Across the early decades of the seventeenth century, Englishmen and women moved through a physical, social, and mental world organised into a carefully maintained balance of motion and pause. This book examines how seventeenth-century English architectural theorists and designers rethought the domestic built environment in terms of mobility, as motion became a dominant mode of articulating the world across discourses. These discourses encompassed philosophy, political theory, poetry, and geography. From mid-century, the house and estate that had evoked staccato rhythms became triggers for mental and physical motion-evoking travel beyond England's shores, displaying vistas, and showcasing changeable wall surfaces. The book sets in its cultural context a strand of historical analysis stretching back to the nineteenth century Heinrich Wolfflin. It brings together the art, architectural, and cultural historical strands of analysis by examining why seventeenth-century viewers expected to be put in motion and what the effects were of that motion. Vistas, potentially mobile wall surface, and changeable garden provided precisely the essential distraction that rearticulated social divisions and assured the ideal harmony. Alternately feared and praised early in the century for its unsettling unpredictability, motion became the most certain way of comprehending social interactions, language, time, and the buildings that filtered human experience. At the heart of this book is the malleable sensory viewer, tacitly assumed in early modern architectural theory and history whose inescapable responsiveness to surrounding stimuli guaranteed a dependable world from the seventeenth century.
Angered by reports of a new exhibition of German art currently being held in London, German Chancellor Adolf Hitler seethed: ‘There is no room for any Neanderthal culture in the twentieth century, no room at least in National Socialist Germany!’1 Hitler’s words about the London exhibition and its ‘Neanderthal culture’ – as he described paintings by many of the most well-regarded German Modernist painters of their day – was exactly the angry response to the exhibitionary provocation that those mounting the London exhibition had hoped for. This chapter focuses on the culture of counter-exhibitions that developed in Britain as political arguments during the 1930s. It might be possible to claim several exhibitions in this book as counter-exhibitions but my specific definition here is exhibitions used as arguments or justifications, which mounted a direct riposte.
The two counter-exhibitions that this chapter centres on were held in 1938. The first was the Workers’ Empire Exhibition in Glasgow, mounted by the Communist-aligned Independent Labour Party, a direct critique of the Glasgow Empire Exhibition at Bellahouston’s propaganda in support of the British Empire. The second was Twentieth Century German Art held in London, mounted by a group of prominent art historians and curators with the Freier Künstlerbund (Free Association of Artists) in direct response to the German degenerate art exhibitions. In both cases, exhibitions acted as a vital, cosmopolitan practice, a mode that offered the potential to make a forceful denouncement of cultures of fascism and imperialism in a shifting ecology of multimedia communication.
Counter-exhibitions take shape
Inspiration for such exhibitionary rebuttals likely came from France, where Surrealists were increasingly using counter-exhibitionary tactics to show solidarity.2 From May to December 1931, the French government had held L’Exposition Coloniale Internationale (International Colonial Exhibition) in Paris’s Bois de Vincennes, showcasing its colonial relationships.3 In response, the Ligue Anti-Imperialiste (Anti-Imperialist League) and, at the request of the Comintern, the Surrealists organised the counter-exhibition L’Exposition Anti-Impérialiste: La Vérité sur les colonies (The Anti-Imperialist Exhibition: The Truth about the Colonies) from September 1931 to February 1932 at the former Soviet pavilion of the Paris 1925 Expo.4 The Paris counter-exhibition’s intended audience included French and colonial workers who had not yet developed a revolutionary consciousness.5 Its poster showed three exaggerated and stereotyped illustrations representing colonial subjects buckling under backbreaking work, set against an exoticised temple structure, with no sign of Surrealist influence.
In the Paris L’Exposition Anti-Impérialiste, a section on the ground floor curated by historian André Thirion tried to expose the brutality of the colonisers. It featured maps, documents, photographs of the indigenous way of life and charts recording the abuses committed by imperialism, beside text panels celebrating the ‘good life’ in the USSR, with its ‘wonderful ethnic diversity’.6 French civil rights organisation Ligue de Défense de la Race Nègre (League for the Defence of the Negro Race) worked with the Surrealists to contribute a room devoted to visual art, working with Louis Aragon, Paul Éluard, Georges Sadoul and Yves Tanguy. Two Surrealist tracts amplified ideas in the exhibition: the first, of May 1931, ‘Ne visitez pas l’Exposition Coloniale’, (‘Do not visit the Colonial Exhibition’) signed by twelve Surrealists, attacked the French government for its exploitation of colonised peoples and portrayed the Colonial Exhibition as a denigrating ideological force; while the second, in July 1931, decried colonialism, focusing on the hypocrisy of missionary practice.7
The trend for counter-exhibitions as political responses to major exhibitions was catching on elsewhere. In the Netherlands in summer 1932 the Anti-Koloniale Tentoonstellings Actie (Anti-Colonial Exhibition Action) organised themselves to oppose the Indonesian Exhibition staged in The Hague.8 While in 1936 the Dutch counter-exhibition titled D.O.O.D., doubling both as the Dutch word for ‘death’ and acronym for De Olympiade Onder Dictatuur (The Olympiad under Dictatorship), was held in Amsterdam as a direct riposte to Nazi propaganda chief Goebbels’ Nazi Art Olympiad. British painter Jessica Dismorr, who had showed with the AIA in 1937 and 1939, was one of only seven British women with works at D.O.O.D, which also included two works by AIA sculptor Betty Rea.9
Fascism in London: Mussolini’s ‘infamous’ The Italian Exhibition
The British establishment’s belief in exhibitions held on home soil as consummate displays of universal, civilising culture somehow unblemished by contemporary political concerns was called into question in 1930 when Italy’s fascist leader Benito Mussolini shaped an exhibition of Italian treasures at London’s Burlington House. Mussolini’s proposal, enthusiastically taken up by Sir Austen Chamberlain MP and developed over five meetings, became The Italian Exhibition.10 To ensure the exhibition was as eye-catching as possible, Mussolini had issued a diktat that no treasures from Italian museums would be off-limits to Burlington House and went out of his way to promote the exhibition.11 The fascist leader’s huge personal investment in the development of The Italian Exhibition showed his awareness of exhibitions’ value for his regime’s collective self-fashioning, as well as their potential to attract public approval. As desired, the exhibition courted much attention: UK’s Pathé News captured the Italian treasures’ arrival in Britain, with Sir Austen and Lady Chamberlain filmed greeting the ship at the docks and the treasures, worth a noted £14 million, being off-loaded into a van theatrically labelled ‘Transport for Italian Art Exhibition – Anglo-Italian Express’.12
While the Italian Ambassador to London declared The Italian Exhibition ‘the greatest, most effective propaganda one could imagine or wish for on behalf of Italy’, onlookers in Britain recognised that the institution had been manipulated from afar by the Italian dictator; used for self-promotion, to court approval and to signal his support within Britain. Soon after its closure, many reacted with horror to the Chamberlains’ complicity in enabling Mussolini to promote himself in London. Art historian and museum director Kenneth Clark echoed them when he recalled the ‘infamous’ exhibition in his autobiography.13 Exhibitions were being used as instruments of fascist states in their own countries, but their manipulation from afar in Britain, as a tool of remote propaganda for a foreign dictator, was a novel, shocking and altogether unpalatable development.
Subverting a propaganda tradition: counter-empire exhibitions in Britain
This book’s main focus is on exhibitions from 1933 onwards. But in the context of exhibitions of empire in Britain, the threads were longer: from the 1920s conspicuous displays of imperial might in Britain were starting to attract opprobrium, as well as praise.14 Exhibitions mounted as the focus for displays of imperialist propaganda in Britain were increasingly subverted and eclipsed. They were used as platforms for showing the opposite of what their commissioners had intended, diverted to a focus on foregrounding anti-imperialist discourses through ‘counter-exhibitions’, a potent strategy for opposing ideas and political positions. From 1919 onwards, oppositional voices in Britain began speaking up, and shadow gatherings, organised by increasingly extensive anti-colonial networks, drew strength and strategies from one another.
The oppositional voices that started to be heard after 1919 were shaped by the increasing hardening of racial barriers in Britain and the colonies, meaning everyday manifestations of racism increased, such as denying people of African descent service at hotels and restaurants.15 This opposition was partly inspired by the declared commitment of the Communist International to liberating people of African descent and colonial peoples. Many British-based artists and designers were affiliated to the Communist International, founded in 1919, which sponsored conferences; others were associated with it indirectly through groups such as the League Against Imperialism, some of which ran exhibitions alongside them, bringing anti-colonial activists to Moscow to study and exchange ideas.16 Other internationalist organisations in Britain attracted mass participation to anti-slavery, feminist and pacifist causes such as the British Commonwealth League, League of Nations Union, Anti-slavery and Aborigines Protection Society. They became the focus for anti-colonial dissent. Exhibitions, which were focused towards strengthening and consolidating the imperial body, became an increasingly potent vehicle for opposition.17
A major focus for support, as well as increasing opposition to empire, was the British Empire Exhibition at London’s Wembley of April 1924. This had attracted more than 27 million visitors to see the empire ‘reproduced in miniature’.18 In his opening oration King George V described the exhibition as a ‘living picture of the history and structure of the British Empire’.19 Wembley enabled racist narratives and beliefs to be reinforced, conspicuously through its ‘native villages’ and ‘native workshops’, housing roughly sixty Hausa, Yoruba, Mendi, Asante and Fanti speakers who lived and worked on site for the duration of the exhibition.20 In the months leading up to and during the exhibition, Felix Oladipo (Ladipo) Solanke, a Nigerian law student from Abeokuta and a member of Union of Students of African Descent (USAD), had gained notoriety for publishing a series of letters in West Africa criticising the exhibition’s racist and salacious depictions of Africans.21 According to Solanke, the outrage over his letters and other coverage of West Africans at Wembley led directly to the creation of the Nigerian Progress Union (NPU) and the West African Students’ Union the following year, thrusting him to the forefront of Black activism in London.22 Wembley sparked renewed attempts by Black intellectuals in London to organise London-based West Africans across colonial divisions.23
The British Empire Exhibition activated public figures who had not previously taken a public stance on British colonialism. Novelist Virginia Woolf wrote the essay ‘Thunder at Wembley’ after her visit, describing the ominous sky above the exhibition and imagining a force more powerful than empire that would cause it all to tumble down: an imperial apocalypse, showing Woolf’s ambivalent mix of nostalgia and disgust.24 Wembley’s representations of Africa in London activated Africans living in London to mount their own shadow or counter-exhibition to counter it. Galvanised by the letters of Solanke and Joseph Boakye Danquah from the Gold Coast and other members of USAD, they initiated an extensive letter-writing campaign and passed a resolution denouncing representations of Africans that ‘hold up to public ridicule citizens of countries whose money has been voted in large sums for the purpose of the exhibition’.25
The Workers’ Empire Exhibition
Exhibitions offered an excellent vehicle for conspicuous displays of political opposition to colonialism. In the interwar years, criticism of the British Empire was a minority discourse outside Black radical circles, only occasionally percolating through to public and parliamentary debates.26 Some exponents of anti-fascism openly defended the empire, distinguishing British and French colonialism from the Nazi racial politics of the 1930s, while at the same time Black intellectuals and activists in London and elsewhere attempted to force an anti-imperialist cultural front.27 Despite the fact that the Artists International Association’s founding idea was to oppose ‘Imperialist War’ and ‘Colonial Oppression’, as articulated in 1934, in practice the AIA was more focused towards opposing the fascism occurring in Europe, while its particular formulation of an oppositional politics often remained woolly and undefined, especially when it came to the British Empire. An exception was the AIA’s exhibition Artists Against Fascism and War held in November 1935, which, in standing as a protest against the rise of fascism, included Mussolini’s recent invasion of Abyssinia.
Internationalist groupings proliferated in Britain during the 1920s, supporting colonial dissidents, opposing empire and white supremacy. Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia in October 1935 had brought into focus the largely unacknowledged correlation between European fascism and European colonial endeavours, and galvanised these groupings towards a global Black coalition of resistance, with the founding of the International African Friends of Ethiopia (IAFE).28 London became an important locus of Black resistance to racism and empire, with the emergence of new organisations and publications to engage with British and imperial publics and to create a common platform. Exhibitions were, once again, identified as tools of dissidence. Anti-fascist exhibitions developed in multiple contexts during this period, with campaigns in support of Ethiopia including exhibitions. The Friends of Abyssinia, who formed the Friends of Abyssinia [Ethiopia] League of Service in 1935 in response to Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia, held the painting exhibition Ethiopia House in 1936 at 20 Ludgate Hill EC4, for example, accompanied by a ‘bureau of information’ to raise awareness of the plight of Ethiopians.29
Anti-colonial sentiment was once again piqued by the mounting of Britain’s final major Empire Exhibition of 1938 at Glasgow, when crowds thronged Glasgow’s Bellahouston Park to wander down Dominion Avenue, watch fountains play by day and night and look out over the extensive expo from the Tower of Empire designed by Scottish architect Thomas Tait of London-based practice Burnet Tait and Lorne. At the same time, across the city, an exhibition of a rather different kind was taking shape. This ‘other’ exhibition – the Workers’ Empire Exhibition – was being developed as a forceful counter-exhibition to the larger and showier Empire Exhibition. This smaller exhibition, created to critique its major counterpart, highlighted the appalling conditions of working people in Glasgow and across the British Empire, allowing political activists to develop and enunciate their adversarial anti-imperialist agenda. Compared to the much-photographed Bellahouston Park show, the other was little documented.
The Empire Exhibition was an extremely ambitious venture for a population recovering from the dire economic slump, with 1.9 million still unemployed.30 It cost £11 million and was led by Scottish industrialists with British government support and the King as Patron. It was intended as overt pro-Empire propaganda: to showcase Scottish industry and to provide visually persuasive evidence of ‘the progress of the British Empire at home and overseas’, as well as showing off the Empire to future generations. The UK Government Pavilion, the largest national building, was designed by architect Herbert Rowse and devoted to showcasing British industries. Misha Black, despite his oppositional politics, worked for the British government at Glasgow designing displays for the Steel, Coal and Public Welfare halls with a section on ‘Fitter Britain’. Flow-charts, photomontage, text, models, dramatic cascading lighting and illustrative vignettes were set in streamlined cabinets to illuminate scientific and industrial research. Echoing recent display stands that had been lauded in the trade press by designers such as Richard Levin (introduced in Chapter 1), Black incorporated type as a structural element through titles and foregrounded explanatory text to create a narrative arc. In Shipbuilding, backlit photographs showed the shipmaker’s craft and abstracted elements of the ship (Figure 5.1). These were accompanied by titles with filmic qualities that propelled the visitor through the exhibit with multimedia displays including newsreels.31
The major fractures already appearing across the Empire were barely hidden within the Glasgow Empire Exhibition’s colonial narratives. For the first time, India – nearing independence – refused to participate.32 Displays included the West African Colonies, Southern Rhodesia, Victoria Falls and East Africa, Malaya and the West Indies. In the Colonial Pavilion a strangely disparate grouping brought together Malta, Somaliland, Hong Kong and the Falkland Islands. South Africa, already a ‘sovereign independent state’ by 1938, was inappropriately represented by a pavilion in the form of a Cape Dutch house, a style of rounded gables resonant of the Amsterdam town houses associated with Dutch colonial settlers. There were pavilions for the ‘Dominions’ of New Zealand, Canada, Australia and Ireland, which had seceded from the United Kingdom several years earlier.33
There was fierce opposition to the exhibition’s representation of Empire. Socialist newspaper Forward said in an editorial, ‘Anyone who has wandered about the Empire Exhibition at Bellahouston would think that the British Empire was a federation of happy and prosperous and contented nations and that everything in the imperial garden was lovely’. It continued, ‘hundreds of millions of natives’ live ‘under the heel of the exploiter’.34 Another socialist newspaper explained that, at the Empire Exhibition, ‘Ideal conditions are being created for enticing your men to become murderous robots on behalf of the ruling caste’;35 while journalist George Padmore, writing in a Pan-Africanist journal, mocked the Empire Exhibition for ‘informing their Imperial Majesties what a glorious contribution to the peace and prosperity of the people of the Empire this Exhibition represents’, even ‘as the working masses of the West Indian island of Jamaica [are] being shot and bayoneted for demanding betterment of their miserable working conditions’.36 The Empire Exhibition’s condensed presentation served to crystallise colonial opposition, just as it had hoped to achieve the reverse.
Beyond the Empire Exhibition’s colonial misrepresentations, conditions for workers at the Glasgow Bellahouston site were also controversial. Sources described expo workers being made to pay the same inflated prices for meals as the visiting public and the casual workers in the Amusement Park working 16-hour days and attendants working 68-hour weeks.37 Ironically, the Scottish Trades Union Congress had a small pavilion at the Empire Exhibition, focused on the need to shorten the working week.38 The Empire Exhibition’s vision of commonwealth cosmopolitanism was predominately white and the overt racism of contemporary Britain was conspicuous to the expo’s visitors: a Scottish missionary complained she and an African colleague had been refused service in the exhibition’s most luxurious restaurant, the Atlantic, where the King and Queen had recently been entertained.39 Many Glasgow hotels refused non-white guests, something that might have gone unreported had it not been that celebrated Black American bass singer and actor Paul Robeson had struggled to find accommodation during his visit to Glasgow.40
Spurred on by the mounting grievances against the expo, counter-action was led by the Independent Labour Party (ILP), a socialist group already supporting the emergence of dissenting voices and representatives from colonial workers’ organisations. ILP opposition was led by activist Arthur Ballard, a carpenter by training whose London Socialist Book Centre was a gathering place for Leftist activists. Writing in 1938 in the New Leader, the newspaper of the ILP, Ballard described how: ‘Walking amidst the wonderful buildings [at the Empire Exhibition] one thinks that the Empire is just a paradise on earth’. ‘The average visitor, amidst this setting, may be carried away by this propaganda unless we are able to do something to present the real situation within the Empire’. The ILP group, Ballard explained, was planning an anti-imperialist exhibition ‘to present the other side’, appealing for funding to support this venture. ‘We hope’, he said, ‘to make the Exhibition effective not only as propaganda but as a means of directly helping our comrades in the colonial countries to organise against the exploitation from which they suffer’. Any profits would go to develop working-class organisations in the colonies.41
The 1938 Glasgow Empire Exhibition’s counter-exhibition, organised by Ballard, was mounted across town at the Kingston Halls and named the Workers’ Empire Exhibition.42 The main evidence of this counter-exhibition comes in the form of newspaper reports, accompanying leaflets and textual descriptions, rather than photographs. A small image of a subject of the British Empire with a baby strapped to her back standing by Tait’s Tower headed an article in the New Leader (Figure 5.2). This described the blue and grey colour scheme of the Workers’ Empire Exhibition, purposely designed to echo that of the Empire Exhibition, twelve panels clustered round a central column. The panels subverted messages in the main exhibition, showing ‘that the real owners of the Empire are not the people of Britain or of the colonies, but the big financial and commercial interests centred in London’, describing the main firms operating within the Empire, led by wealthy ‘plutocrats’ like Lord McGowan and the Duke of Montrose. The counter-exhibition had involved weeks of preparation, much research and the gathering of material from three continents. This research was translated into visual form by a group of London artists contributing voluntarily.43 Sections were devoted to parts of the Empire, showing how India was being held ‘in poverty and ignorance by brute force’; they gave the background to recent upheavals in the British West Indies including poor education and population malnutrition; low mining wages in South and East Africa; extermination of the native population in Australia; and oppression in Palestine, Ceylon and Ireland.44
The form of this fringe event – the Workers’ Empire Exhibition – allowed for a full-blown counter-attack, with alternative narratives that exposed conspicuous power dynamics of class and race, allowing a developing anti-imperialist political agenda to reach a new audience. And the collective rage of the exhibitionary attack through which these injustices were highlighted was extremely forceful and affecting.
This political manifesto in three dimensions was accompanied by a plethora of communiqués on the same subject produced in other forms. Visitors received a satirical leaflet that adopted the style of a holiday brochure. With straight-faced irony very different from the more straightforwardly polemical approach of exhibitions of the same period, the leaflet invited visitors to: ‘Come and See THE EMPIRE BY THE ALL RED ROUTE’ (referring to the red route used on maps to demarcate the extent of the British Empire). It mocked: ‘VISIT THE EMPIRE – It is the duty of every British citizen to see OUR GLORIOUS EMPIRE. We must take a proper pride in OUR POSSESSIONS, which cover nearly one-third of the earth’s surface. Patriotic workers should make use of their holidays to visit the Empire’ (original emphases) (Figure 5.3). After introducing the reader to the luxury they would travel in, the pamphlet laid bare the gross inequalities of workers employed on the route, the many aggressions played out in each context, enslaved peoples and shockingly low life expectancies, exposing visitors’ lack of knowledge of the realities of ‘their’ empire.45 The leaflet highlighted the two things visitors needed to do to help end ‘the tyranny of British Imperialism’: the first was to support workers’ organisations in the Empire fighting for political and economic freedom and justice, such as the International African Service Bureau; the second was to support, in Britain, the ILP, which, they claimed, was the only political party fighting imperialism.
Scottish Labour politician James Carmichael opened the Workers’ Empire Exhibition with celebrated working-class novelist and political activist Ethel Mannin (Figure 5.4).46 Mannin’s opening speech was echoed in her article for socialist newspaper Forward titled ‘Empire with the Lid Off’ in which she decried the racism of colonialists, British ignorance about the Empire and the ‘Imperialist mentality’. She noted optimistically the increasing number of people, especially younger people, ceasing to take Empire for granted and pointed out that while the Empire Exhibition over at Bellahouston Park was being ‘patronised by Royalty’, every newspaper was full of news of ‘street-fighting in Jamaica and the rushing of troops and a battle-cruiser to crush the revolt of workers struggling for the “privilege” of a bare living wage’ – just one example, she said, of what could be found on looking below the outward pomp. The two exhibitions, Mannin said, were ‘two sides of a medal’: the Empire Exhibition showed the British Empire ‘from the angle of the owning and governing classes … the capitalist side of the medal’; the Workers’ Exhibition showed the Empire ‘from the bottom … the workers’ angle’. Mannin drew out further contrasts: at the Empire Exhibition you could see products of Empire while at the Workers’ Exhibition you would see ‘what it has cost in human blood and sweat and exploitation to turn out these products’.
The Workers’ Empire Exhibition, Mannin said, was not spectacular; it did not have ‘clever’ or ‘expensive floodlighting’. It was ‘no amusement park’. Indeed, it was, she said wryly, ‘as unspectacular as Hitler’s quiet annexation of Austria [or] Mussolini’s quiet extermination of the Abyssinians …’ It explained fascism within the British Empire, including the Colour Bar Act, and was a ‘record of the living drama of the struggle for human liberty’.47 Alongside the exhibition, the New Leader ran an eight-page ‘Empire Special’ amplifying the horrifying conditions in the Empire and the gross inequalities, where socialist activist Fenner Brockway again drew direct parallels between the fascist aggressions of Mussolini and Hitler and those of imperialism.48
It is hard to assess the impact this presentation had on its visitors because the only significant trace around the exhibition appears to have been left by those who supported it. But it is evident that the Workers’ Empire Exhibition provided a focal point for a series of growing anti-imperialist and anti-fascist voices, being a perfect meeting point for such opposition, accompanied, as it was, by lectures to packed halls on colonial conditions, given by such prominent speakers as Kenyan anti-colonial activist Jomo Kenyatta and George Padmore, both of whom published articles attacking the Glasgow Empire Exhibition. Activist groups organised themselves round another fringe event, the Peace and Empire Congress held at Glasgow’s McLellan Galleries in September 1938, where the Scottish Peace Council worked with the International Peace Campaign and the National Peace Council, to give delegates from Empire countries an opportunity for discussing common problems.49
Although modestly sized, the Workers’ Empire Exhibition was notable enough to attract messages of congratulation from prominent socialist leaders, including independence activist Jawaharlal Nehru, who was to become India’s first Prime Minister a few years later.50 Soon after, it toured to central London, showing for eight days at Friends House on Euston Road alongside a colonial conference and public demonstration with speakers from Leftist groups, including the pacifist Peace Pledge Union, and from the colonies.51 All these events provided an invaluable focus for the developing anti-colonial agenda in Britain. The New Leader reported the outcome of the colonial conference as to appoint a British Centre against Imperialism, and the election of a ‘Council of Nineteen’, with ten representatives of the Colonial Peoples and nine of British anti-Imperialists.
Under the heading ‘Coloured Workers Speak Out’, the New Leader noted that the keynote was Karl Marx’s declaration that ‘Labour with a white skin cannot emancipate itself while Labour with a black skin is branded’. This Marxist quotation was printed on a huge banner backing the platform ‘showing two muscular workers, one white and the other black, linked by the symbol of their work’.52 Following the conference a committee was appointed to co-ordinate the struggle against imperialism in the colonies and in Britain, linking the colonial workers’ organisations and mobilising support in Britain.53 These exhibitions in Glasgow created between them a representation of Empire that could be as much kicked against as supported, galvanising individual activists and groups. The Workers’ Empire Exhibition – a small counter-exhibition – reinforced new anti-imperialist political identities and galvanised oppositional groupings at Britain’s end of Empire. It succeeded in creating of the Glasgow Empire Exhibition a kind of anti-imperial manifesto, explicit proof of all the things that were manifestly wrong with the Empire.
Countering ‘degenerate art’ in Britain
I turn now to consider a very different example of a counter-exhibition in Britain, held in the same year: Twentieth Century German Art at London’s New Burlington Galleries. Its focus was on countering Nazi propaganda and, in particular, that played out through the profusion of ‘Schandausstellungen’ (exhibitions of shame) developed in Germany to demonstrate adherence to or rejection of certain people and ideas, to mock artworks, cultures, religions and races considered shameful. Despite the ever-growing knowledge in Britain of Nazi abominations, public opinion remained divided on the question of the Nazi impact up until the outbreak of the Second World War. The Manchester Guardian, for example, reported with admiration in April 1934 on the ‘magnificent technical display’ mounted by the Nazis at a German People and German Work exhibition in Berlin, despite this impressive form enveloping displays about ‘the old Teutonic tribes’, racial science and hygiene, displays against ‘mixed marriages’ and pro Nazi sterilisation laws, as the newspaper described them.54 Hitler’s adept, direct use of exhibitions as platforms extended to his attendance at events such as the Schreckenskammer der Kunst (Chamber of Horrors of Art) at Dresden in 1935, with art historian Herbert Read including a photograph of Hitler attending this exhibition in his article in The Listener ‘Soviet Realism: Art in the USSR’.55
The Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition first staged at Munich’s Archaeological Institute from July to November 1937 was the most powerful and chilling of the Nazi ‘exhibitions of shame’.56 Organised by the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts under director Adolf Zeigler and opened by Hitler, the exhibition, gathering 650 artworks considered to reflect symptoms of cultural decline, was part of a concerted campaign that had begun even before the National Socialists came to power in 1933.57 Artists witnessed their work being systematically removed from German museums, paralleling their attempted erasure from German society, with many being forced to flee from the cities, several ending up in Britain.58
While Degenerate Art was focused towards creating erasure of the identities of artists and works considered a threat, it was a powerful example of the exhibition as argument. It was paired with another exhibition, the Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung (Great German Art exhibition), held nearby in Munich’s new House of German Art, a building described by artist Robert Medley in British journal Axis as ‘impressive rows of simple columns repetitively asserting “Noble Simplicity and Iron Discipline”’.59 Great German Art opened in July 1937 but this time in order to celebrate art glorifying the Reich, the two exhibitions working as dialectical counterparts: ‘good’ art (at the House of German Art) versus ‘bad’ art (at the Archaeological Institute).60 The contents of Great German Art had been solicited by newspaper advertisements calling on all German artist members of the Reich’s Chamber of Culture, living at home or abroad, to submit works to provide ‘as comprehensive and high quality a survey of contemporary German painting, sculpture and graphic arts as possible’. Although limited guidance was given on subject matter or style, most of the submitted work was figurative and glorified the German nation, Aryan people and its National Socialist leaders.
Aside from whole exhibitions mounted as arguments in Nazi Germany, sections of Nazi exhibitions were also presented in the form of picture books (variously called Bildbucher, Bilderbucher or Anschauungsbucher), recalling the visual-textual interplay of illustrated weeklies and allowing exhibitions to act as propaganda by pursuing particular arguments. Picture books were sometimes called Anschauungsbucher, a word choice creating slippage between visual perception (Anschauung) and ideology (Weltanschauung).61 Exhibitions of this type, using a combination of text and photographs, were comparable to books in being reproducible and mass produced – a form for the machine age – and also to advertising, with its economical interplay of visual and textual elements. Under Stalin, denunciatory or defamatory exhibitions were also becoming explicit sites of defamation and expurgation.62
Twentieth Century German Art at New Burlington Galleries
While exhibitions in Germany had been absorbed into chief propagandist Joseph Goebbels’ armoury of propaganda amplifying the Nazi programme, in Britain exhibitions were increasingly structured as rhetoric to present an opposing view. The exhibition of Twentieth Century German Art, held at New Burlington Galleries in July 1938, was mounted to counter the vituperative view of Modernist art and the reputational damage meted out by the German exhibitions of shame.63 While the British government was still pursuing a policy of appeasement, attempting to avoid conflict with increasingly aggressive German and Italian fascist states, the exhibition allowed activists to offer an alternative view, a provocative counter-argument.
The exhibition’s original title was due to be Banned Art. However, its committee, perhaps fearing reprisals, changed it to the more neutral and descriptive Twentieth Century German Art, claiming the show was ‘not concerned with the political’, rejecting the immediate context by suggesting it had been under discussion for ‘ten or fifteen years’.64 However, correspondence from the organisers shows it as being a direct response to Munich: ‘You will remember that there was an Exhibition of so-called “degenerate art” in Germany about a year ago. We have collected works by the same artists, who are no longer allowed to paint and exhibit in their own country, and will be showing them at the New Burlington Galleries’.65
Its publicity was less moderate and more agitational in tone, however, inviting people to ‘Go and see expelled and banned art. Visit and Support the Exhibition of German 20th Century Art’.66 Meanwhile, the front cover of the book visitors received with their entrance fee linked it directly with recent exhibitions mounted by the Nazis, announcing it as ‘the London opening of the famous Munich exhibition of “degenerate” German art’.67 This 108-page book, Modern German Art, by ‘very well-known German art critic’ Peter Thoene, pseudonym of prominent Yugoslavian art historian Oto Bihalji-Merin, introduced by Herbert Read, was one of a series of anti-fascist studies published as Pelican Specials.68
Britain’s first comprehensive survey of modern German art, the New Burlington Galleries exhibition showed sixty-four artists’ work, all born or coming to prominence in Germany, almost all branded ‘degenerate’ by the German regime.69 Many of the artists shown were, by then, living in England, with works including figurative oil paintings by German Modernists like Max Liebermann and Paula Modersohn-Becker, Max Beckmann’s triptych Temptation, Oskar Kokoschka’s Self-Portrait of a Degenerate Artist and Franz Marc’s Blue Horses. Organised in collaboration with the Freier Künstlerbund (Free Association of Artists), a federation of exiled German artists living in Paris, the exhibition fundraised for refugee relief, with Spanish painter Pablo Picasso as Patron and painter Augustus John as President.70 It was the idea of Swiss painter Irmgard Burchard, previously a progressive gallerist in Germany before the rise of Hitler, working with Herbert Read and painter and patron Roland Penrose.71
Installed in a conventional fashion on New Burlington Galleries’ fourth floor, wall-hung paintings were interspersed with sculptures on podiums. A first gallery was hung primarily with figurative oil paintings by German Modernists, a larger second gallery contained early twentieth-century Expressionist paintings, a small third gallery held abstract and semi-abstract works, a fourth hung with large oils.72
John Heartfield, founding member of the Berlin Dada group, was a notable exclusion from Twentieth Century German Art. Heartfield’s work – overtly political, anti-Nazi photomontages – was well known amongst fellow refugees. It manipulated appropriated, mass-produced images to create satirical new meanings, putting him high on the Gestapo’s death list. Heartfield’s exclusion from Twentieth Century German Art was likely due to the blatantly political nature of his work. He arrived in England from exile in Prague a few months after the exhibition under the auspices of the Artists’ Refugee Committee (ARC) formed the same year (as discussed in Chapter 6). The ARC was an idea forged in the network created at Twentieth Century German Art by German refugee painter Fred Uhlman, who had settled in London in 1936, and his English wife Diana Croft, who volunteered for and donated to the exhibition, forging contacts that would be crucial to their setting up of the committee.73
The New Burlington Galleries exhibition provided the focus for a cultural festival of talks and music: Max Beckmann spoke in German ‘Über meine Malerei’ (‘On My Painting’), referring only obliquely to political events.74 A music festival included a performance of work by Arnold Schoenberg and a staging of Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera, with lead singing from German soprano Elisabeth Schumann and American actor and singer Paul Robeson, who was on his way home to the US from a pro-Republican tour of Spain.75 Robeson was photographed in front of Beckmann’s oil on canvas triptych, Temptation (1936–37), an image widely circulated in the contemporary press.
The exhibition was originally due to be open for three weeks but the run was extended several times, finally closing eight weeks later after twenty thousand visitors.76 In a statement on ‘Limitations and Possibilities’ in the book accompanying the exhibition, critic Peter Thoene summarised the show’s importance in allowing art to have freedom. Influential New Statesman and Nation critic Raymond Mortimer commented, however, that it would be tempting to acclaim the works in the show simply because Hitler had condemned them, but as a critic he said that his duty was to resist this, declaring the works ‘extremely bad propaganda’ and suggesting visitors might say ‘If Hitler doesn’t like these pictures, it’s the best thing I’ve heard about Hitler’ because ‘the general impression made by the Show upon the ordinary public must be one of extraordinary ugliness’.77
Despite individual critics such as Mortimer’s dislike of the work, the exhibition acted as a powerful anti-Nazi statement, a protest against the rise of Nazism and an act of defiance.78 And, as hoped, the provocation worked and Hitler responded. Opening the second Great German Art Exhibition at Munich’s House of German Art in summer 1938, Hitler contrasted the virtues of the semi-classical nudes and paintings of German peasantry with the work of ‘Moscow and the Jews’ on show at the New Burlington Galleries. He sneered, ‘We rejoice that the democracies are opening their progressive doors to these degenerate elements for, after all, we are not vindictive. Let them live, we do not mind! For all we care, let them work – but not in Germany!’79 Having succeeding in provoking Hitler, AIA members felt vindicated in responding further to his 1938 speech, by creating a poster headed ‘Hitler Attacks London Art Exhibition’, quoting from Hitler’s response to the London exhibition as ‘impertinence’, attempting further provocation by asking ‘Why does Hitler expel artists?’ and proposing ‘Because Fascism is afraid of those who think, of those who see truth, of those who speak the truth’.80 AIA members distributed the poster and a call to visit Twentieth Century German Art at a demonstration in support of the Spanish Republic. These provocations from exhibitions at New Burlington Galleries were enough to have the gallery specifically singled out for castigation on grounds of its 1938 ‘anti-German exhibition of “degenerate art”’ in the German Gestapo’s Informationsheft GB (Information Booklet GB), compiled as an introductory handbook on Britain for the Nazi occupation troops.81
While exhibitions had long been used in Britain for presenting national trade and industry, they had, by the eve of the Second World War, become effective for countering prevailing political beliefs: for documenting and sharing political ideas on the Left in Britain, working in tandem with a series of other media including pamphlets, lectures and congresses. They showed themselves as a formidable focus for anti-imperialist discourses, with counter-exhibitions a potent strategy in Britain for opposing ideas and political positions, drawing inspiration from counter-exhibitionary strategies developed by the French Surrealists in the early 1930s. The next chapter discusses the way in which propaganda exhibitions proliferated as a way of displaying political solidarities in Britain.
1
Hitler speech at opening of Great Exhibition of
German Art, Munich, 10 July 1938.
2
Adam Jolles, The Curatorial
Avant-Garde: Surrealism and Exhibition Practice in France,
1925–1941 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania
State University Press, 2013).
3
Jody Blake, ‘The Truth about the
Colonies, 1931: Art Indigene in Service of the Revolution’,
Oxford Art Journal, vol. 25, no. 1,
2002, p. 38.
4
Romy Golan, ‘The World Fair: A
Transmedial Theatre’, in Jordan Mendelson et al. (eds), Encounters with the 30s (Madrid:
Fabrica, 2012), pp. 183–4.
Counter-exhibition held from September 1931 to February 1932, across
the city at the former Soviet pavilion of the Paris 1925 Expo. See
also Romy Golan, Muralnomad: The Paradox of
Wall Painting, Europe 1927–1957 (London: Yale
University Press, 2009).
5
Blake, ‘The Truth about the
Colonies’, p. 45.
6
Janine Mileaf, ‘Body to Politics:
Surrealist Exhibition of the Tribal and the Modern at the
Anti-Imperialist Exhibition and the Galerie Charles Ratton’,
Anthropology and Aesthetics, no.
40, Autumn 2001, pp. 239–55.
7
Blake, ‘The Truth about the
Colonies’, p. 45.
8
M. Kuijt, ‘Exposing the Colonial
Exhibition: Dutch Anti-Colonial Activism in a Transnational
Context’, Reinvention: An International
Journal of Undergraduate Research, vol. 12, issue 2,
2019.
9
Alicia Foster, Radical
Women: Jessica Dismorr and Her Contemporaries
(London: Lund Humphries, 2019), p. 73.
10
Frances Haskell, ‘Botticelli, Fascism and
Burlington House – The “Italian Exhibition” of
1930’, The Burlington Magazine,
vol. 141, no. 1157, August 1999, pp.
462–72, p. 465.
11
Andree Hayum, ‘Mussolini Exports the
Renaissance: The Burlington House Exhibition of 1930
Revisited’, The Art Bulletin,
vol. 101, no. 2, 2019, pp.
83–108.
12
www.britishpathe.com/video/the-treasure-ship-1 (accessed 17
May 2023).
13
Letter of March 1930 quoted in Hayum,
‘Mussolini Exports the Renaissance’, p. 88; Clark,
Another Part of the Wood, pp. 177–86; Haskell,
‘Botticelli, Fascism and Burlington House’, p.
470.
14
Deborah Sugg Ryan, ‘Staging the Imperial
City: The Pageant of London, 1911’, in Felix Driver and David
Gilbert (eds), Imperial Cities: Landscape,
Display and Identity
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 117–35. Ryan explains how The Festival of
Empire of 1911 at Crystal Palace in Sydenham advertised itself as
‘a Social Gathering of the British Family’, to
encourage the ‘firmer welding of those invisible bonds which
hold together the greatest empire the world has ever
known’.
15
Gopal, Insurgent Empire, p. 210.
16
Matera, Black London, pp.
14–15.
17
For example, see the handbook of the Wembley
Exhibition, as quoted by Matera, Black London, p. 26.
18
Scott Cohen, ‘The Empire from the Street:
Virginia Woolf, Wembley, and Imperial Monuments’, Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 50, no.
1, Spring 2004.
19
‘The King Opens the Great
Exhibition’, Manchester Guardian, 23 January
1924.
20
Matera, Black London, p. 26.
21
‘West Africa and the Empire
Exhibition’, West Africa, 12 April 1924, p.
322.
22
Matera, Black London, p. 28.
23
Matera, Black London, p. 25. Woodham and
Britton discuss two key Wembley protests – one was West
African Students’ Protest which led to the closure of the
African Village, the other was a Working Conditions Campaign.
Woodham, ‘Images of Africa’; S. Britton,
‘“Come and see the empire by the all red
route!”: Anti-imperialism and Exhibitions in Inter-war
Britain’, History Workshop
Journal, vol. 69, no. 1, 2010, pp.
68–89.
25
According to Matera, but he gives no further
details of this ‘counter exhibition’; Black
London, p. 27.
26
Gopal, Insurgent Empire, p. 370.
27
Matera, Black London, p. 16; Gopal,
Insurgent Empire, p. 343.
28
Matera, Black London, pp. 15, 23,
65–6; Gopal, Insurgent Empire, p. 329.
29
An event I know from written records. WMRC
MSS.292/963/2 Abyssinia/ Ethiopia: Italian invasion,
1935–1944 ‘Exhibition of original paintings,
1936’.
30
Alistair Borthwick, The
Empire Exhibition Fifty Years On (Edinburgh:
Mainstream Publishing, 1988), p. 8.
31
Barbara Bush, Representing
Empire
(Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), p. 183;
Kinchin and Kinchin, Glasgow’s Great Exhibitions, p.
129; MacKenzie and McAleer, Exhibiting the Empire, p.
9.
32
Bush, Representing Empire, p. 183.
33
Woodham, ‘Images of Africa’, p.
27; J. M. Richards, ‘Glasgow 1938: A Critical Survey’,
Architectural Review, July 1938.
34
Editorial, Forward, 5 June 1938.
35
Gopal, Insurgent Empire, p. 376, quotes
Eric Williams, The Negro in the
Caribbean (Washington: The Associates in Negro Folk
Education, 1942).
36
Gopal, Insurgent Empire, p. 333. George
Padmore, ‘Labour Unrest in Jamaica’, International
African Opinion, vol. 1, no. 1, July 1938;
‘Anti-imperialist Exhibition in Glasgow’,
International African Opinion, vol. 1, no. 1, July
1938.
37
Bob Crampsey, The Empire
Exhibition of 1938: The Last Durbar (Edinburgh:
Mainstream, 1988); Forward, Saturday 17
September 1938; The New Leader, Friday 9 September 1938, p.
3.
38
Scottish Trades Union Congress Souvenir
(Glasgow: Scottish TUC, 1938), p. 16.
39
Crampsey, The Empire Exhibition of 1938,
p. 68 quoted in A. Peat, ‘Scottish Internationalisms at the
1938 Empire Exhibition: Between Britain, Europe, and Empire’,
Open Library of Humanities, vol. 6,
no. 1, 2020, p. 21.
40
This was not the first time Robeson’s
racist treatment in Britain had hit the headlines. In 1929, the
Times had reported that London’s Savoy Grill had
refused to serve Robeson, which caused a major scandal. But for most
of the city’s Black residents this type of incident was all
too familiar. Matera, Black London, p. 37, quoting Martin B.
Duberman, Paul Robeson: A Biography
(New York: Ballantine Books, 1989), pp.
123–4 and Ade Ademola, ‘Colour Bar Notoriety in
Britain’, in Nancy Cunard (ed.), Negro:
Anthology Made by Nancy Cunard (London: Wishart and
Co., 1934), pp. 556–7.
41
Arthur Ballard, ‘We Are Going to Run an
Anti-Empire Exhibition!’, The New Leader, Friday 3
June 1938, p. 8.
42
Held 13–27 August 1938.
43
‘The “Other”
Exhibition’, New Leader, 12 August 1938.
44
Forward, 20 August 1938.
45
BL collection, YD.2011.b.1781, ‘Come and
See the Empire by the All Red Route’; Britton,
‘“Come and see the empire”’, pp.
68–89.
46
University of Exeter Special Collections
Correspondence between Ethel Mannin and Christopher Walker EUL MS
452, ‘Success of Anti-Imperialist Exhibition’, The
New Leader, 19 August 1938. Also report in New
Leader, 23 September 1938.
47
Ethel Mannin, ‘Empire with the Lid Off:
This Insidious Imperial Propaganda – Fascism Under the Union
Jack’, Forward, 13 August 1938, p. 6.
48
‘Empire Special’, New
Leader, 29 April 1938, p. iv.
49
Forward, 1 October 1938.
51
Groups included the ILP, LP, PPU; New
Leader, 13 January 1939, p. 2. It was shown from Friday 20
January 1939.
52
New Leader, Friday 27 January 1939, p.
4.
53
New Leader, Friday 10 February
1939.
54
‘A “German People and German
Work” Exhibition: From Teutonic Times to Modern Days Display
in Berlin of Nazi Ideas on Many Questions’, Manchester
Guardian, 23 April 1934, p. 13.
55
The Listener, 2 October 1935, p.
579.
56
After Munich (where it showed from 19 July to 30
November 1937), it toured to Berlin from February to May 1938, to
Leipzig from May to June and to Düsseldorf from June to
August.
57
Tymkiw, Nazi Exhibition Design;
Bohm-Duchen, Insiders Outsiders, p. 24.
58
Stephanie Barron and Sabine Eckmann (eds), Exiles & Emigrés: The Flight of
European Artists from Hitler (New York: Harry N.
Abrams, 1997), pp. 13–14.
60
Barron and Eckmann, Exiles &
Emigrés, p. 13.
61
Tymkiw, Nazi Exhibition Design, p.
135.
62
Adam Jolles in ‘Stalin’s Talking
Museums’, Oxford Art Journal,
vol. 28, no. 3, 2005, pp. 429–55 and
Jolles, The Curatorial Avant-Garde.
63
Held from 8 to 30 July 1938. Discussed in
Anthony Penrose’s essay in Bohm-Duchen, Insiders
Outsiders, p. 177. The exhibition poster (reproduced in
Bohm-Duchen, p. 221) states the patrons included: Augustus John
(President), the Bishop of Birmingham, Sir Kenneth Clark, Lord Ivor
Churchill, Pablo Picasso, Herbert Read and Sir Michael Sadler.
Penrose states that the exhibition lost money but that two at
Penrose’s London Gallery, supplemented by generous donations,
helped raise funds for the same cause. TGA Ewan Phillips collection
has photographs of the interior of Twentieth Century German Art at
the galleries, London 1938.
64
Cordula Frowein, ‘German Artists in
War-Time Britain’, Third Text,
vol. 15, Summer 1991, p. 50.
65
WMRC, TUC archives, MSS.292/943/3/57 Exhibition
of Twentieth Century German Art: letter from Irmgard Burchard, Hon.
Organiser to Sir Walter Citrine, General Secretary of the Trades
Union Congress, with publicity leaflet and card, 9 Jul 1938.
66
Radford, Art for a Purpose, p.
104.
67
Peter Thoene, Modern German
Art (London: Pelican, 1938),
front cover.
68
These Penguin Specials included E.
Mowrer’s Germany Puts the Clock Back, G. T.
Garratt’s Mussolini’s Roman Empire and the
Duchess of Atholl’s Searchlight on Spain.
69
Wasensteiner observes that 62 of the 64 appeared
on the list of Entartete Kunst here: www.geschkult.fu-berlin.de/e/db_entart_kunst; Lucy
Wasensteiner, The Twentieth Century German Art
Exhibition: Answering Degenerate Art in 1930s London
(Abingdon: Routledge, 2018). Although 271
works are listed in the catalogue, at least 315 were exhibited and
more than 600 were brought to London. Wasensteiner has traced the
origins and onward journey of many of the works.
70
Freier Künstlerbund (FKb), whose purpose
was to inform the public about opposition to the German government
in exhibitions among other forms, organised the exhibition Five
Years of Hitler’s Dictatorship the same year in Paris
as a retort to Degenerate Art held at the Paris Maison de la
Culture in November 1938, as Keith Holz states in Bohm-Duchen,
Insiders Outsiders p. 214.
71
Helping Penrose and Read with Twentieth
Century German Art was Ewan Phillips, who would later become
the director of the ICA from 1948.
72
Wasensteiner, The Twentieth Century German
Art Exhibition, pp. 26–7.
73
As Anna Muller-Harlin notes in Bohm-Duchen,
Insiders Outsiders, p. 190.
74
According to Barron and Eckmann, Exiles
& Emigrés, p. 17, they note that Beckmann had
refused to participate in group exhibitions organised by German
exiles in Paris but agreed to speak at the New Burlington Galleries
exhibition opening.
75
Bohm-Duchen, Insiders Outsiders, p. x.
‘Today’s Arrangements … Mr Paul Robeson Singing
at the Exhibition of Twentieth Century Art, New Burlington
Galleries’, Manchester Guardian, 3 August 1938, p.
18.
76
Wasensteiner disputes that Read did much of the
exhibition’s legwork. The exhibition catalogue lists Read as
the Chairman and organisers as Irmgard Burchard, Dunstan Curtis,
John Harrison, Brian Howard, The Rt. Hon. The Earl of Listowel and
Roland Penrose, p. 5.
77
New Statesman and Nation, 16 July
1938.
78
Wasensteiner quotes Twentieth Century German
Art, p. 6. She claims that as a gesture it was ultimately
futile, failing either to make an effective anti-Nazi statement or
to convince its British audience of the merits of
‘degenerate’ art.
79
David Aaronovitch, The Times, 9 June
2018, p. 8.
80
Poster is TGA AIA collection 7043/17/2. Cited by
Morris and Radford, The Story of the Artists International
Association, p. 50 and reproduced by Frowein, ‘German
Artists’, pp. 52, 49.
81
Sibyl Oldfield, The Black
Book
(London: Profile, 2020), p. 33, compiled
from May to July 1940. News Chronicle, 11 July 1938:
‘Herr Hitler complained of the impertinence of a London
Exhibition of pre-Nazi German artists, which he likened to the
staging of the opposition Reichstag Fire Trial’.
Scotsman, 11 July 1938: ‘Modern art had no place
in Nationalist Socialist Germany. He intimated that modern artists
who had not yet left Germany should do so now’.