inviting people to contribute work.²⁴

The amplification and dissemination of exhibitions in and from Britain in the 1930s was aided by the proliferation of trade journals, which had long reported on Britain’s mixed efforts towards exhibiting on the world stage. Architectural Review magazine had a focus on emerging exhibition practices and was long established after its founding in 1896. The DIA had its own magazine, the DIA Quarterly Journal. Display, the Official Magazine of the British Association of Display Men, was launched in 1919. Commercial Art: A Magazine of Printing & Advertising Progress was produced in London from 1922 by the publishers of The Studio, conceived of as a trade journal for the British advertising industry. The Daily Express newspaper organised a National Display Competition annually from 1924 and in 1933 Shelf Appeal began, catering to the interests of commercial artists primarily working on display and packaging.

Britain eclipsed at international exhibitions

Britain’s contributions at international expos in the 1920s were at best banal, nostalgic and eccentric. A notable example was the British contribution to Der Internationalen Presse-Ausstellung (International Press Exhibition), known as Pressa, held in Cologne in 1928. The British exhibits were a narrow selection, mainly from within the orbit of the DIA, including contemporary fine printing and book illustration, posters for London Transport and works by Crawfords advertising agency, accompanied by a potted palm and a Union Jack. Das Berliner Tageblatt newspaper dismissed Britain’s effort as ‘pious, aristocratic, historically reverent, at peace in its confidence’.²⁵ This contrasted with the newspaper’s excitement about El Lissitzky’s Soviet Pavilion, a montage environment that was wowing audiences. It used text to striking effect as a central element, with lettering in a range of bold, dominating sans serif fonts from tiny to human-height; demanding attention and unsettling the viewer, following and reinforcing the structural elements. These were shown alongside powerful enlarged photographs on the horizontal and vertical axes over viewers’ heads, producing rapid changes in rhythm and mood that disorientated and stimulated audiences. The ‘L-E-N-I-N’ display at Pressa used lettering to reinforce the sequential qualities of the exhibition, forcing visitors to move through the display in order to reveal its cryptic contents.

The gulf between the British and Soviet Pavilions’ installations was stark: the British exhibits were wall-hung in a conventional space dominated by a Union Jack and a printing press, surrounded by wood engravings using historic typefaces. Meanwhile El Lissitzky led a Soviet team in the creation of a vast, chaotic but compelling photomural, ‘The Task of the Press Is the Education of the Masses’, which, Das Berliner Tageblatt enthused, displayed ‘grandeur in its exposition of social conditions … Forward! In the struggle and into class consciousness’.²⁶ The Soviet contribution showed the potential of photography and of exhibition as a creative medium in its own right, a new discipline within the field of visual communication. Herbert Bayer later explained that Lissitzky’s installation at Pressa had inspired him to take up exhibition design, although he saw Lissitzky’s work as ‘chaotic’ while his own desire was for the imposition of artistic control.²⁷ Lissitzky’s Pressa room was also admired in the British display press. Typographer Jan Tschichold, writing in London-based Commercial Art magazine, marvelled at his use of ‘a new exhibition technique’, which ‘produced a new purely visual design of the exhibition space’, bringing together many materials including glass, mirrors, celluloid, nickel, wood, lacquer, textiles and photographs, as well as experimenting with introducing technologies, ‘continuous films, illuminated and intermittent letters’ and ‘rotating models’. He compared the exhibition space, in Lissitzky’s hands, to a stage, ‘on which the visitor himself seemed to be one of the players’, a novel form of immersive experience for spectators.²⁸

Britain was relatively slow to grapple with the arts of publicity and public relations. British civil servant Stephen Tallents, who led the short-lived Empire Marketing Board (EMB) from 1926 to 1933, which used exhibitions as a primary mode of promotion, described being profoundly moved by Germany’s powerful contribution to the 1929 International Exhibition at Barcelona. Tallents saw Germany’s ability, through Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich’s German pavilion made of glass, steel and marble and fourteen other sections, to reinforce the ‘sense of the industrial power of modern Germany’ and to transmit the ‘expression of a lonely, powerful and forward-looking spirit’. Through them, Tallents saw Germany harnessing exhibition as the medium through which to project itself as ‘the industrial leader of Europe’ and the place to find ‘efficient, modern manufactured goods’. This visit galvanised Tallents to the view that British exhibitions must follow suit, to be used more effectively for purposes of communication and projection. ‘England has always held herself aloof from the world’s opinion’, Tallents wrote. ‘She can no longer afford that indifference … she should set herself to throw a true and modern picture of her qualities on the screen of the world’s mind’.²⁹ For Tallents, as for his contemporaries, there was a distinction between cultural propaganda promoting ‘national aims and achievements’ and political or economic propaganda. The former was acceptable and necessary within a democracy, while the latter was not.³⁰

As well as putting the kind of ‘good design’ on show that had so impressed members of the DIA, while Britain was still far from having identified the power of photography in exhibitions, German Werkbund exhibitions demonstrated photography’s communicative potential. Film und Foto: Internationale Ausstellung des Deutschen Werkbundes (Film and Photography: International Exhibition of the German Werkbund) was held in Stuttgart in May 1929 before touring internationally. The exhibition showed how photography might be used as a dynamic and persuasive tool for communication in contemporary society, with sections given over to individual nations, to techniques like photomontage and to photography’s relationship with advertising. In his contribution to the show, Moholy-Nagy was able to show off the approach he had called ‘Neue Sehen’ (New Vision): the camera’s ability to act as a kind of prosthesis, extending and improving upon what people perceive with their eyes. In Film und Foto, Moholy-Nagy illustrated the principles of ‘New Vision’ by means of a display that brought together varied photographs with different provenances (zoological, astronomical, botanical, aerial, medical, forensic, industrial, journalistic), with the logic that they could be ‘read’ beyond the purpose for which they were taken. The exhibition was accompanied by a full cinematic programme, which highlighted the visual parallels between the content and sequencing of photography and cinema, a connection that would not be made in British exhibitions until the mid-1930s.³¹

German exhibitions not only impressed the critics for their use of two-dimensional media, such as photography and film; they were noted for their innovation as spatial entities. Their designers embraced exhibitions’ innately dualistic ability to prompt an embodied, sequential experience of moving through displays on the ground, whilst giving visitors an overview from differing spaces and levels.³² In his design for the German section of the Ausstellungsstand der Baugewerkschaften (Exhibition of the Building Workers Unions) in Berlin 1931, Herbert Bayer, working with Marcel Breuer, Walter Gropius and László Moholy-Nagy, created opportunities for visitors to climb above ground level, looking down from bridges to change the interactions with spaces, to give them intimate experiences of individual sections and long views of themes. Gropius and Moholy-Nagy both spent time in Britain in the mid-1930s, shaping design and exhibition cultures (as discussed later in this chapter).

Bayer, who moved from Berlin to New York in 1938, believed exhibition design paralleled ‘the psychology of advertising’ in being calculated to change visitors’ beliefs and behaviours, to get fully under their skin.³³ The parallels between circulating in an exhibition space and reading were apparent to him in his observation that ‘an exhibition can be compared with a book insofar as the pages of the book are moved to pass by the reader’s eye’ and that ‘the reading method of Western man is from left to right. The walking direction in exhibitions must, logically, be from left to right’.³⁴ Bayer continued to work with this concept of exhibition visitor-as-reader, capitalising on it in his design for the MOMA’s Bauhaus: 1919–1928 exhibition in 1938 and his 1942 MOMA Road to Victory exhibition. In the latter, narrative underlined and reinforced the meaning through inextricably linked sequences, a spatial structuring with curves, flows and the careful placing of information: ‘planned circulation’, as Bayer described it, as the key principle.³⁵ Road to Victory toured Britain in 1943 with the revised name America Marches with the United Nations (as discussed more fully in Chapter 7). British propaganda exhibitions’ increasingly deft incorporation of text, narrative and sequence, which reinforced their potential as spatial arguments, is a major theme of this book.

The Gorell Committee and after

Acknowledging Britain’s deficiency in contributions to international exhibitions, the Board of Trade formed the Gorell Committee in 1931 to investigate and advise on ‘the desirability of forming in London a standing exhibition of articles of every-day use and good design of current manufacture, and of forming temporary exhibitions of the same kind’ and ‘the desirability of organizing local or travelling exhibitions of the same kind both at home and abroad’.³⁶ The resulting report of 1932 concluded that ‘The Government and Local Education Authorities should vigorously promote the improvement of the art education of the country’, focused on the role of ‘exhibitions of industrial art’ in improving ‘the taste of designers, manufacturers, distributors and the general public’ by displaying ‘beautiful modern manufactured goods, due regard being paid to the purchasing power of the householder of moderate means’.³⁷

The Council for Art and Industry (CAI), chaired by Frank Pick and funded by the Treasury, was founded to enact the recommendations of the Gorell Report. Civil servant Pick links many of the events analysed across this book as a key figure in British cultures of publicity, promotion and propaganda into the war period (until his early death in 1941). Pick, who identified exhibitions as a key promotions vehicle, had worked with the Underground Group from the start of his career, appointed as its Publicity Officer in 1908 and rising through the ranks to become Managing Director in 1928. As a founding member of the DIA, Pick was invested in promoting ‘good design’ and after the formation of the London Passenger Transport Board (LPTB) in 1933, Pick acted as patron for Modernist designers who he commissioned to create publicity posters and exhibitions, as well as designing new forms of transport. At the CAI Pick established a Committee on Presentation and Display, tasked with addressing Britain’s poor exhibitions record and arranging exhibitions of industrial products abroad. Sir Edward Crowe, Controller of the Department of Overseas Trade, amplified these endeavours, explaining in Display magazine the government’s recognition of ‘the full value of publicity, propaganda, and advertising, and particularly the value of display’.³⁸

‘The first significant exhibition of design’, according to historian Kenneth Luckhurst, surveying exhibitions immediately after the Second World War, was the 1933 British Industrial Art in Relation to the Home exhibition.³⁹ This was mounted in response to Gorell and held at Dorland Hall in 1933, showing the public the ‘best examples’ of ‘the new industrial art’.⁴⁰ Exhibition architect Oliver Hill worked with a committee including E. McKnight Kauffer, Wells Coates, Serge Chermayeff and Raymond McGrath to show a ‘Minimum Flat’, a ‘Unit House’ and a large stone wall incised by sculptor Eric Gill. Under the banner ‘Designs for Living’, the exhibition showed five living rooms, bedrooms, bathroom, kitchen and office, as well as a set of ‘interiors in motion’ for ocean liner, car, airliner, yacht and plane.⁴¹ McGrath’s illustrations for the design of a yacht cabin were shown and the Lawn Road flats designed by Wells Coates were built in 1933–34 after being shown as prototypes at the exhibition. Mounted in the same year that Wells Coates founded MARS (the Modern Architectural Research Group) and Berthold Lubetkin formed the Tecton Group, chiming with this Modernist zeal and self-mythification, the exhibition professed ‘to give expression to a new type of civilisation’.⁴²

Showing Gorell’s perceived significance, the committee Report was reproduced as an appendix to Herbert Read’s book Art and Industry: The Principles of Industrial Design in 1934. As an editor, poet, writer and critic, Read had an overview of British culture, which enabled him to become chief interlocutor for British Modernist art movements from the 1930s. In Art and Industry, designed by Herbert Bayer and published by Faber & Faber, Read addressed questions about how exhibitions could improve design education and foster ‘good form’, attributing the poor quality of manufactured goods to poor education. Read espoused the ideas and ideals of Walter Gropius, laying out Gropius’s educational programme for an English-speaking audience. He noted the shortcomings of the technical schools system and how ‘art’ education had become separate from ‘technical industrial education’, art seen as distinct from the process of machine production. The Bauhaus, Read believed, offered a model where ‘in every practical activity the artist is necessary, to give form to material’, from regional plans to door-handles. All schools should be assimilated to the ‘Fachschule’ or else become factories.⁴³

Despite recognising models of good practice, the standards of British exhibitions continued to be poor. The British Art in Industry exhibition of 1935 was another conspicuous failure. Held at Burlington House, it was intended to impress upon the British and foreign public the importance of beauty in the articles they purchased and to prove to manufacturers that British artists could supply ‘original, attractive and technically suitable designs for the production of articles by mechanical means’.⁴⁴ Prominent artists were invited to contribute, with Graham Sutherland showing china and glass carrying strong graphic shapes, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant showing patterned furnishing fabrics and Paul Nash showing decorated glassware and printed chiffon.⁴⁵ Serge Chermayeff and others joined forces to lampoon the exhibition as ‘fanciful, extravagant, nothing to do with design for mass-production’. It was, Chermayeff said, ‘totally unfunctional, completely inefficient, ladylike, directed towards Mayfair gracious living’, revealing the problematic sexist, class-ridden ambivalence at the heart of the ‘good design’ agenda, which could deteriorate very quickly into middle-class (male) do-gooders trying to impose their own taste on working-class customers.⁴⁶ Russian-born architect and industrial designer Chermayeff had moved to Britain as a child, training during the 1920s at schools in Germany, Austria, France and the Netherlands while working as a journalist and designer to support himself. On returning to Britain in the late 1920s, Chermayeff developed the Modern Design Studio at furniture designers Waring and Gillow, before launching his own practice as interior architect and taking on regular exhibition commissions.⁴⁷ The DIA, echoing Chermayeff’s criticisms, denounced British Art in Industry as ‘a grotesque failure’, while Herbert Read believed the exhibition would do more harm than good unless it was demolished, lashing out at a ‘modish’ and ‘Mayfairish’ walnut and maple bed.⁴⁸

Raymond Mortimer, writing in the New Statesman, bemoaned the standards it set as ‘costly and depraved’, while Pevsner admitted the exhibition was embarrassing: ‘what such an exhibition might have been!’ Redeeming features included a playful perfumery display by Misha Black, praised by Shelf Appeal for showing fifty objects ‘without the least appearance of crowding’ (Figure 1.2).⁴⁹ Architectural Review’s assistant editor J. M. Richards responded to the exhibition with a long piece about the character of modern industrial design entitled ‘Towards a Rational Aesthetic’ in which he emphasised that standardisation should not mean monotony, as it had done there.⁵⁰

1.2 Misha Black’s ‘interestingly arranged’ perfumery display at the British Art in Industry exhibition, 1935. Image courtesy of the British Library. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.

Learning to be an exhibition designer

Herbert Read had proposed in his treatise Art and Industry that the standard of British design would only improve through education. Up to this point, exhibition design training had happened through apprenticeships and commissions for consultant design companies, which were increasingly central to the commercial ecology of shop window displays and trade fairs from the 1920s. The career trajectory of Misha Black, who is central to this book across all of its phases, is an important example of the haphazard nature of exhibition design training in early twentieth-century Britain. Black described becoming an exhibition designer ‘by accident’, starting work ‘as an office boy in an exhibition firm’ in 1927, at the age of 17, without formal art school training.⁵¹ His first job was through London-based Arundell Display Ltd, managed by ‘Lady’ Page Wood,⁵² which advertised itself in the 1920s as offering manufacturers, advertisers and retailers ‘a complete window publicity service’, with showrooms in Bush House for potential employers to see ‘display novelties’, innovative ways of treating display issues.⁵³ Black answered an advertisement in The Times inviting replies from ‘anybody interested in learning shop-window dressing’, which led to classes under Hans Kiesewetter, where he met and took on commissions alongside Lucy Rossetti, with whom he set up his first design practice, Studio Z.⁵⁴

Other companies offering similar services included Wickham Limited and George Cuming Limited, which took on young apprentices such as Black to train up across several types of commission, including shop window displays, advertising in newspapers for people who were interested to work and learn semi-formally with authorities in the area.⁵⁵ Many companies put their stand designs to commercial display companies and consultants with specialist skills. Those regularly praised in the display press for commissioning interesting designers and incorporating new forms, typography and materials included Bakelite, the Electrical Distributors’ Association (EDA) and the General Post Office (GPO).⁵⁶ The Gas Light and Coke Company, whose promotions work was often admired in the trade press, took on Misha Black as consultant designer for several years in the 1930s to design stands and other company branding elements.

Designing for exhibitions used transferable skills that could be developed in other commercial contexts including advertising poster and book cover design, packaging and shop window displays. Trade fairs such as BIF provided a lively training ground for commercial artists to hone their craft as designers and story-tellers. Dorothy Braddell’s Crosse & Blackwell Marmalade stand for the Olympia Food Exhibition in 1925 showed her prowess as story-teller, incorporating a large model of the towers and spires of the four London churches mentioned in the ‘Oranges and Lemons’ nursery rhyme and a market scene, with exhibits on stalls with striped awnings playfully incorporating the firm’s name. Braddell designed multiple stands for Shell-Mex Ltd, often with plate glass show windows behind which were positioned mechanical models of cars moving through a landscape.⁵⁷

As well as being a route for commercially trained artists, exhibitions work offered an important training ground for young architects, especially given that the Depression had devastated architectural practice from the late 1920s, with building programmes slowing down or stopping entirely as a result.⁵⁸ Working on exhibitions filled the void, offering significant experience to recently qualified architects.⁵⁹ Some built their careers with companies that repeatedly commissioned them to design successive exhibition stands. Stands were often highly architectural, formed as miniature buildings, incorporating structural lettering, lighting and a furnished meeting area; becoming a chance to showcase new building forms and materials, novel forms of signage and contemporary furniture. Others were closer to the form of photographic exhibitions developed elsewhere, increasingly showcasing display trickery through the 1930s. Architect Rodney Thomas, who went on to found the Arcon architectural practice in 1943, worked with Ascot Gas Water Heater designing stands for nearly twenty years from 1936, which provided an excellent opportunity to experiment with building forms and materials.⁶⁰ Architect Joseph Emberton attributed the success of his whole architectural career to his first commission for an exhibition stand about artificial leather at Olympia in the early 1920s.⁶¹

By the mid-1930s, Modernist architects’ contributions dominated the Building Exhibition, with manufacturers increasingly understanding the benefits of working with designers willing to experiment with forms in their stands.⁶² The Venesta company pioneered the practice of commissioning stand designers direct: their 1930 stand for the Building Exhibition was designed by architects Le Corbusier and Charlotte Perriand;⁶³ they commissioned their 1932 stand from architect Wells Coates; their 1934 stand from new practice Tecton; and in 1936 they turned to reputable furniture designer R. D. Russell.⁶⁴ As I discuss in Chapters 7 and 8, architect Peter Moro and designer Robin Day, who collaborated on many exhibitions, testified to exhibitions’ huge significance as training grounds within both their careers. Moro had been born in Heidelberg, training as an architect in Stuttgart, Berlin and Zurich before arriving in Britain in 1936, acquiring his Labour Permit initially as a specialist on spiral staircases, which allowed him to work with Berthold Lubetkin and the Tecton practice.⁶⁵

Exhibition design was the least prestigious of the three-dimensional arts, as Misha Black acknowledged, describing exhibition designers as a ‘small body of rather pathetic men’.⁶⁶ Yet designing exhibitions was an important source of income for artists and designers struggling to make ends meet. Artist Paul Nash – who worked variously as painter, printmaker, illustrator, photographer and commercial artist – recognised this, listing exhibitions as one of several ways of building artistic careers in an article of May 1933 for The Journal of Careers. In the article, Nash described how artists were admired but often not sufficiently remunerated for artistic work, discussing how difficult it was for artists to make a living by art alone and acknowledging the snobbery associated with admitting to taking on commercial design work, such as creating exhibitions.⁶⁷

‘A flutter in the dovecotes of display’: Reimann in London

Standards in British exhibition design looked set to improve with the news that Berlin’s ‘famed’ Reimann School was opening in London in January 1937. In anticipation, Shelf Appeal announced that soon there would be ‘a flutter in the dovecotes of display’ with the arrival of the School ‘to design and sell display, as well as teach it’, optimistic it could address British shortcomings in display.⁶⁸ Founded in Berlin in 1902 by Albert and Klara Reimann, the School had grown out of a regular weekend art school, quickly developing an international reputation.⁶⁹ Reimann staff knew how to bolster the School’s reputation through publicity in the media, developing the in-house publication Farbe und Form and inviting prominent contributions. The School made sure that glowing reports on its work appeared regularly in the British trade press. Director Albert Reimann persuaded British readers of the merits of the School’s training through an article in London-based Commercial Art, explaining how ‘display men’ were trained at ‘the only higher technical school in Germany’.⁷⁰

Rather than shying away from the commercial applications of training, Reimann embraced them, priding themselves on how excellently they equipped students for employment in the areas of design, mediating between production and consumption, courses including shop window display, stage exhibition and poster design, as well as packaging and commercial illustration. Reimann’s window display courses under Georg Fischer were another draw, developed in tandem with department stores blossoming in Berlin.⁷¹ The British trade press acknowledged the quality of German window displays as outshining British ones, something they attributed to poor training. An article in Commercial Art, written by an unnamed German designer, explained how German shop display training worked, highlighting the ‘extraordinary mutual benefit’ that could derive from a close relationship between the artist and merchant, and that ‘commercial propaganda may be the means of raising the public taste to a higher level in matters of art’.⁷²

The Reimanns’ move to London was in direct response to increasing hostility from the Nazi regime. Shelf Appeal reported that the ‘school of industrial art’ in London would be led by Heinz Reimann, son of the founders, and run ‘on a large scale as a profit-earning concern’. Its pointedly vocational focus was to be replicated in this new context: its intention for students to get ‘good jobs on the strength of their training’ paramount.⁷³ This was ‘Design for Making a Living’, a Reimann advert proudly declared, where ‘training enables you to put your creative ability to practical use’ (Figure 1.3).⁷⁴ The London School was set up to teach a mix of both amateurs and professionals already working in display, adapted to fit their timetables through teaching in both daytime and evening class sessions.

The relatively high fees meant students needed already to be earning. Fees meant, Shelf Appeal hoped in a spirit of encouraging its readers to put themselves forward to teach, that instructors would get better salaries than in art schools. Forty per cent of students were reported to come from outside Germany (including Scandinavia, Austria, France, England and the USA). That Reimann prepared students for ‘real’ work was reinforced by students not only using ‘drawing boards’ but working in studios ‘to build displays’ for stores and manufacturers that would, in themselves, bring income to the School and provide students with real experience. A staff of forty display instructors would be in charge, ten brought over from Berlin, as Heinz Reimann had been able to find few competent enough to teach in England, with students taught how to apply to display ‘principles of dynamic, asymmetric balance, long applied to typography and layout’. Shelf Appeal, concluding its article about Reimann’s London opening, stated, ‘British display, judged by its conventions, its press, and on its own face value, is Britain’s weakest selling point’.⁷⁵

The London Reimann School and Studios opened on Regency Street, Westminster in January 1937, in an ex-warehouse converted into a ‘modern school’ for five hundred students, initially under the direction of ex-Architectural Association School Principal Howard Robertson. By the time of its opening its Principal was Canadian-born graphic designer Austin Cooper. The opening was marked with a sherry party, a tour of the new building and an exhibition sampling work of London teaching staff and Berlin-based students including a ‘dramatisation of a Hoover’, with ‘ghost stairs’ created from metal and stretched string, and an ‘animated’ window display for Ripolin paint using ‘a black revolving roller’ to suggest the can’s contents were flowing down a slope. Cooper’s opening speech referred to the exhibition: ‘Remember it is the work of German students … But I doubt whether a higher standard of student work could be seen anywhere to-day’, negotiating with sensitivity the possible perceived threat of the School as being too ‘foreign’ by reassuring that while the tried and tested system used in Berlin would be retained, the London School would present ‘a tribute to British taste’, by some unspecified means.⁷⁶ Design writer John Gloag spoke at the opening. ‘There is’, he said, ‘an aching need for the proper training of people so that they work for commerce and industry without friction, without prejudice, without waste’. Shelf Appeal, reviewing the opening, reported ‘display technique’ vying with ‘a spectacular list of instructors’, while Frank Pick of the London Passenger Transport Board enthused about the inaugural exhibition as ‘far above anything’ he had ever seen – so good, in fact, that Pick thought it would make everything else in Britain look ‘rubbish by contrast’.⁷⁷

1.3 Advertisement for the Reimann School in London, 1937. Image courtesy of the British Library. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.

The London Reimann School’s advisory council was a list of the great and the good of British commercial art.⁷⁸ The focus of specialisation was ‘Display & Education’, ‘Commercial Art’, ‘Fashion & Dressmaking’, ‘Photography and Film’ and ‘Arts and Crafts (elementary and non-professional)’, as trade advertisements made clear.⁷⁹ As Shelf Appeal noted again, the continuing paucity of British specialists in this area was reflected in the fact that only half of the forty London Reimann instructors was what they called ‘English’, among them illustrator Eric Fraser, industrial designer Milner Gray, typographer Robert Harling and graphic designer E. McKnight Kauffer. Only one of five display instructors was ‘English’, as such a talent ‘did not exist in England’.⁸⁰ The lack of local instructors, Shelf Appeal explained, was because ‘display is a three-dimensional job’, ‘construction and lighting and colour’, ‘not mere showcards and backgrounds as the average English art director sees it’. The magazine revealed an ongoing uncertainty over whether to embrace or gloss over the perceived foreignness of the School’s work, influenced, as they described it, ‘strongly by German practice’.⁸¹ Richard Hamilton, later a celebrated Pop artist, was amongst the early tutors.⁸² Natasha Kroll, former student at Reimann in Berlin and later an eminent display designer in Britain, was one of several designers who travelled from Berlin to join the London faculty (Figure 1.4).

1.4 Faculty of the London Reimann School, with Natasha Kroll in the centre. Image courtesy of the University of Brighton Design Archives. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.

For some commentators the Reimann lived up to its promise: Shelf Appeal reported enthusiastically on progress, praising good quality work such as a raincoat display with string animating four coats worn by invisible people. It described how many department stores – the Lewis’s chain, Swan & Edgar and Austin Reed – were sending staff to train at the School. Addressing potentially xenophobic critics, the magazine reported: ‘If you ever had qualms that the school would introduce an alien note into British design’, ‘you will be reassured to learn that there is actually a bigger proportion of foreign students than foreign teachers’, with, by this stage, only eight German of the forty teaching staff.⁸³ The head of exhibition and display planning was H. Loew, a student of Joost Schmidt and László Moholy-Nagy at the Bauhaus, where he had acted as Gropius’s assistant in exhibition work.⁸⁴ Loew had joined the Reimann faculty after years as a freelance display and exhibition designer.⁸⁵

An exhibition in autumn 1937 of the work of exhibition design students was an opportunity to show the departmental curriculum through ‘an ingenious diagrammatic photo-mural showing the order of studies’. Much of its audience represented businesses ‘anxious to engage trained students’.⁸⁶ By the end of the year Reimann taught shop window display, but not yet exhibition technique because of a shortage of expertise even on the Continent, despite the many propaganda exhibitions held in Germany.⁸⁷ Although there was much optimism for Reimann, it did not make a significant impact on the quality of British exhibitions and the training was not universally admired. Misha Black described his ‘prejudice’ against the school, considering their display work out of fashion, harking back to German display styles popular a decade earlier.⁸⁸

Trying to push up standards

Designing impressive propaganda exhibitions demanded multiple skills – from understanding type and text layout, to using photography and film, to creating spaces as a setting to engage and envelope audiences – and these skills were still not widely shared and understood by British designers, even by the outbreak of the Second World War. This problem of how best to teach these skills associated with exhibitions work continued to puzzle all those involved. Art schools and technical colleges across Britain were often ill-equipped, their highly stratified and class-bound systems divided between teaching the higher status skills associated with fine art and architecture, on the one hand, and skills associated with practical and commercial applications on the other. This led designer Clifford Hatts, who started his career as exhibition designer after the Second World War, to observe the distinction up until the mid-1940s between the middle-class ‘round boys’, who pursued the more prestigious fine art and architecture training, and working-class ‘flat boys’, like himself, who had learnt commercial design skills through two-dimensional, graphic means at a technical college.⁸⁹ This stratified culture meant that nowhere were both the two- and three-dimensional skills associated with exhibition design being taught.

Brighton School of Art was one of several schools that ran courses associated with commercial display design in the mid-1930s. Brighton’s ‘Window and Shop Display’ courses were entirely focused towards supporting commercial careers, benefiting shop workers and display assistants; providing, as they did, practical demonstrations, skills in window lighting, making suitable backgrounds, foregrounds and accessories and unit dressing.⁹⁰ The same was true elsewhere: at Leicester College of Arts and Crafts and Goldsmiths College, display courses were piecemeal and haphazard, focused towards commercial application.⁹¹ In the process, any wider skills allowing students to develop a more conceptually nuanced sense of display as a way to communicate ideas, not just to sell products, were not being taught.

The failure of art and design schools to provide training for good exhibitions returned to the fore after Britain’s critical failure at the Exposition Internationale des Arts et des Techniques dans la Vie Moderne held in Paris in 1937, where the British Pavilion was slated by critics. The British Pavilion, overseen by Frank Pick, working with lead architect Oliver Hill, contained a series of objects that were admired, including a painting by Edward Bawden and finely printed photographs of the English countryside. But they were shown beside sports displays about golf, tennis, polo, fishing and shooting game birds. The display’s overall impact was eccentric and highly class-bound, leading bewildered New Statesman and Nation editor Kingsley Martin to ask: ‘could this be England?’⁹²

In the aftermath of this failure, the Board of Trade attempted once more to remedy the situation, setting up an enquiry on presentation and display, chaired by Pick, to ask all those involved with British exhibition design why they were ‘not highly commended’ and to investigate ‘what had gone wrong’.⁹³ Those invited to give evidence to the panel give a fascinating insight into the profession of exhibition design just before the Second World War. Witnesses included architects (Serge Chermayeff, Joseph Emberton), art college principals, department store managers, the press, display trade bodies (the Association of Display Producers and Silk Screen Printers and the National Display Association), display firms (Beck and Pollitzer) and display designers (Misha Black, Grace Lovat Fraser). There was unanimous agreement from all witnesses on two points: first, that British art, architecture and design schools taught exhibition design badly, if at all, and second, that the pool of exhibition designers and design firms in Britain was extremely limited (less than a dozen).

An important focus of the hearings was on harnessing exhibitions’ ability to act as communication. Several witnesses called in front of the Board of Trade committee were clear that this was a feature of foreign exhibitions but was not yet happening in Britain. Many designers described falling into exhibitions work by accident; however, architect Serge Chermayeff described his regular work on exhibitions as ‘by intention’. Exhibitions were, he thought, an important form for explaining and showing modern architecture; ‘we have to become our own propagandists’, he said, likely referring to the exhibitions work of the Modern Architectural Research Group (MARS), which Chermayeff was involved with at the time (and which I discuss in more detail in Chapters 2 and 3). Chermayeff believed ‘that if you put your morals, your principles, into the exhibit, with what has to be shown, you would educate the public and get them to accept those ideas by the way of the things displayed’. German exhibitions, he believed, were already managing to do this, explaining ‘abstract facts’ to the public, an approach he believed British government non-commercial exhibitions needed to adopt to show subjects like town planning, dealing with traffic, ‘related to some particular feature in community life and not merely an efficient market place’.⁹⁴

Exhibitions’ shortcoming as communication in Britain – the major conclusion of the Board of Trade enquiry – was soon to be addressed head-on. But, as the next chapter will show, there were already some exceptions emerging during the 1930s, in the context of housing activism and the presentation of government policy through exhibitions. The strong economic imperatives towards the development of commercial exhibitions for promoting trade and industry in Britain continued during the first decades of the twentieth century, as did exhibitions focused on heading off poor quality goods and supporting their ‘good design’ agenda. British training in exhibition design was acknowledged as haphazard and piecemeal, with a renewed focus on improving mixed and deeply stratified art education from the mid-1930s. Authoritative art historian and critic Herbert Read supported this agenda. Like many contemporaries, Read saw importing the Bauhaus model as the answer to Britain’s shortcomings. Early optimism about the potential impact on display design of the opening of the London Reimann School in 1937 turned out to be largely unfounded and the School’s impact turned out to be more limited than hoped. The next chapter addresses the contexts in which exhibitions in Britain started to be seen as more effective as communications media.