On Mayday 1938, at an anti-fascist gathering at London’s Hyde Park, amongst the assorted banners was one that read:

This pithy quotation, an adaptation of words from one of England’s most celebrated Romantic poets, critiqued contemporary government policy and referenced British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement, which, they believed, was allowing Hitler to expand German territory unchecked.¹ The London Surrealist Group’s Blake banner typified the playful, politically engaged and below-the-radar nature of contemporary artistic interventions. This chapter explores such interventions, showing how the definition of ‘exhibitions’ was stretched during the 1930s, so that they morphed to operate as strategic forms of public ‘demonstration’, intersecting with wider protest cultures in Britain, at a time when permissible public activities were severely curtailed.

With the rise of political extremism, laws and byelaws increasingly controlled activities allowed in public spaces and were intended to curtail protests and other behaviours viewed as disruptive. In this context, exhibitions became expedient vehicles for politically engaged artist- and designer-activists. They allowed political ideas to be shared publicly, in a form less conspicuously challenging to authority, and so were more permissible spaces for raising political issues to the public, acting as another form of public communication that went under the wire. In order to consider the varied activities discussed in this chapter as forms of ‘exhibition’, we need temporarily to remove our main focus from their specific, material forms and, instead, to consider them as varied ‘acts of exposure’, to draw from cultural theorist Mieke Bal’s proposition for understanding exhibition’s rhetorical power as public exposition and public presentation. If we can focus temporarily on the discourse within which exhibitions evolved in this period and the ideas and rhetoric deployed in and through them, rather than on their particular forms, we are able to see the playful and provocative ways in which they were being rethought to become available for political means.²

4.1 Surrealist group banner at Hyde Park rally, May Day, 1938. Unknown photographer. © reserved. Image courtesy of TATE. TGA 7043/14. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.

Although exhibitions were being used to striking effect in totalitarian states across Europe, both on the Left and Right during the 1930s, in Britain publicly mounted exhibitions were the preserve of artists and designers on the Left. My primary focus in this chapter is on the exhibitionary ‘demonstrations’ held by two groups in particular. The first group most actively pioneering exhibitions for sharing political ideas in early twentieth-century Britain was the Artists International Association (AIA), their innovation as exhibition makers being in conceptualising urban space as a platform for exhibitions performed ‘live’, as well as temporary assemblages of billboards and banners. The second group was the pacifist Cambridge Anti-War Council who created impactful exhibitions for demonstrating peace.

The groups had overlapping protagonists, with Misha Black a prime mover across both contexts. Drawing from ideas in philosopher Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space, I will suggest that exhibitions operated for the AIA in particular during this period as a means of creating multi-faceted and interpenetrating ‘social space’: space created by the relationships they supported, space created from ideas and solidarities; where ambiguous continuities existed regardless of whether there appeared to be visible boundaries and forms of spatial separation.³

The formation of the AIA and exhibitions as ‘demonstrations’

The founding meeting of Artists International (as they were initially named, echoing the Communist International) was held in 1933 at the London Covent Garden flat of 23-year-old designer Misha Black, a group of young artists – including James Fitton, Clifford Rowe, James Boswell, James Lucas and Pearl Binder – sitting on fruit boxes, by candlelight. The group, which a few months later became the Artists International Association (or AIA), styled themselves as anti-fascist and anti-imperialist activists: artists and designers who wanted to use their practice as a political weapon. They declared themselves ‘The International Unity of Artists Against Imperialist War on the Soviet Union, Fascism and Colonial Oppression’ who would achieve their ends through creating ‘working units’ of artists to make ‘propaganda’ in the form of ‘posters, illustrations, cartoons, book jackets, banners, tableaux, stage decorations’ spread through the press, lectures and meetings and, crucially, through mounting exhibitions.⁴

The formation of the Leftist AIA came in 1933, the year Hitler took power in Germany, in the wake of the Depression and with half the British population living below the poverty line. With the rise of extremist groups on the Left and Right in Britain, including the formation of the British Union of Fascists in 1932, marches held to protest poor living and working conditions led to regular clashes, causing public authorities to pass a flurry of laws and byelaws curtailing public freedoms to gather or demonstrate in public space. The Incitement to Disaffection Act of 1934, popularly known as the ‘Sedition Act’, included a prohibition against public gathering, while the Public Order Act, passed after the 1936 clashes popularly known as the Battle of Cable Street, regulated use of public political symbols such as flags, banners and emblems, banned political uniforms and gave police powers to regulate public processions or to ban them altogether.

The AIA’s work made a direct response to such prohibitions. They affiliated themselves to organisations like the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL), formed to oppose such legislation and to defend free speech and assembly, setting up a system for reporting ‘irregularities’ including banning or interference with meetings, processions and propaganda, use of leaflets, chalking or loud speakers, and police action at open-air meetings.⁵ The NCCL made clear to its network the legal limits of police powers in curtailing moving processions, while public meetings could be broken up more easily.

Taking up this language of politics, the AIA had a strong sense of their exhibitions as politically engaged protests, regularly describing them as ‘demonstrations’ and evoking exhibitions as performative, active, provocative and participative vehicles for propaganda and persuasion. For the AIA, exhibitions were more than a vehicle through which to display their work as artists and designers: they were an urgent form of political engagement; a significant affective form; a means of expression for making manifest and visible issues that were abstract or invisible; a way of communicating common beliefs; and vehicles for provoking public awareness for issues of concern.

The AIA’s spatial negotiation through exhibitions can be described, in Lefebvrian terms, as the interplay of ‘dominated space’, controlled and regulated by the British authorities, and ‘appropriated space’, in which the AIA sought to create ever more playful means through which to connect with others.⁶ With the articulation in British legislation of definitions of prohibited public behaviours, the AIA’s sense of the possibilities of exhibitionary space became ever more expansive and fluid: at different times exhibitions became representations, performances, platforms, meeting points and events. In making this argument, I am complicating Tony Bennett’s use of Michel Foucault’s panoptic impulse to describe the control that museum-based exhibitions have over audiences, by suggesting that in the context of 1930s Britain, exhibitionary spaces outside of institutions of the kind I am discussing were less surveilled and circumscribed than other spaces.⁷ AIA member artists had seemingly contradictory aspirations: at once to bring activities and representations of the street into their work, while pursuing the liberation of exhibitions from established institutions and spaces, by taking them out to the streets.

Early work by AIA members satirised government anxieties about public gatherings and behaviours considered seditious. James Holland’s cartoon for the Left Review titled Incitement to Disaffection (c.1934) saw lumbering police racing to their next site of public concern, while Edith Tudor-Hart’s photograph Sedition? (1935) showed a crowd as an unspecified object of suspicion and Pearl Binder’s lithograph Chalking Squad (c.1932) had a sedate woman in the process of enacting a supposedly seditious activity: writing a political message in chalk on a wall. Lithography as a form created a kind of spatial porosity for AIA artists. Several founder members had met at a lithography evening class at the Central School. Many AIA lithographs took their subjects from the street, and lithographs, being affordable and reproducible, allowed the AIA to remove pictures from gallery spaces and to send them on tour. The AIA’s Everyman Prints series, launched in 1939, allowed work usually seen only in galleries to become dispersed across all kinds of sites around the country.

AIA members had a recurring interest in bringing street art into exhibitions. The assimilation of such work was highly uneasy, laying bare conspicuous class inequalities. North London pavement artist David Burton, given an exhibition at the AIA’s Charlotte Street gallery space in 1945, was patronisingly dubbed the ‘Hampstead Primitive’ by Picture Post.⁸ AIA members acknowledged discomfort at seeing fellow members taking inspiration from the subjects of the street purely as visual experience, a merely anthropological interest, rather than born of a more genuine working experience of their subjects.

If the AIA sought to bring the imagery and activities of the street into their exhibitions, central to their work was the seemingly contrary aspiration towards taking exhibitions out, to the street, creating social space as ‘encounter, assembly, simultaneity’, to quote Lefebvre.⁹ The AIA’s innovation as exhibition makers was in their perception of public urban spaces as sites for exhibitionary ‘demonstrations’ that allowed people to come together in public when this fundamental right was being threatened. Central to AIA exhibitions was a professed belief in democratisation; their literature declared, ‘it has always been our aim … to make our exhibitions accessible to the widest possible public’.¹⁰ In order to do this art must be taken out of the studio and the museum, to be shown on sites that would attract a public not drawn to galleries, such as ‘Underground Stations, factory canteens and working men’s settlements’, the AIA’s Bulletin explained. Art should ‘come to the people and not be simply a form of luxury goods’; it should ‘perform a social function’.¹¹

Early AIA exhibitions: The Social Scene and Artists Against Fascism and War

The AIA’s aspiration to take exhibitions ever further out, ever more removed from galleries as contained and closed, was enacted most convincingly as symbolic and rhetorical. Despite their aspiration to take art to the people, the AIA’s exhibitions in the first five years were largely restricted to central London, on sites in Charlotte Street, Soho Square and Mayfair’s Grosvenor Square. What the group lacked in the diversity of its sites and spaces, however, it achieved in stylistic variety, the geographical diversity of its vision and the internationalism of its contributing artists. Its vision of the world, and its real and imagined networks, encompassed a vast geography. A lack of adherence to particular stylistic orthodoxies was a key tenet of AIA exhibitions, including accepting works from trained and untrained painters alike (though not without some distinction being drawn when the latter were regularly singled out as ‘amateur’ or ‘unprofessional’).

The AIA exhibited much painting and sculpture containing overt political and social critique. Their inaugural exhibition, The Social Scene, was held at a former motorcycle showroom on Charlotte Street, behind London’s busy Tottenham Court Road, in October 1934. It caused criticism and disagreement from critics, which the AIA countered by saying that these people ‘disliked the presumption of a number of artists co-operating to criticise the society in which they lived’.¹²

The AIA’s second exhibition, Artists Against Fascism and War, was held in November 1935, a few weeks after the Italian fascist invasion of Abyssinia of October 1935, at 36 Soho Square in a ‘splendid Georgian house’ that the AIA rented for the purpose, as lead member Betty Rea described it.¹³ No images of the exhibition’s installation are held in the archive, but it was likely a conventional hang, with paintings shown at eye level round the walls. An influential committee of artists – including Eric Gill, Augustus John, Laura Knight, Henry Moore and Paul Nash – selected works by six hundred artists. These included abstract painting and sculpture by Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson, John Piper, John Tunnard and László Moholy-Nagy and figurative work by Ethel Walker, Harold Knight (Cottage Bedroom) and Charles Cundall (of the Miners’ Gala, Durham).¹⁴ One section of Artists Against Fascism and War was devoted to photographs of working-class life, including work by Edith Tudor-Hart (whose photographs feature in several contexts through this book) and other members of the Leftist English Workers’ Film and Photo League of which she was part.

The AIA received submissions for Artists Against Fascism and War from France, Holland, Poland and Russia, from organisations sympathetic to AIA’s aims, indicating the reach of members’ reputations and affiliations. Many works took up Leftist subjects, such as Clifford Rowe’s painting Canvassing the Daily Worker and Peter László Peri’s sculpture Against War and Fascism. The use of social realism was considered an effective way of raising problems up the political agenda, and socially engaged subject matter was seen particularly in prints and drawings, with titles like Prostitution, South Wales Tubercular Miner and a satirical work by Peggy Angus called Poison Gas, attacking the Jubilee celebrations of that year.

As spaces that allowed gatherings, AIA exhibitions provided an occasion for exploration of wider social and political themes and ideas, with articles published alongside talks from prestigious speakers. Although AIA members espoused clear ideas about the artistic styles most suited to political engagement, early AIA exhibitions did not dictate formal or stylistic orthodoxy, and Artists Against Fascism was no exception. It was accompanied by lectures on ‘Marxism and Aesthetics’ by art critic Alick West, and on ‘The Crisis in Culture’ by politician and writer John Strachey. It was opened by writer and philosopher Aldous Huxley whose 1932 dystopian novel Brave New World had warned against ominous trends in politics and technology.¹⁵ In his foreword to the exhibition catalogue, Huxley proposed the case for the artist ‘as a special case of the good citizen … while painting, he is controlled, scrupulous, conscientious’.¹⁶

Visited by six thousand people, the exhibition was praised by critic Montagu Slater in Left Review for its impressive scale and ambition, for attracting people who did not normally visit art shows and for bringing war and anti-fascism together, recognising it as ‘something between a demonstration and a national gallery’, with ‘no “market” to speak of’, operating as he saw it outside the commercial considerations of West End art galleries. Despite praising its ambition, Slater regretted that Artists Against Fascism mainly failed to achieve its intention, that only in the abstract room had he found the ‘tendency and direction’. Essentially he felt the show gave no answer to the question ‘where do we go from here?’ and, he thought, ‘lacked a positive’.¹⁷ Artists Against Fascism allowed AIA members to demonstrate relationships and solidarities between the many groups with common interest in these issues and to provide a platform from which to express them. But it failed to build a consensus around how to respond. Moreover, the class differences between the exhibitors were painfully manifest, specifically distinctions between those attempting to sustain themselves through artistic practice, perhaps with private income to supplement, and its working contributors, such as the miners of the Ashington Group, whose other ‘working’ identities were exposed while apparently championed.

‘Exhibiting’ and ‘demonstrating’ at Trafalgar Square

Aside from AIA exhibitions mounted in central London houses temporarily given over for the purpose, the AIA were creating exhibitions ‘live’, in the open air, as a way of reclaiming and appropriating public spaces dominated by official rules. This was an astute method for circumnavigating prohibitions imposed by the Office of Works, which had banned the exhibition of art works in the street, only permitting banners at demonstrations.¹⁸ On one occasion, AIA painters Rodrigo Moynihan and Victor Pasmore, attending an ‘Arms for Spain’ rally in Trafalgar Square in February 1939, applied sketches to blank banners while the rally was in progress, with speeches being given by biologist J. B. S. Haldane and trade unionist Tom Mann. Some banners bore motifs drawn from Goya’s condemnation of the universal evils of warfare Disasters of War (1810–20) – ironic given that the rally was in fact focused towards arming Spain.¹⁹ These were then constructed behind the speakers to create an impromptu temporary exhibition. AIA member Nan Youngman’s sketches of an earlier rally at Trafalgar Square convey this sense of banners surrounding the base of Nelson’s Column, creating an impromptu ‘structure’ as backdrop (Figure 4.2).

Such ‘live exhibitions’, created in front of the Trafalgar Square rally, exemplified the plural performativity and carnivalesque quality of AIA activities.²⁰ This same attitude was apparent in May 1938 when two hundred artists, including many AIA members, took to the streets for a May Day procession protesting the government’s policy of appeasement in response to the rise of Nazism. Surrealist artists Roland Penrose, James Cant, Julian Trevelyan and F. E. McWilliam marched wearing masks of Neville Chamberlain and carrying placards with the slogan ‘Chamberlain Must Go!’, with occasional ironic Nazi salutes. The Surrealist group’s van appropriated public space by carrying a loudspeaker issuing the tunes of ‘The Internationale’ and the ‘United Front’, both recognisable anthems of the Left, with a great gilded birdcage perched atop with a whitened skeleton inside, captioned ‘Present from the Dictators’, a commentary on the Prime Minister’s dangerously uncritical relationship with European fascist leaders, as they perceived it (Figure 4.3).²¹

4.2 AIA member Nan Youngman’s sketches of a political rally at Trafalgar Square in 1937. Nan Youngman. © Will Rea and Nan Youngman’s estate. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.

Advertising hoardings as ‘exhibition’ sites

The AIA’s extension of the boundaries of exhibitions as public spaces and ‘live’ experiences, acts in defiance of the police and other authorities, was to the fore when in February 1939 they took over twenty public advertising hoardings around London as sites through which to raise Spanish relief, painting illustrated slogans calling for support for the Popular Front in Spain live in front of a crowd. This was a bold act of appropriation of commercial space, which we might describe, in Lefebvrian terms, as ‘re-appropriation, diversion, detournement’.²² The Manchester Guardian showed a photograph of AIA member artist Julian Trevelyan up a ladder by a billboard at the intersection of Bouverie Street and Fleet Street, in the process of painting Isotype-style warships and submarines and the slogan ‘Send Food to Spain Now!’, with a large crowd of onlookers, which, the newspaper reported, had ‘quite flustered’ the police.

4.3 Artists International Association photograph of a rally in London, 1938. Unknown photographer. © reserved. Image courtesy of TATE. TGA 7043/14. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.

The same day artists painted eight other hoardings for Spanish relief. One of the best, according to the Manchester Guardian, was that by James Holland just beside Tower Bridge, which ‘neatly included the bridge itself – a symbol of London’s solid security – in a design showing war-stricken Spain’. Intrigued by the novelty of this new kind of public display, the newspaper remarked, ‘The AIA, whose exhibitions have already contributed to the cause of Spanish relief, to-day tried a new sort of exhibition – if exhibition it can be called – for the same cause’ and likening this kind of work to ‘novel bill-stickers’ or ‘pavement art’. The newspaper continued approvingly, ‘If this practice spread it would certainly be one way of improving London’s hoardings’.²³ Such painting was in the spirit of the Soviet windows displayed by the TASS News Agency in Moscow, being painted by artists on the spot and appearing at the same time as the news items they illustrated, as topical propaganda.²⁴ In these activities exhibitionary cultures converged with street theatre and agitprop.

The AIA showed through their hoarding painting their prowess at courting media attention to their campaigns. AIA members demonstrated clear understanding of the potency and potential spectacle of gathering in public space to paint and create ‘live’ exhibitions. AIA member Priscilla Thornycroft notified newsreel cameramen that she and Nan Youngman would be painting a hoarding on 23 February 1939. They were then surprised when, instead of giving them time to start their painting, the crew arrived almost immediately to film them painting the slogan ‘Spain Fights On – Send Food Now’. Thornycroft recalled:

A few days later, the AIA’s billboards, with their ‘Aid to Spain’ slogans, were photographed in the Evening Standard daubed with fascist slogans after a messy attack from Mosleyite supporters. Under ‘Send Food to Spain Now!’ someone had painted ‘Mosley Will Win’ and a fascist symbol. Action, the magazine of the BUF, picking up on the story, reported the hand-painted work of ‘Spain savers’ as having been ‘altered for the better’, ‘evidently by some sympathiser of British Union’.²⁶ This simple alteration showed such sites’ vulnerability to having their meanings overturned and redirected, becoming public information battlegrounds.

The AIA’s anti-fascist Art for the People at Whitechapel Art Gallery

A landmark exhibition-as-demonstration of the AIA’s first decade was the popular display of members’ work, the anti-fascist Art for the People at Whitechapel Art Gallery from February to March 1939. This claimed to be ‘A cross-section of every form of contemporary art in Great Britain exhibited as a demonstration of the Unity of Artists for Peace, Democracy and Cultural Progress’. Works ranged from a cartoon by Augustus John to sculptures by Jacob Epstein, Frank Dobson and Peter László Peri.²⁷ Peri’s large concrete piece was called Save Spain. Noting the contribution of Surrealists to the exhibition, journalist Derek Stanford declared ‘Surrealism has come to the East End’.²⁸ A provocative lecture series ran alongside, the first titled ‘THEY LIKE WHAT THEY KNOW: Criticisms of the Present Exhibition’, given by News Chronicle art critic Frederick Laws, and another by Sunday Times and Manchester Guardian art critic Eric Newton.²⁹

It is unclear how the exhibition was hung. The exhibition’s most notable aspect was its attempt at outreach: of giving people who did not usually see contemporary art an experience of it, a missionary instinct central both to AIA and Whitechapel Art Gallery work of the time. Intending to respond to the snobbery of the art world, by moving its exhibitions away from Mayfair and the West End to the Whitechapel, AIA and Whitechapel interactions with the public often made class inequalities and condescension all the more conspicuous. On Sundays, admission to the AIA’s exhibition at Whitechapel was to be free, the exhibition invitation noting in red at the top: ‘The exhibition will be opened by THE MAN IN THE STREET’ (original emphasis), ‘intended as a symbol of the relation of anti-fascism to the art of the people’.³⁰ This became Art for the People’s most widely reported aspect. The Star enthused:

This gimmick paid off: East End butcher O’Brien was considered perfectly emblematic of the AIA’s intended working-class audience and the press showed much interest in the images O’Brien preferred. The Manchester Guardian opined, ‘He seemed a typical decent East End workman in the thirties … He had no particular interest in art, but the Surrealist sculpture and paintings in the gallery did not deter him’. It went on, ‘The Association is seeking to break down the barriers between artists and the people, and no better place for their efforts could be than the Whitechapel Art Gallery, which has always sought in its forty years to procure the best pictures for the poorer art-lovers’.³² Meanwhile the Star tabloid carried the story of artist miner L. F. Smith’s contribution to the show. Smith had not been able to afford to join the AIA but the other members had done ‘a whip-round’, it reported, presenting him with the cost of a subscription.³³

The exhibition’s anti-fascist message added to the clamour of voices calling for peace. In its appraisal, The Times praised the Whitechapel exhibition for demonstrating the importance of peace. ‘No doubt it is tempting to the outraged man to further peace by representing the horrors of war’ – partly, the paper suggested, because ‘scenes of cruelty’ gave some pleasure – but ‘to saddle art with propaganda is to show lack of confidence in its intrinsic power’. It concluded, Art for the People ‘may be hailed as a solid contribution to the causes of peace, democracy, and cultural progress’.³⁴ Forty thousand people visited the show.³⁵ The exhibition’s one-month run coincided with the British government recognising Franco’s Nationalist government in Spain.

Art institutions’ sensitivity to becoming platforms for political messaging and potentially falling foul of public authorities is indicated by an exchange with painter and Mass Observation founder Julian Trevelyan. Following the success of the 1939 Whitechapel AIA exhibition, Trevelyan wrote to Whitechapel Art Gallery proposing a new exhibition of works he described as ‘by working class artists, chiefly pictures from all over the world by unprofessional painters that Mr Tom Harrisson and myself collected together’. An internal Whitechapel memo showed nervousness, stating that ‘So many of these bodies are political, that we really must exercise considerable care in ensuring that we do not allow our Gallery to be used for propaganda by any political or semi political artistic organisation’.³⁶ The exhibition was rejected. The rebuff did not deter the AIA from writing back a few weeks later to propose yet another exhibition: of art produced under the US Works Project Administration, never before seen in England and already enjoying a high reputation among artists for its social commitment and as the first example of major government funding for artists. The outbreak of the Second World War put paid to this exhibition idea.

Demonstrating for peace: Cambridge Anti-War Council exhibitions

As the threat of fascism became ever more present across Europe, newly formed British pacifist organisations, looking for ways to share anxieties about the possibility of war, identified exhibitions as a way to represent and explain their values. One such was the Cambridge Anti-War Council, which mounted a series of exhibitions from 1933, with a focus on ‘effective action, collective and organised, to prevent or to stop the conduct of war’, starting at home and beginning ‘now’, a way of attracting recruits to the cause.³⁷ Although attracting illustrious contributions to the cause, the remaining evidence of these exhibitions is fragmentary: a small advertisement in a limited circulation bulletin or flyer, usually text-heavy and frustratingly image-light, forcing me to piece scattered information together. Despite this, these pacifist exhibitions were significant for two particular reasons: firstly, because they attracted the involvement of many of the same cast of designers, artists and writers who were developing exhibitions in other contexts across this book; secondly, because they show how political organisations in Britain were using exhibitions as arguments, platforms and recruiting grounds.

The Cambridge Anti-War Council, formed at a conference at Cambridge’s Co-operative Hall in summer 1933, was focused against British rearmament and to organise action ‘for peace and international co-operation of all people and all workers’. Their range of activities included regular demonstrations, such as one against fascist activist Oswald Mosley during his visit to Cambridge in March 1935. Despite the evident importance of imagery to the Cambridge exhibitions, as is clear from those involved whose modus operandi was visual presentation, extremely limited visual material remains to show what this series looked like. Much of the discussion of anti-war exhibitions in this section therefore comes from textual material including catalogues, letters and news reports. The first Anti-War Exhibition organised by the Cambridge Anti-War Council was held in November 1933 at St Andrew’s Hall, Cambridge, touring extensively, to forty venues around Britain, with a second showing in Cambridge a year later.³⁸

This free exhibition, mounted by designer Misha Black (in the year he founded the AIA) and actor and political activist Barbara Nixon, innovated in using an exhibition as a space through which to share a political perspective on the perils of war. It provided an immersive three-dimensional environment through which audiences would absorb visual and textual material. Its structure was created through vertical display screens created by W. Doel, chair of the Council. It was accompanied by a striking catalogue designed by AIA member artist Clifford Rowe, its cover image a gas mask in green, red, black and white (Figure 4.4), inside incorporating lithographs by Paul Nash. The exhibition’s seven sections explained the lead into the First World War, showed the unfolding horror of war itself and outlined how the anti-war movement was addressing current dangers with photographs (some official, some forbidden by censorship), news-cuttings, cartoons, maps, charts and war recruitment posters.

4.4 Cover for the Cambridge Anti-War Exhibition pamphlet designed by Clifford Rowe, held originally at St Andrew’s Hall Cambridge in 1933, touring to Manchester in 1934. Clifford Rowe. © Anna Sandra Thornberry, daughter. Image courtesy of Working Class Movement Library. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.

Information about war and anti-war was amplified through work by Flemish painter and graphic artist Frans Masereel, German painter George Grosz and Hungarian painter and illustrator I. Szegedi-Szuts. Photographs of paintings by John Nash, stills of war films and a map by radical cartoonist J. F. Horrabin were also used in the exhibition. Posters by graphic designer Ashley Havinden, artist Pearl Binder and others carried slogans declaring ‘War? No! Strike’, ‘War Means Workers Fighting Workers – Smash the War Plots!’ and ‘Against War – Bread! Not Battleships’.³⁹ Misha Black’s poster, centring on a photomontage bearing the slogan ‘Smash the Armament Trusts’, explained in small print: ‘Each spot is an armament firm. The lines show how they are connected’ (Figure 4.5). Black’s poster was reproduced on the front cover of the Bulletin of the British Anti-War Movement.⁴⁰ Talks were programmed alongside the Anti-War Exhibition on subjects including ‘Women and War’, ‘Pacifism in Germany and France, 1914–18’, ‘War: a Personal Experience’ and popular science writer J. D. Bernal speaking on ‘Science and War’. Paul Nash donated a set of war lithographs to the exhibition, to be sold in aid of the Council.

4.5 Misha Black poster, ‘Smash the Armaments Trust’, reproduced in Bulletin of the British Anti-War Movement, December 1933. Author photo. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.

Isotype at the Cambridge Anti-War Exhibition

Viennese polymath Otto Neurath created Isotype diagrams especially for the 1933 Cambridge Anti-War Exhibition. At the time, the Neuraths were still based in Vienna. After the outbreak of the Second World War, Otto and Marie Neurath fled to Britain, establishing the Isotype Institute in Oxford in 1941, which supplied pictograms to Ministry of Information exhibitions, with Isotype taken up in these wartime contexts as a succinct and powerful universal language, as I discuss in Chapter 7. Isotypes elucidated key statistics in visual form, aiming to simplify and universalise knowledge. These were mentioned in the Cambridge exhibition’s programme but, to my knowledge, no visual records remain of the specific diagrams.

Isotype, a language of ‘informative pictures’, as its originator Neurath described it, was a system of symbols for figures and objects that had been developed for public information exhibitions, initially to explain housing and gardening in an exhibition that became the basis for Vienna’s Museum for Housing and City Planning in 1923.⁴¹ The pictogram language of Isotype, regularly incorporated as charts and posters, became an integral element of the visual lexicon of documentary exhibitions across Britain and Europe. In his 1931 book Gesellschaft und Wirtschaft (Society and Economy), museum director Neurath developed a new visual language for quantitative information using interpretable icons, to elucidate details of issues as varied as global motor manufacture and the world’s energy consumption (Figure 4.6).⁴² Neurath developed the lexicon to stop museum visitors from being overwhelmed by viewing vast quantities of material that lacked a system of arrangement. ‘Many go away [from an exhibition]’, Neurath explained, ‘blaming themselves for not having gained a better grasp of the information it is intended to convey but those who analyse exhibitions seriously as a means of communication consider that the way in which they are set out is often a visual offence’. Isotype was offered as a universal language, purely factual and seemingly neutral. ‘The Isotype maker is therefore bound to be as “neutral” as a map-maker and to provide material for free discussion from any point of view’, Neurath wrote.⁴³ Having been developed to extend the communicative reach of exhibitions, Isotype was perfectly suited for use in the Anti-War Exhibition.

Neurath distinguished between exhibitions and other contexts where information was being shared, such as lectures or films, explaining:

4.6 Isotype diagrams used to show global motor manufacture in Otto Neurath, Gesellschaft und Wirtschaft: Bilstatistches Elementarwerk (Leipzig: Bibliographisches Institut, 1931), p. 56. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.

The specific experience of visitors walking around exhibitions at their own speed and being able to revisit areas in order to clarify was key to providing them with ‘permanent information’, as Neurath described it: information that stayed with them. Neurath explained that ‘Isotype leads to the presentation of events stripped of superfluous details by means of an international language-like technique. Training people to deal with the mass of material in a documentary photograph leads them to the international visual environment of modern man’.⁴⁵ Neurath’s interest in interrogating how people receive information, in three-dimensional environments, shaped the serious regard with which such exhibitions were viewed as spaces for sharing knowledge.

Neurath’s driving interest was in interrogating ways that information shared in exhibitions could be made to remain in the mind of the public. Its actual impact was hard to evaluate. Despite this, the idea continued to be a central concern in contexts where exhibitions formed one possible route for sharing information amongst many, including those mounting official information exhibitions during the wartime in Britain.

The second Cambridge Anti-War Exhibition

The Cambridge 1933 exhibition, with its display boards, illustrations and graphics, pictograms and text, enabled visitors to be immersed in a multiform political presentation. Pleased by the positive response, the Cambridge Anti-War Council started preparing a second Anti-War Exhibition early in 1935; the high-profile committee included experimental physicist P. M. S. Blackett, in the process of doing pioneering cosmic ray research work and lending weight and credibility to the subject.⁴⁶ The committee intended this new version to draw out more clearly the linkages between fascism, nationalism, militarism and war, to highlight forms of anti-fascism inside Germany, Italy and Austria; and to be mobile, allowing it to tour easily. The exhibition had originated as the anti-fascist L’Exposition Internationale sur le Fascisme shown at Galerie La Boetie in Paris from March to April 1935, organised by a group including, once again, artist Frans Masereel and writer and art historian André Malraux. Malraux would later introduce the phrase ‘musée imaginaire’ (‘museum without walls’), an acknowledgement of the museum’s expansion beyond physical spaces, through photographic reproductions and in the space of memory and imagination.⁴⁷ This was an idea that likely took shape through contributions to projects like the Galerie La Boetie show.

The Paris L’Exposition Internationale sur le Fascisme addressed ‘the promises of fascism’, fascism and young people, fascists and women, anti-Semitism and myths about race. Anticipating its transfer to London, William Gillies, first International Secretary of the Labour Party, asked Victor Schiff, Paris Correspondent of British Labour-supporting Daily Herald newspaper, to send a report on the exhibition. Schiff responded by bemoaning the exhibition as ‘purely Communist propaganda … anti-Socialist and anti-democratic’, which set out to prove that ‘“democratic illusions” of Social democrats, in Germany and in Austria as well, are responsible for the triumph of Fascism’. In summary, he declared the exhibition ‘a scandal’.⁴⁸ Despite this, it transferred to London in 1935.

In its London iteration, efforts were focused towards fundraising, intending any profit to support anti-fascists inside Germany, and attracting a donation from novelist E. M. Forster. Writer Virginia Woolf joined the exhibition’s committee, agreeing to canvass financial support for the exhibition; other supportive luminaries included sculptor Frank Dobson, painter Augustus John and architect Wells Coates.⁴⁹ Several of Woolf’s friends, including Clive Bell, criticised her involvement with what they rightly perceived to be a communist organisation. Poet R. C. Trevelyan wrote to Woolf saying he would not sponsor it on this basis: ‘I do not believe this is the right way to set about counteracting Fascism … It can only irritate Fascists abroad’. Trevelyan went on, ‘It seems to me to expose the evils of Fascism and Nazism, and to say nothing whatever of the similar evils of the Russian regime, is completely wrong-headed’.⁵⁰

The resulting Cambridge Exhibition on Fascism & War was shown, like the earlier one, at St Andrew’s Hall, Cambridge in November 1935. It used ‘documentary evidence’ – photographs, newspaper cuttings, sketches and documents – to explain the origins and history of fascism in Italy and Germany, ‘Semi Fascism’ in Austria and Spain, ‘Embryo-Fascism’ in Britain, the relationship between fascism and militarism and, finally, the anti-fascist movement and was accompanied by a set of cartoons by AIA artist and London Evening Standard cartoonist David Low. Designed by artist Paxton Chadwick, the exhibition had an upright display screen constructed by Anti-War Council chair W. G. Doel, accompanied by a pamphlet entitled ‘Explanation’, the cover designed by graphic designer E. McKnight Kauffer (Figure 4.7). In addition to carrying out work for the Cambridge Anti-War Council, during the 1930s Kauffer aligned himself with a range of Leftist political organisations. He had designed sets and costumes for the Arts League of Service (ALS), formed in 1919 to democratise art and theatre; for the pacifist Peace Poster Service and Peace Pledge Union; for the AIA; he designed the brochure In Defence of Freedom, Writers Declare against Fascism and, by 1937, in solidarity with the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, designed an aid to Spain poster, combining dynamic lettering in primary colours set against a head by Spanish Renaissance painter El Greco, entitled ‘Help to Send Medical Aid to Spain’ (Figure 4.8). Kauffer’s voracious appetite for taking commissions from a plethora of organisations led him also to work in direct contradiction to his stated alignments. His cover illustrations for Oswald Mosley’s treatise The Greater Britain of 1932, which marked the formation of Mosley’s British Union of Fascists and led to mass recruitment for fascism in Britain, is just one example.⁵¹

4.7 Cambridge Exhibition on Fascism & War brochure for its showing at Hull, with cover image by E. McKnight Kauffer. © Simon Rendall. Image courtesy of Hugh Gilbert and Webb & Webb, Design. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.

4.8 E. McKnight Kauffer poster for the Spanish Medical Aid Committee, 1937. Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Gift of Mrs. E. McKnight Kauffer, 1963–39–107. Photo: Matt Flynn. © Smithsonian Institution. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.

Following a visit to the 1935 Anti-War Exhibition, Woolf confessed in her diary to being ‘plagued by a sudden wish to write an Anti-fascist Pamphlet’ and, following a failed attempt to write a more politically engaged novel, which became The Years of 1937, she wrote Three Guineas, published in 1938.⁵² The book, suggestive of being a text accompanying an exhibition, played with modes of exhibition, voice and presentation. Woolf’s narrator evoked the atrocities of war, inviting the reader to examine Spanish Civil War photographs of ‘dead bodies and ruined houses’, ‘piling up on the table’, at the fictional exhibit. Woolf referred in the book to embryonic fascism in Britain as ‘the egg of the very same worm that we know under other names in other countries’.⁵³

Aside from Woolf’s involvement with the Cambridge Anti-War Council, her most active political involvement was her membership of the anti-fascist group For Intellectual Liberty (for the ‘defence of peace, liberty, and culture’), with Margaret Gardiner as secretary, the British affiliate to the French group Comité de Vigilance des Intellectuels Antifascistes.⁵⁴ Woolf and other Bloomsbury Group members were regularly involved with AIA activities during this period. At the AIA’s request, Woolf wrote ‘Why Art Today Follows Politics’ for Communist newspaper the Daily Worker.⁵⁵ Woolf wrote in her diary that she had been shocked and inspired in this by a packet of photographs sent from Spain ‘of dead children, killed by bombs’.⁵⁶ Her piece opened, ‘I have been asked by the Artists’ International Association to explain as shortly as I can why it is that the artist at present is interested, actively and genuinely, in politics’.

The article closed by explaining why, in the present circumstances, it was necessary for artists to organise themselves into groups like the AIA. Bloomsbury Group painter Duncan Grant was at that point an AIA member, calling for submissions to the AIA exhibition. By the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War eight months later, Woolf’s sister Vanessa Bell was an AIA member.⁵⁷ An editorial published with Woolf’s piece sought to distance itself by clarifying that Woolf’s view was not that of the newspaper, adding ‘we doubt whether artists in the past have been so peacefully immune from the conditions and issues of the society in which they live as she suggests’. After its showing in Cambridge, the Anti-War Exhibition travelled to London, accompanied by a lecture series, shown for just four days in November 1935 at 27 Soho Square, a site across from the Soho Square premises being used simultaneously by the AIA for Artists Against Fascism and War.⁵⁸

Anti-war exhibitions in Manchester

The Cambridge Anti-War Council was not the only pacifist group demonstrating their beliefs by creating anti-war exhibitions. A number of other exhibitions were mounted around the country on the same theme. Remaining evidence exists in the form of brief advertisements and small newspaper articles. The Manchester and District Anti-War Council arranged a programme of exhibitions in 1935, one of which opened in January at the Friends Meeting House, with eight sections looking at the causes, conduct and aftermath of the First World War and how preparations for another war were being made.⁵⁹ Woman To-Day, the magazine of the British section of the Women’s World Committee Against War and Fascism, reported in 1937 on a Women’s Anti-War Exhibition arranged ‘by Manchester Women’. ‘Simple, attractive and not without humour’, the exhibition showed through drawings, photographs, graphs and press cuttings how warfare impacted on women (although I have not found visual records, so the mode of installation is unclear).⁶⁰

The same year a Peace Exhibition was held at Manchester’s Central Hall and the year after, in January 1938, the Manchester & District Anti-War Council again hosted the Cambridge Anti-War Exhibition at two venues. I have not found visual records but know from flyers that Maurice Dobb, a Marxist economist from Cambridge, opened the exhibition. Art and lighting direction was by E. G. Barlow, who lent six of his own drawings, with design and mounting by Misha Black and Barbara Nixon.⁶¹ Exhibitions had been recruited to the cause of peace, acting to create immersive, multimedia arguments in three dimensions. But this powerful, pacifist vision shared by many on the Left in Britain was severely challenged by Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia in October 1935, further disrupted by the increasingly hostile Nazi regime in Germany after Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, by the Spanish Civil War’s call to arms, by increasing knowledge of Stalin’s abuses in the Soviet Union, by Germany’s annexation of Austria in 1938 and by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s official policy of appeasement and accommodation of these developments.⁶² The next chapter explores the way in which counter-exhibitions were developed as political arguments in Britain during the late 1930s.