‘Artists’, wrote critic Myfanwy Evans in 1937, ‘were in the middle of a thousand battles: Hampstead, Bloomsbury, surrealist, abstract, social realist, Spain, Germany, heaven, hell, paradise, chaos, light, dark, round, square’.¹ Evans described artists’ lives being shaped by a series of intersecting formal, stylistic and political clashes. Some of these imaginative ‘battles’ they fought collectively, through exhibitions. Increasingly these exhibitions were being taken out of spaces of art and mounted in public spaces in direct response to political developments.² What bonds and ideas did such battles encompass and how might exhibitions be a way of signalling particular alignments?

Philosopher Sally J. Scholz, in her work on political solidarity, discusses solidarity as denoting a relation or unity between people, either emphasising the cohesiveness or fellow feeling of a group, the shared project that informs the unity, or accentuating obligations to fellow citizens by virtue of membership in a state.³ ‘Political solidarity’, Scholz states, unites individuals based on their shared commitment to a political cause in the name of liberation or justice and in opposition to oppression or injustice. Exhibitions operated as a focus for political organising, uniting individuals around political causes and issues.

This chapter traces how exhibitions mounted in Britain from the 1930s became the focus for solidarities across a series of conditions outlined by Scholz: acting as a shared project and denoting fellow membership of particular groupings. Exhibitions were a conduit for such solidarity, providing a voice to newly arriving refugees and becoming the focus for conviviality between individuals. They allowed those rebuilding their lives in new locations to form cohesive social contacts and they enabled artists to signal connections with causes and people near and far, across time. The mobilisation of exhibitions as a productive form by newly arriving refugees was directly related to their circumstances: their vilification by the Nazis, alienation from previous contacts and dislocation from home. In their coming together, exhibitions offered a space of solidarity and a platform for sharing messages of hope. Exhibitionary solidarities were articulated as a gesture of friendship across time and space, fulfilling social scientist Émile Durkheim’s idea of solidarity as a necessary component of a functioning civilisation and of a fulfilling human life.⁴

In becoming tethered in this moment to the itinerant conditions in which refugees were creating, the form of the exhibition itself became displaced and nomadic: created outside of galleries and museums, moving between public sites, from shops to bombsites, in keeping with art historian T. J. Demos’s proposition of ‘modernity-as-exile’.⁵ Being more dependent on arguments than on particular works, information exhibitions operated well for artists and designers in exile, being made up of reproducible elements, principally as photographs and text. Czech-born philosopher Vilém Flusser described coming to London at the start of the war as being ‘overcome by that strange dizziness of liberation and freedom which everywhere characterises the free spirit’ and exile as ‘an ocean of chaotic information’. ‘If he is not to perish, the expellee must be creative’, Flusser observed, going on to describe ‘creation as a dialogic process, in which either an internal or external dialogue takes place. The arrival of expellees in exile evokes external dialogues, and a beehive of creativity spontaneously surrounds the expellee. He becomes the catalyst for the synthesis of new information’.⁶ This process of synthesising new information in exhibitionary form became a significant project for newly arriving artists and designers in Britain.

We can consider such exhibitions as solidarities as ‘the infrapolitics of the powerless’, to quote social anthropologist James C. Scott’s phrase in Domination and the Arts of Resistance describing the way powerless people use cultural forms as vehicles of resistance and insubordination to create and defend social space.⁷ In this sense, exhibitions provided a space from which newly arriving people and political activists could safely mount a riposte, by signalling solidarities in form, messaging and mode of production. The manner in which these exhibitionary alignments from the British Left could be played out was not singular or settled and there were multiple, fractured directions for solidarities. From the mid-1930s, the British Left looked in several directions, with alignments forming with the Spanish Republicans against Franco and with the anti-fascists against German Nazis and Italian Fascists, while the role of the Soviet Union in its relationship with Britain was also the subject of tense debate, as I signal in this chapter.

This chapter discusses the many exhibitions mounted in solidarity with Spain, several supporting the plight of refugees to Britain and others in solidarity with the Soviet Union by a series of groups including the Artists International Association (AIA) and the Free German League of Culture (FGLC). These examples cover the period starting in the late 1930s with the Spanish Civil War and end in the midst of the Second World War, after the Soviet Union had joined the Allies. Exhibitions enabled new arrivals to build cultural capital and to re-assert themselves following their attempted erasure under the Nazis. They also offered opportunities for women in their continuing struggle for equality.

Exhibitions as solidarities with Spain

Exhibitions became a significant focus for British Leftist resistance against the nationalist position in Spain and an important form from which to demonstrate solidarity with the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. This war, a nodal point of the 1930s in Europe, tested the alliances and allegiances of leaders across the continent and challenged the pacifist principles of Leftist anti-war groups.⁸ Over 2,500 British men and women travelled to Spain to assist the Republicans by joining International Brigades or with paramilitary units established by the Communist International.⁹

The first British civilian to be killed fighting on the government side in Spain in August 1936 was young AIA member Felicia Browne.¹⁰ Browne had attended the Slade School before joining the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1933. While on a drawing excursion to Spain, where she sketched soldiers and local people, Browne joined the Republican militia. Her death activated other artists and writers in Britain, who responded in a series of ways, through protests, posters, banners, fundraising campaigns, writings, artworks and exhibitions.¹¹ News of Browne’s death inspired other artists to align themselves with the International Brigades.¹² Priscilla Thornycroft, studying at the Slade School in London at the outbreak of the Spanish war, was inspired to begin campaigning.¹³ Alongside newspaper coverage, the AIA’s retrospective exhibition Drawings of Felicia Browne at London’s 46 Frith Street, shown only weeks after her death in October 1936, drew attention to the cause.¹⁴ Proceeds from commemorative booklet sales amounted to £200 for the Spanish Medical Aid Committee.¹⁵

Browne’s death became emblematic for many artist-activists, marked in historical pageants such as the Communist Party of Great Britain’s 1930s series. The first pageant, referred to in the Daily Worker as an ‘English History Demonstration’, was staged in September 1936.¹⁶ At the end of the procession, the final point in the narrative was a ‘great portrait’ of Felicia Browne, flanked by a Red Flag and the Spanish Flag. Browne’s portrait fitted within a tradition, which the Daily Worker described as ‘leading down the centuries, directly to the struggle which is going on even more intensified to-day’. Political activists recognised the potency of acknowledging historical continuities and of collapsing time in order to bring past struggles closer to the present.¹⁷ Echoing past struggles enabled activists to reinforce and amplify their current engagements.

Artists Aid Spain

While news of British casualties in Spain caught artists’ imaginations, attacks by British Union of Fascists members on work by Jewish artists in Britain made the situation more acute. Two sculptures by Jewish artist Jacob Epstein were daubed with anti-Semitic slogans in October 1936. Artists’ support from Britain for the Republican faction continued to grow, with posters and exhibitions acting as a focus for fundraising. In December 1936, the AIA mounted one of its most successful exhibitions in support of the Spanish Civil War: Artists Aid Spain.¹⁸ Organised by AIA sub-group the Women of the AIA, assembled in just two weeks and held in London, it aimed to raise medical funds for Spain. It featured works donated by leading artists working in a range of styles: Ben Nicholson, Paul Nash, Eric Gill, Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, Eric Ravilious, Edward Bawden and Moholy-Nagy, who was living in London. Exhibition proceeds went to buy an ‘Artists’ Ambulance’, intended for use by the International Column established to defend Madrid.

After being forced to cut short a visit to Spain, Anglo-Jewish painter David Bomberg, born to Polish Jewish immigrant parents and raised in London’s East End, joined the cause from February 1937. Bomberg submitted a resolution to the London Group proposing they affiliate with the AIA and Surrealist groups in their support of anti-fascism in politics and art; that funds be granted for Spanish Medical Aid; and that ‘honorary membership of the London Group be extended to certain left-wing poets and writers’.¹⁹ Several British organisations formed to fundraise for Spanish aid used exhibitions as vehicles. The Communist-aligned Spanish Medical Aid Committee, set up at 24 New Oxford Street, London, held events including a ‘St Pancras and Holborn Spain’ week on London’s Euston Road, with a fundraising exhibition showing how the Spanish government was ‘building a new Spain’. Accompanying talks were given by people billed as ‘Just back from Spain and the Refugee Camps of France’ and Labour MP Ellen Wilkinson.²⁰

Exhibitions continued to be at the heart of British fundraising efforts for Spain. In March 1937 the National Joint Committee for Spanish Relief (NJCSR), an umbrella organisation set up to bring together a number of Spanish aid organisations, including Communist-aligned ones, held an exhibition and sale of rare first editions, autographed books and authors’ manuscripts. Located at Foyle’s Gallery on London’s Charing Cross Road, proceeds went to the Spanish Medical Aid Committee.²¹ Contributors included prominent novelists H. G. Wells and Rebecca West. The month after, the NJCSR mounted another fundraising exhibition (whose existence I know about from descriptions not images). This was led by the AIA and organised by artist Peggy Angus, held at St George’s Gallery in London’s Hanover Square, showing work by Duncan Grant, E. McKnight Kauffer, Paul Nash and Bernard Leach.²² Ex-Byam Shaw Art School student and AIA member Felicity Ashbee contributed her work to the NJCSR, making three posters for the organisation captioned ‘They face famine in Spain’.²³

Spanish Aid exhibitions proliferated. The Spanish Exhibition Committee, formed in a London Inn of Chancery to represent groups wanting to send medical aid to Spain, was yet another body using exhibitions for fundraising.²⁴ A leaflet announced a ‘SPANISH EXHIBITION … In support of anti-fascist Spain’, held at London’s 36 Ludgate Hill, EC4 from February to March 1937, to raise money for ‘Relief Work in Spain’ and opened by a representative from the Spanish Embassy. The Committee’s headed paper named an impressive and influential group of members drawn from Leftist politics and the arts: artist Duncan Grant, poet Francis Meynell, political activist Fenner Brockway and Spanish Civil War correspondent John Langdon-Davis.²⁵ Evidence of how the Committee’s exhibitions looked is scarce, pieced together through text flyers and modest written advertisements. Emphasising the documentary form of the exhibition, one leaflet promised visitors to ‘see in posters, photographs and pictures the background and causes of the war, Franco’s allies, the International Brigade, care of the refugees, the work of reconstruction in schools, hospitals and factories’.²⁶ The exhibition functioned in giving visual form and image to situations otherwise far removed from British life.

Spain: The Child and the War, organised by the Holborn and W. C. London Committee for Spanish Medical Aid and held in October 1937 at the showrooms of toymakers Paul and Marjorie Abbatt on Wimpole Street, showed Spanish drawings by children aged nine to sixteen previously shown in Valencia. The display was accompanied by an illustrated pamphlet describing help going to children in Republican Spain.²⁷ The Abbatts, well known as patrons of leading Modernist designers, were close friends of architect Ernö Goldfinger, who had designed their shop interior.²⁸ In the same year as Spain: The Child, the Abbatts organised a section on ‘The Child’ for the British Pavilion at the Paris International Exposition, 1937, with Goldfinger as designer.

Exhibitions as interventions: the AIA’s Exhibition for Peace, Democracy and Cultural Development

Under Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, the British government’s policy towards Spain was one of sympathy but ‘non-intervention’, even if this risked the downfall of Spanish democracy. In the face of this, the British Surrealist Group developed an idea of exhibitions operating as interventions and demonstrations of their alignments; bringing poets, artists and intellectuals together, to be exposed to a set of ideas that would initiate an emotional response to change or subvert minds. This strength of feeling from the Surrealists challenged the AIA’s own anti-war stance and assumption of pacifism.²⁹

For three days in April 1937 the AIA, working with the Society of Industrial Artists (SIA) and the British Surrealist Group, held the First British Artists Congress at London’s Conway Hall addressing the theme of ‘Unity of artists for peace, democracy and cultural freedom’, accompanied by an exhibition at 41 Grosvenor Square from April to May 1937, fundraising and showing support for ‘Peace, Democracy and Cultural Development’. The vast exhibition, containing over one thousand artworks, brought together painters and sculptors of many styles, to prove ‘the broad aesthetic basis of the membership’.³⁰ The intersection of activities, which acted principally as a form of solidarity, makes clear the sociability and conviviality of these events, despite their deadly serious focus.

Marking the same occasion, sculptor Henry Moore designed a manifesto-style pamphlet for the British Surrealist Group, printed by Farleigh Press, to draw Congress and Exhibition visitors’ awareness to the British government’s policy of non-intervention in Spain (Figure 6.1). ‘On the occasion of the Artists’ International Congress and Exhibition WE ASK YOUR ATTENTION’, it announced, going on to set out a lengthy argument for the necessity of British government intervention: ‘IF only in self-defence we must END ALL FORMS OF NON-INTERVENTION, INTERVENE IN THE FIELD OF POLITICS, INTERVENE IN THE FIELD OF IMAGINATION’ (as per the original formatting). It is evident in this Surrealist rhetoric that exhibitions were being imagined as a materialisation of the end of the policy of non-intervention, themselves becoming interventions in debate. The leaflet continued: ‘Economic justice is the first object of our intervention, but we demand also that vindication of the psychological rights of man, the liberation of intelligence and imagination. INTERVENE AS POETS, ARTISTS AND INTELLECTUALS BY VIOLENT OR SUBTLE SUBVERSION AND BY STIMULATING DESIRE’ (original emphases).³¹

The foreword to the guide for the Exhibition for Peace, Democracy and Cultural Development stated that the AIA ‘does not in any sense stand for a uniformity of expression: for the dragooning of artists or the sinking of individuality’, suggesting their programme had a clear focus on solidarity around political questions but a lack of clarity or dogma around how to unite visually. Instead, the AIA’s exhibition demonstrated, they said, ‘the richness and variety of the work that can be produced in the vanguard, thereby holding out a promise which isolation and defeatism themselves must salute’.³² This richness and variety was reflected in the range of styles and approaches taken by exhibiting artists, separated into an abstract room, including work by members of the Circle group, as well as Kandinsky and Léger.³³ In its ambition to act as a stylistic and thematic broad church, the exhibition lacked a clear installation strategy. It was criticised as overcrowded, visually incoherent and downright poor. Sometime AIA member and painter William Townsend wrote in his private diary of the ‘monstrous’ and ‘depressing’ show, while Left Review dismissed Surrealist works as having ‘the vagueness and chaos of anarchism’ and the ‘worker artists’ as having poor style and poorly chosen subjects.³⁴ A packed ‘Surrealist’ room included work by prominent artists who were both directly and indirectly linked with the movement: Ernst, Tanguy, Miró, Klee, Picasso, Man Ray, Dalí, Delvaux and Giacometti. The archival records of the exhibition I have seen do not clarify how it was hung or captioned, or, indeed, the role contributing painters played in its coming together.

6.1 ‘On the occasion of the Artists’ International Congress and Exhibition WE ASK YOUR ATTENTION’, pamphlet designed by artist Henry Moore for the British Surrealist Group to draw awareness to the British government’s policy of non-intervention. Published by Farleigh Press. Image reproduced by permission of the Henry Moore Foundation. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.

The AIA at the Paris International Exposition

While Germany and the Soviet Union were sizing each other up through pavilions set on either side of the central axis of the Exposition Internationale des Arts et des Techniques dans la Vie Moderne, held in Paris in 1937, Britain’s national pavilion was critically disdained for being conservative, whimsical and old-fashioned (as discussed in Chapter 1). Elsewhere at Paris, British artists engaged more directly with increasingly volatile international politics. Members of the AIA were invited to create a demonstration in the form of a League of Nations room and an International Peace Campaign room at a small pavilion for ‘Peace Democracy and Cultural Freedom’. These initiatives were related to the International Peace Campaign headed by British statesman Lord Cecil (who had spearheaded the formation of the League of Nations as a vehicle for peace). AIA artists worked on these peace exhibitions, with funding support from the French Popular Front peace organisation. AIA contributors included Misha Black, James Holland, Elizabeth Watson, Betty Rea and Nan Youngman.

The AIA artists created a series of painted slogans and photo-based murals combining peace statements such as ‘Enthusiasme Force Efficacite’ (‘Enthusiasm Force Efficacy’) and ‘Une Idee Fait Son Chemin’ (‘An Idea Makes Its Way’). Maps and statistics explained the role of the League of Nations in maintaining world peace.³⁵ Dynamic shapes directed visitors’ attention. This combination of media allowed them to work quickly, cheaply and on site, rather than having to find space elsewhere to pre-prepare. Photographs allowed them to represent their struggle more directly and with greater impact. These contributions allowed the AIA to express public solidarity with others with the same beliefs in a highly visible, international context. The AIA was appropriating space, in the Lefebvrian sense, in a context otherwise dominated by jostling national interests. Elsewhere at the Paris exhibition, totalitarian governments were moving towards more traditional means of representation including monumental paintings, tapestries and mosaics.³⁶

Guernica in Britain

The AIA’s painted murals and photomurals had formal and material qualities in common with the work shown at the Spanish Republican Pavilion, which had been formulated, in the increasingly tumultuous context of the Spanish Civil War, as international propaganda for the Republic, an invitation to join in solidarity with a government under attack. The building, devised by architects Josep Lluís Sert and Luis Lacasa, had extensive internal and external photographic murals by leading photomural artist Josep Renau, incorporating striking slogans and instructive pictograms; a systematic use of the photographic representation of Spain to serve the needs of a political programme, introducing visitors to the government’s concerns.³⁷ Despite Renau’s much-admired work, the most widely celebrated work of the Paris exhibition and of the Spanish Pavilion was Picasso’s monumental black and white oil mural Guernica, evoking the brutal aerial bombing of the Basque city of Guernica by German aircraft at the request of Franco’s Nationalist army. This painting, commissioned by the Spanish Republican government, arrested visitors’ attention near the Spanish Pavilion’s entrance. Works by Picasso and Renau had much in common, stretching floor to ceiling, being of equal width and using the same black and white tonal range, uniting them as structural forms of montage. Although not hung adjacent to the photomurals, Picasso’s painting was experienced as part of the same visual continuum.³⁸

After the closure of the International Exposition, Picasso sent Guernica on the road, believing in its power as political message and its capacity to move and activate people. Experienced directly in exhibitions as opposed to small, grainy reproductions in illustrated magazines or black and white newsreels, it could be a travelling focus for building international solidarities. Showing first in Norway, Guernica went on to visit twenty cities, before finally being installed at MOMA New York at the end of 1940.³⁹ Artist Roland Penrose toured Guernica round England, sponsored, as he explained, ‘by a strong committee of left-wing politicians, scientists, artists and poets’, under the auspices of the NJCSR. Penrose’s intention was essentially pacifist: to ‘draw attention to the horrors of war’ and the way in which Britain’s non-interventionist policy was allowing Franco a free rein to commit atrocities.⁴⁰ Details of the mode of Guernica’s installation are consistently eclipsed by the contemporary interest in the artwork’s relative effectiveness as pacifist propaganda, but it is clear that Roland Penrose believed fervently not only in the message of Guernica but in its power and immediacy when witnessed at first hand. For some the painting was ineffective as a political statement, however. Philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre asked whether Guernica would win even one heart to the Republican cause, given its incomprehensibility, while art historian Anthony Blunt opined that the painting was ‘not an act of public mourning but the expression of a private brainstorm which gives no evidence that Picasso had realised the political significance of Guernica’.⁴¹ Herbert Read rejected Blunt’s suggestion that Picasso was politically naive, describing Guernica as ‘a monument of protestation’, ‘a monument to destruction, a cry of outrage and horror amplified by the spirit of genius’; ‘it is only when the widest commonplace is infused with the intensest passion that a great work of art, transcending all schools and categories, is born; and being born, lives immortally’, defending the work both as politically engaged and great art, conditions he felt were rarely satisfied together.⁴²

The British venues chosen to host the mural in Britain give an insight into the way its tour fitted with established patterns for showing politically engaged artworks. In London, Guernica went to New Burlington Galleries and Whitechapel Art Gallery, while in Manchester it was mounted at a car showroom. At New Burlington Galleries, in October 1938, Guernica was displayed alongside sixty of Picasso’s preparatory paintings, sketches and studies. These, Penrose believed, made ‘a more direct appeal than did the picture itself, which demanded a greater effort to be understood’ and attracted lots of attention and three thousand visitors but not many funds for the NJCSR.⁴³ Patrons offering financial support included News Chronicle editor Gerald Barry (who would become Director-General of the Festival of Britain a decade later), socialist politician Fenner Brockway, writers E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf, designers Ashley Havinden and E. McKnight Kauffer.

In January 1939 Guernica travelled to Whitechapel Art Gallery, to be shown alongside Spanish War documentary films and workshops. Labour Party leader Clement Attlee was photographed in front of it, providing a succinct visual means of signalling his support for and solidarity with the International Brigades fighting with the Republicans in Spain (Figure 6.2). Roland Penrose, painter Julian Trevelyan and art critic Eric Newton gave tours of Guernica at Whitechapel.⁴⁴ Many visitors came: over a fortnight at Whitechapel the artwork attracted twelve thousand visitors.⁴⁵ From Whitechapel, Guernica travelled north to a Manchester motor showroom, under the aegis of fundraising group Manchester Foodship for Spain, who explained that ‘its awful symbolism portrays the ruins of human intelligence and human kindness. It is a damning commentary on War’. The Manchester Evening News reported ‘human faces and lifelike animals distorted with agony and exterminated by ruthlessness’, showing ‘the anguish of destruction’. They concluded, ‘No-one could fail to be impressed by a tremendous work which, more than any words, condemns the crime of war’.⁴⁶ Guernica’s journey through Britain enabled efforts to raise money and awareness of the war in Spain.⁴⁷ Moreover, it demonstrated exhibitions as useful vehicles for communicating politics and enabling people to signal allegiances and solidarities.

6.2 Labour Party leader Clement Attlee at Whitechapel Art Gallery, speaking in front of Picasso’s Guernica in January 1939. Uncredited photographer. © Succession Picasso/DACS, London 2023. Image courtesy of the Marx Memorial Library. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.

Offering solidarity to artists under persecution: the Artists’ Refugee Committee

Many German and Austrian artists had fled to Prague by 1938 but, as the Nazis became poised to take over Czechoslovakia, these fugitives needed a new sanctuary. Through international cultural networks, anti-Nazi German and Austrian artists who had fled to Prague but who now sought a passage to Britain made contact with Roland Penrose.⁴⁸ One such artist was Czech painter and cartoonist Josef Čapek, a left-wing political activist and part of the Oskar-Kokoschka-Bund (OKB) group named after the Austrian painter in exile in Prague. Čapek had written to political activist Margaret Gardiner appealing for help. Gardiner, who had earlier founded workers’ group For Intellectual Liberty, contacted Penrose, her neighbour in London’s Hampstead. Penrose responded by inviting neighbours to lunch to discuss how they could join together to help.⁴⁹ They agreed to form the Artists’ Refugee Committee (ARC) in November 1938, which invited art societies the London Group, the Royal Academy and the AIA to serve on the committee and to offer guarantors and hospitality for the OKB artists, a requirement in order to secure British entry visas.⁵⁰ Penrose represented the Surrealists on the ARC committee, while three of his Hampstead-based neighbours joined.⁵¹ The group raised £1,700 to carry out their work and to give hospitality to refugees, succeeding in saving the lives of at least twenty people.⁵²

Showing the work of Jewish artists in London: Exhibition of German-Jewish Artists’ Work

While the AIA was creating exhibitions as anti-fascist statements, from 1933, London-based art dealers were also mounting exhibitions both as anti-fascism and in solidarity with artists of the Jewish faith. London-based art dealer Carl Braunschweig held Exhibition of German-Jewish Artists’ Work: Sculpture-Painting-Architecture at Parsons Galleries, 315 Oxford Street in June 1934.⁵³ Braunschweig, born in 1886 to a German Jewish family, had fled to England in late 1933.⁵⁴ He worked on the show with the Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith in Berlin, seeking to show how Jewish artists had contributed to recent German art in ‘closest harmony’ and doing ‘honour’ to it, the catalogue explained. Braunschweig’s show contained 221 works by 86 contemporary German Jewish artists who had worked and exhibited in Germany before 1933 including painters Martin Bloch, Hans Feibusch, Lotte Laserstein, Max Liebermann and Adele Reifenberg. Most had not previously shown work in Britain, more than a third were women, many were still in Germany experiencing persecution by the Nazis and some had already scattered abroad to Britain, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Spain and Palestine, as the catalogue explained. The show placed a focus on artists ‘no longer able to display their productions in public exhibition or public galleries in their native country’; ‘their work cannot be discussed in the Press’. Many of the artists, the catalogue noted, had been reduced to poverty and lost touch with supporters.⁵⁵ In making this exhibitionary statement in 1934, Braunschweig aligned himself with artists later labelled ‘degenerate’.⁵⁶

Dutch pioneer of abstraction Piet Mondrian, accompanied by his friend the artist Winifred Nicholson, moved from Paris to London in September 1938 to escape the threat of Nazi invasion. Although not Jewish, Mondrian had immediate cause to fear as two of his works had been included in the 1937 Degenerate Art exhibition, effectively putting him on a blacklist. He was helped by his friends Russian Constructivist Naum Gabo, who had arrived in 1936, and abstract painter Ben Nicholson.⁵⁷ Expressionist artist Ludwig Meidner was in exile in England for fourteen years from 1939. He had been highly regarded in Germany, the subject of two solo exhibitions in Berlin and Dresden before 1933, represented by four paintings at Degenerate Art. Meidner had no solo show in England although his work was included in two group exhibitions at London’s Ben Uri Gallery.⁵⁸ In the absence of existing exhibiting opportunities and forced to develop new connections through which to find work and support, these refugees artists formed their own groups to organise exhibitions, as I go on to discuss in the next section.

Exhibitions as platforms for refugee artists: Free German League of Culture

Many artists of extraordinary talent, fleeing from Central and Eastern Europe and beyond, arrived in Britain during the 1930s, through a number of routes including the patronage of the ARC and the RIBA Refugee Committee, established in 1939.⁵⁹ Painter Oskar Kokoschka arrived in England from Prague in 1938, under the auspices of the ARC. While in Germany, Kokoschka, like Meidner, had seen his identity erased through the inclusion of twelve of his paintings in Degenerate Art. Kokoschka took British nationality and remained in the country until 1954.⁶⁰

Another to arrive under the auspices of the ARC was German photomontage artist John Heartfield, who entered Britain with Labour MP Ellen Wilkinson as ‘guarantor’.⁶¹ Born Helmut Herzfelde, Heartfield had become prominent in German Communist circles, including the Rote Frontkämpferbund (Red Front League of Struggle) founded in 1924, whose clenched-fist symbol Heartfield designed. Heartfield had been compelled by Hitler’s rise to power to flee to Czechoslovakia in 1933. In April 1934, Heartfield had been a major participant in an international exhibition of caricatures held at Prague, in which contributions by George Grosz and T. T. Heine, whose cartoons were admired by Trotsky, were prominently displayed. The tone of the exhibition, and especially of Heartfield’s works, was so sharply anti-fascist that the German and Italian governments put pressure on Czechoslovakia, with Czech police responding by removing the offending pictures. Heartfield already had a British audience, through work such as his provocative photomontage The Happy Elephants, which satirised Prime Minister Chamberlain’s ‘fairy-tale’, as he saw it, of the Munich Accord with Hitler, giving British people a false sense of security. The work was published in Picture Post, the popular magazine launched in the same year by Hungarian refugee Stefan Lorant. Further Heartfield works had been published in British illustrated magazine Lilliput within weeks of his arrival in London.⁶²

Many refugee artists who had achieved critical acclaim in their home contexts failed to achieve the same level of recognition or success in Britain where there was limited appreciation for German Expressionism and the New Objectivity. Limited sympathy in the British contemporary art world for the work of refugee artists made critic Herbert Read unusual in his interest in developments in German art.⁶³ Despite his fame in Germany, while in exile in Britain Oskar Kokoschka did not have a solo exhibition of his own work, a contradiction referred to by fellow refugee artist Fred Uhlman, who described ‘Germany’s most distinguished painter, a man famous all over Central Europe, but at that time almost completely unknown in England except to a few connoisseurs and dealers’.⁶⁴ While exiled in Britain exhibitions did offer opportunities for artists to connect with each other, however, and to assert their shared beliefs and solidarities, providing a platform and a voice.

In December 1938, Kokoschka and Heartfield were co-founders of London-based solidarity organisation the Freie Deutsche Kulturbund (Free German League of Culture in Great Britain, or FGLC) as a ‘German, anti-Nazi, antifascist non-party refugee organisation’. Its multiple cultural support for those experiencing cultural, social and political exile in Britain included mounting exhibitions, which offered the chance to raise the plight of refugees and to provide mutual support for recent arrivals. An important model for the FGLC was the Assoziation revolutionärer bildender Künstler Deutschlands (Association of Revolutionary Visual Artists), known as ‘Asso’, which many refugees who reached Britain from Germany had been members of. The initiative for Asso’s foundation had come from artists keen to mobilise the graphic talents of artists in the service of the Communist Party, including creating visual displays, leaflets, broadsheets, banners and placards and giving an organisational framework to political art but without imposing a common style; focusing on questions of solidarity and common concern, rather than formal or stylistic qualities of the work.⁶⁵

The FGLC’s stated aim was to create mutual understanding between refugees and British people: emphasising and strengthening the solidarity of the refugees with ‘all democratic, freedom-loving, progressive forces’; looking after the social interests of refugees; cultivating and developing relations with ‘other friendly organisations and personalities’. The emphasis was on cultural and social rather than political aims, reflecting the restrictions imposed on refugees’ political activities by the British government. Despite this, the FGLC’s activities attracted the attention of British Security Service MI5, which kept members under close surveillance, believing it ‘a communist front organisation’. An MI5 Special Branch report in December 1939 described the FGLC as ‘an organisation which aims to arrange lectures and other events on artistic and literary manners but is more or less recognised to foster communist sympathies among refugees and British subjects’.⁶⁶ At its peak, the FGLC had 1,500 members, with group exhibitions a major strand of its work, successfully providing newly arriving German artists a community with which to work and exhibit. These regular exhibitions were mounted in a Hampstead house made available by George Bell, Bishop of Chichester, with larger exhibitions at central London venues.⁶⁷

FGLC exhibitions provided an opportunity to see works by artists not shown before in Britain, and to help support these artists. The First Group Exhibition of German, Austrian, Czechoslovakian Painters and Sculptors held in June 1939 at the Wertheim Gallery, run by Lucy Wertheim in London’s Burlington Gardens (a short-lived venture running from 1930 to 1939), showed work by artists in exile from their countries.⁶⁸ The standard of sculpture was particularly praised by the press – works like Georg Ehrlich’s Fisherman’s Son and Siegfried Charoux’s Terracotta Group, for example – while Kokoschka, who showed four paintings, was criticised by the New Statesman for ‘his disregard for the subtleties of his art is too undisguised’.⁶⁹

While in Britain, Kokoschka acted principally to promote other artists’ work, including FGLC member and fellow German artist-in-exile John Heartfield. Unlike other refugee artist friends, Heartfield was achieving a reasonable amount of success and financial stability while in Britain, receiving regular commercial commissions, including designing book covers.⁷⁰ In December 1939 Kokoschka mounted a politically provocative one-person show of Heartfield’s work called One Man’s War against Hitler: Exhibition of John Heartfield at Paul Wengraf’s Arcade Gallery with montages from Berlin and Prague, documenting Heartfield’s fight against Nazism. The Arcade was one of very few London galleries to remain open throughout the war.⁷¹ Wengraf, born in Vienna in 1894 to a family of art dealers, had set up a business at home but fled to London in 1938 after the German annexation of Austria, opening the Arcade Gallery on Old Bond Street in March 1939, supported by his friend Danish engineer Ove Arup.⁷² The rather esoteric gallery programme ranged from Netherlandish Mannerism and early Baroque to Neoclassicism, as well as work by Jewish artists trapped in Nazi-occupied Europe to help them escape persecution. One such artist was former Bauhaus student and Communist Party member Friedl Dicker, whose work Wengraf exhibited in August 1940, in the hope that doing so would aid her emigration from Czechoslovakia, which tragically did not materialise. Wengraf received exemption from internment and continued to exhibit even at the height of the Blitz.

Heartfield was interned for six months in 1940.⁷³ The FGLC held another exhibition of his work in June 1941, to mark his fiftieth birthday: a display of photomontages published in Communist newspaper Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung (Workers’ Illustrated News). Alongside this exhibition, Heartfield gave a talk about the evolution of photomontage from photography. In the audience was MI5 informant Kurt Hiller, who was there to assess Heartfield’s capacity to be politically radical and subversive in Britain. Hiller reported Heartfield demonstrating ‘how he and his fellow workers had always used [photomontage] in the service of the truth (as the Communists understand it) and how great a part this could play in social and revolutionary struggles’.⁷⁴ Heartfield remained on the M15 watch list and his written applications to remain in Britain for work and health were denied, precipitating his return to Berlin in 1950.

Exhibitions supporting the plight of Jewish people continued to be mounted through the Second World War. In February 1943 Artists Aid Jewry was held at Whitechapel Art Gallery, with a poster carrying a woodblock by Erich Kahn, printed in English and Hebrew. The exhibition consisted of 137 works by Jewish artist members of a group of organisations: the Jewish Cultural Club, the Free Austrian Movement and the FGLC. A pamphlet explained the exhibition as ‘All in Aid of Jews who fell victims to Nazi-barbarism’. Its intention was ‘to show works relating to Jewish life and problems’. As a token of sympathy with ‘their unfortunate brethren’ the exhibitors had agreed to give half of the proceeds from sales to Mrs Churchill’s Fund, for aid to Russia. Appealing to visitors’ good will, it concluded: ‘The Artists express their hope that the visitors for their part will support this effort in the same spirit’.⁷⁵

Refugee exhibitions during internment

If exhibitions mounted in Britain created a focus for solidarities with people in other parts of the world currently experiencing war and oppression, this became amplified once Britain entered the war. Many artists who arrived in Britain in the years immediately preceding the Second World War had been prohibited from exhibiting their work. Perhaps worse, the Nazi regime had ridiculed these artists’ work in exhibitions. Ironically, the British internment camps in which 22,000 Germans and Austrians, as well as 4,000 Italians, were imprisoned as ‘enemy aliens’ in 1940 offered a certain creative freedom, to exhibit and to show artistic work of any style without ridicule.⁷⁶

Relationships between FGLC members were cemented by common experience of internment as enemy aliens from 1940 to 1942. During this period, in July 1941, Kokoschka inaugurated the exhibition Refugee Artists and Their British Friends: over a hundred works shown at FGLC’s Hampstead clubhouse to show solidarity with and for the benefit of interned refugees.⁷⁷ Even internees without artistic training were drawn to pursuing creativity in the midst of internment. Businessman H. G. Gussefeld turned tent pegs into letter-openers in animal shapes and used cannibalised linoleum for linocuts.⁷⁸ Living in these camps for several months, on the Isle of Man and in about a dozen places around Britain including Glasgow, Liverpool and Manchester, allowed artists to make art – sometimes in dedicated studio spaces – and to mount camp exhibitions as productive and enjoyable diversionary activities.⁷⁹

While interned in Hutchinson Camp, art historian Klaus Hinrichsen took on the role of mounting exhibitions. The first, for which no known photographs exist, was reviewed as ‘astounding’ in The Camp, the makeshift homemade newspaper which was circulated in the camp.⁸⁰ The exhibition was held in September 1940 and included work by German painters Fred Uhlman and Erich Kahn. German Dadaist artist Kurt Schwitters, also interned in the camp, had offered porridge sculptures, ‘exuding a sickly and evil smell’, which the organisers turned down in favour of more conventional portraits and landscapes.⁸¹ Schwitters, whose work had been condemned as ‘degenerate’ by the Nazis, was exiled to Britain from Norway in 1940, remaining until his death in 1948.⁸² In 1940, during internment at Hutchinson, Schwitters painted portraits of fellow internees (including Fred Uhlman), landscapes and ‘Merzbilder’ collages, incorporating scrap wood and ceiling materials, dismantled tea chests, toilet paper, discarded cigarette boxes and sweet wrappers and even left-over porridge, as Hinrichsen recalled.⁸³ One Sunday he decorated the staircase of the office building with ‘Miro-like designs’.⁸⁴

Hinrichsen’s second Hutchinson camp exhibition was held in November 1940 on the large first floor of an empty building set aside specially by Hutchinson’s Camp Commander, with all the trappings of professional galleries including private view invitations, a catalogue and speeches, concluding with a performance of chamber music.⁸⁵ Photographs show framed paintings nailed to walls covered in wooden boards or hung against rough breezeblocks and unframed works on paper attached loosely to walls (Figure 6.3). Many were portrait heads of fellow inmates, probably painted from life. There were painted landscapes, photographs, a sculpted head and tiny figurines. The works represented a mix of styles. Hinrichsen explained they ranged from ‘accomplished oil paintings, sculptures and graphic work to untutored but moving “sketches from the German Anti-Nazi fight and the Spanish fight for Liberty”, to Punch and Judy puppets’.⁸⁶ Amongst them were carved wooden pieces with the appearance of tribal objects, displayed symmetrically.⁸⁷ Most of the styles on show were suppressed in Germany so this represented an opportunity to work in a way that had been forbidden for years.⁸⁸

Wartime exhibitions at Bilbo’s Modern Art Gallery

Another Isle of Man internee who used exhibitions as a mechanism for giving voice to fellow refugees was German Jewish refugee Jack Bilbo. German-born Bilbo, originally Hugo Baruch, had co-founded the Kampfbund gegen den Faschismus (Fight against Fascism) in 1930 to oppose Nazi policies. Having fled first to France, he arrived in London in 1936. An anarchist and self-taught artist, Bilbo began painting and sculpting after arriving in Britain, using blackout paper for painting after the outbreak of war. Bilbo was interned at Onchan Camp on the Isle of Man (along with designer F. H. K. Henrion, who was released early to work on exhibition design at the MOI, as discussed in Chapter 7). The lively cultural community at the camp included regular lectures, amateur dramatics, musical performances, debating and newspaper the Onchan Pioneer, a vehicle for news and ideas.⁸⁹ At Onchan, Bilbo hosted two exhibitions of fellow internee artists in his camp cabin, deliberately including amateur artists in the exhibitions in order to eschew the conventional attachment to art world training.⁹⁰ The first exhibition he presented with the motto ‘The world is a cage, forged by human stupidity. Art will break this cage’, pointing to his belief in art’s emancipatory qualities.⁹¹

6.3 The second Hutchinson camp exhibition of November 1940. Daniel, Major H. O. Photo: Tate © The estate of Hubert Daniel. TGA 20052/2/7/13. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.

On release from internment, Bilbo served in the Pioneer Corps but was invalided out in 1941, soon after opening the Modern Art Gallery on London’s Baker Street in the midst of war, ‘with the sole aim of giving the modern artist … an unbiased platform, and of creating for the people an oasis of sanity … believing in the necessity also for an intellectual fight against Hitlerism and all it stands for’.⁹² This was an act of courage and defiance at a time when most London galleries had closed in fear of bombing and, for Bilbo, it was a way of performing solidarity with fellow refugee artists.⁹³ The gallery showed works by well-known avant-garde artists including Picasso and Surrealist Eileen Agar, as well as lesser-known refugee artists including Austrian Anna Mayerson, German Samson Schames and Czech Jacob Bornfriend. Anti-Fascist Exhibition held at the Modern Art Gallery in July 1943 was a display of cartoons by Vicky (Viktor Weisz), who contributed regular cartoons to News Chronicle. Proceeds from the exhibition went to the Stalingrad Hospital Fund, one of many fundraising efforts in solidarity with the Soviet Union, as I will discuss later in this chapter.

Bilbo held Kurt Schwitters’ first solo exhibition in Britain at the gallery in December 1944, by now in a space on the Haymarket. Schwitters – like many other incoming artists of the time – had found it difficult to integrate into British artistic circles and this was a clear act of support and solidarity. Through his friend Naum Gabo, the Russian Constructivist sculptor and painter who lived in Britain from 1935 to 1946, Schwitters had been introduced to people within the British art establishment, such as Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson.⁹⁴ But institutional support for Schwitters’ work was limited, so his 1944 exhibition at the Modern Art Gallery was significant. It included thirty-nine works in collage, oil painting and sculpture; the catalogue, written by Herbert Read, hailed Schwitters as ‘the supreme master of collage’ and a Modernist poet whose work paralleled that of James Joyce, pointing out that despite not having been boosted by critics and art dealers to the same extent as some of his contemporaries he was ‘one of the most genuine artists of the modern movement’.⁹⁵ A flyer for the exhibition advertised ‘Paintings and Sculpture by Kurt Schwitters (The Founder of Dadaism and “Merz”)’.

At the Munich Degenerate Art Exhibition in 1937 one of Schwitters’ large assemblages had been hung at an angle under the heading ‘Total Verrueckt’ (‘Completely Crazy’). Hitler was photographed smirking in front of it. Schwitters had continued to court disapproval for his Merz work while in Britain, hiding it while in internment and only showing his portraits and landscapes publicly.⁹⁶ In the programme concurrent with the Modern Art Gallery show, Schwitters performed his abstract sound poem Ursonate, which he had written twenty years earlier in Germany and had also performed while interned. Read referred to these poems as integral to his work and as an art of ‘abstract incantation’.⁹⁷ Bilbo recalled ‘Kurt … being quite pathological, enjoyed himself immensely. So did my guests, because outside the bombing went on, which seemed to be logical, and therefore wasn’t so amusing, and inside the house Kurt Schwitters went on with his illogicality, which was amusing’.⁹⁸ Two BBC representatives, invited to record his performance, left before he had finished.⁹⁹

Showing British people the underground struggle against Hitler: Allies inside Germany on Regent Street

Exhibitions of solidarity were mounted in unlikely places during the Second World War, and shops, temporarily ceasing to function as places of trade in the midst of war, offered excellent sites for the proliferation of exhibitions mounted by political activists. The blitzed John Lewis department store site became used for many ambitious exhibitions, including the AIA’s major 1943 exhibition For Liberty, which I introduce in Chapter 7. Meanwhile, in an empty shop on Regent Street the group around German photomontage artist John Heartfield mounted Allies inside Germany and Ernö Goldfinger took the empty Boots the Chemists at Piccadilly Circus for an exhibition called The Two Mrs Britains, each driven by an anti-fascist agenda.

The Leftist messages of these exhibitions increasingly converged with and were supported and amplified by the British establishment. This was the case with Allies inside Germany, 1942, an exhibition showing refugees playing an important part in anti-fascist resistance from within Germany, by documenting the opposition to Hitler inside Nazi Germany – ‘the underground struggle of the German Anti-Nazis against Hitler’, as its flyer explained – and raising money to produce propaganda material to be dropped over Germany.¹⁰⁰ The exhibition flyer’s cover image, drawn in red by artist René Graetz, showed a cloth-capped worker standing with a clenched fist (Figure 6.4). Berlin-born Graetz had arrived in Britain in 1939, was interned on the Isle of Man in 1940 and then deported to Canada for a year. He had previously been frustrated by the large number of still lives and portraits in the FGLC and AIA joint exhibition of 1941, believing the isolation from the masses no longer justified the artists adopting a quietist position: ‘In the gigantic struggle now taking place’, he argued, ‘the artist must take a decisive stand’.¹⁰¹

Allies inside Germany was held from July to August 1942 in an empty, two-storey shop at 149 Regent Street, in London’s West End.¹⁰² The exhibition was organised by the FGLC Chairman and Communist politician Hans Johann Fladung, with the English Anti-Nazi Committee backed by British Labour Party member and peer Lord Wedgwood. This was a multidisciplinary information exhibition, a first for the FGLC, whose previous exhibitions had all centred on artworks. Allies was instead focused around twenty-seven panels referring to a number of global, anti-fascist struggles, connecting locations and reinforcing political alliances. The design was a collaboration between Heartfield, who worked on some photomontages of photographic material, with drawn and painted images accompanied by texts by Heinz Worner and Hans Fladung, who were responsible for tracking down the exhibition’s documentation, and René Graetz, who created the exhibition’s graphic layouts.¹⁰³ German economist and, it was later revealed, Soviet spy Jurgen Kuczynzki provided statistical information. The panels in Allies had a homemade feel, with photographs collaged from German and exile newspapers and documents, some smuggled out of Germany, thematising resistance to Hitler inside Germany, the role of refugees in such efforts, the way that literary and cultural life was being censored and silenced and international responses.¹⁰⁴ Slogans and labels were painted, cut out and printed on top.

6.4 Flyer for Allies inside Germany, with a cover drawing by René Graetz, held in an empty shop at 149 Regent Street, London, to show ‘the underground struggle of the German Anti-Nazis against Hitler’. René Graetz. © DACS 2023. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.

6.5 ‘German refugees play their part for Allied victory’, panel 27 from Allies inside Germany. Uncredited photographer. Image courtesy of Akademie der Künst Berlin, Heinz Worner archive. © DACS 2023. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.

Introductory panel ‘Hitler Comes to Power’ portrayed this as a class struggle in which the working classes were fighting back against a middle class duped into supporting the Nazi regime. It showed photographs of antagonism, with anti-Nazi protests by the working classes, and examples of underground working-class newspapers. Another panel illustrated the Nazi’s progressive occupation of Europe – Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland and onwards – contrasting the public demonstrations of military power with photographs of horrifying atrocities. Nazi leaders – from Hitler to Göring – were pictured, their ‘crimes’ listed. As counterpart, several panels showed pockets of resistance: peasants and Christians, as well as highlighting German intellectuals whose work stood against the current regime and those who had been exiled or silenced, illustrated by photographs, quotes and publications (Figure 6.5).

Pamphlets from resistance groups in Britain offering international solidarity were displayed. One panel, entitled ‘Five Minutes Before Twelve’, showed the cut-out heads of Hitler alongside Stalin quoted as saying ‘Hitlers come and go, but the German people and the German state remain’ while ‘German Refugees Play Their Part for Allied Victory’ stated that ‘For years writers, actors, artists, have fought Nazism’, showing how press, stage, art, broadcasting, civil defence and army had been pioneered by refugees.

6.6 One-penny stamps collection designed by German refugee H. A. Rothholz issued for the Allies inside Germany exhibition. H. A. Rothholz Archive, University of Brighton Design Archives. (Uncatalogued). Image courtesy of the H. A. Rothholz estate. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.

Showing the level to which Allies had the establishment seal of approval, Royal Mail issued a series of twelve one-penny stamps on the occasion of the exhibition. These were designed by German refugee H. A. Rothholz, who had arrived in Britain in 1933 and was interned in Liverpool, the Isle of Man and Canada. Each postage stamp had a black and white linocut set in a striking red frame with yellow font, dramatising the role and impact of underground resistance in Germany; titles including ‘Leaflets from the Roof’, ‘Sabotage’, ‘Home and Foreign Labour Unite’, ‘Underground Press’ and ‘Soldiers begin to Think’ (Figure 6.6).¹⁰⁵

Allies was the most high profile of all FGLC exhibitions, attracting thirty thousand visitors but a mixed press response.¹⁰⁶ The Daily Mirror said ‘perhaps the most moving “exhibits” are some of the men who have organised the show. Several of them have escaped from concentration camps’, referring to the exhibition organisers’ status as refugees (without being strictly accurate).¹⁰⁷ The Manchester Guardian reported approvingly that the exhibition showed how German people were fighting Nazism, while New Statesman and Nation was impressed by ‘the visual proof of the growth and boldness of the Opposition’, including photographs of ‘Catholic processions and public demonstrations’.¹⁰⁸ The Spectator published a letter from German historian in Britain Peter F. Wiener, who described Allies as ‘in rather bad taste’, weakening the wider effort by making the British public believe the ‘dangerous myth’ that there were allies within Germany that could bring the collapse of the regime. ‘It is not for me to decide whether this untimely exhibition is the result of ignorance, homesickness or definite political activities’.¹⁰⁹ Press attention came from as far afield as Australian Quarterly, which reported the exhibition a success that had travelled beyond London to six cities including Manchester and Bristol.¹¹⁰ In its travelling guise the exhibition was renamed We Accuse – 10 Years of Hitler Fascism, drawing more attention to the dangers of the Hitler regime and to the need to form a second front.¹¹¹

The Resistance Exhibition, Warrington

One tantalising archival find that has yet to bear further fruit, but is suggestive of further solidarity exhibitions held across Britain during wartime, is the transcript of a speech made by French conservative Resistance leader Louis Marin at the opening of The Resistance Exhibition, in July 1944 in the northern town of Warrington (near Manchester).¹¹² Marin had sought refuge in Britain in April 1944, after the German Gestapo had issued a warrant for his arrest. The only hints of what the exhibition comprised are through Marin’s words. A search of the local Warrington press may well bring further information. Marin’s speech described the exhibition as about ‘armed’, ‘organised’ resistance by ordinary people in France. He used the occasion to suggest that it would only be through remembering current atrocities and oppression that the world would ‘do better next time’. His concluding comment affirmed exhibitions as a useful medium through which governments could form public opinion and the public could judge the work of politicians: ‘With a government depending on public opinion, exhibitions like this are an excellent thing, because governments based on public opinion and free discussion are responsive to the views of the people’. Marin ultimately affirmed exhibitions as playing an important role in supporting democracies.

Exhibitions of refugee children’s work: The War as Seen by Children

The impact of the war on children was of great interest to the public and the focus of scrutiny by politicians and journalists. In an article for Picture Post, Tom Harrisson of Mass Observation discussed ‘A Child’s View of the War’. This was accompanied by images of children preparing for the exhibition ‘Five to Ten’ Exhibition of Children’s War Pictures, including one of Ursula and Ernö Goldfinger’s daughter Elizabeth Ann, preparing her contribution at home at 2 Willow Road in Hampstead, north London. The exhibition was held first locally, at 10 Park Crescent in Hampstead, before touring onwards to New York.¹¹³

Wartime exhibitions were providing a platform for newly arriving refugee artists. They also gave refugee children a voice. Child refugees’ work was shown at The War as Seen by Children organised by Kokoschka in 1942 to fundraise for the Refugee Children’s Evacuation Fund. The exhibition shared the FGLC’s Hampstead base to collect for Theydon Bois School for German Refugee Children, set up to teach children in German, with the aspiration that they could return home after the war. ¹¹⁴ Initially modest and co-organised with Johann Fladung, the exhibition was eventually opened by Czech Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk (part of the Czech government-in-exile in London) and evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley, later UNESCO’s first Director-General. It showed work by refugee children of twelve nationalities, intending to educate adults about their experiences.

Kokoschka’s opening speech showed the extent to which the exhibition was focused towards creating solidarities between the children. It would, he hoped, create ‘a friendly and comradely spirit amongst [the children] themselves’, ‘a most important asset for future international co-operation’.¹¹⁵ These children, ‘such little victims of the Fascists’ barbarity as were lucky enough to find hospitality in England’, had experienced ‘the Fascist menace of death and destruction’ and were ‘now struggling together with their elders for the victory of a life of happiness and beauty’ to arouse in its viewers greater determination to fight the ‘inhuman forces’. ‘Art’, Kokoschka continued, ‘is one of the means through which man expresses his participation in life’. The children offered a model for adults, Kokoschka suggested; through learning to understand and respect each other they had become ‘a working model for an ideal human society of the future’. Although, he cautioned, that despite this some children had still somehow grown to be soldiers of ‘the atrocious Nazi regime’, questioning how the system of education had produced current conditions.

Based on its popularity and perceived educational value, The War as Seen by Children was enlarged and reopened in a ceremony led by Lady Clark at the Cooling Galleries on New Bond Street, central London, in January 1943. This time it was more ambitious, including works by children of all the United Nations, touring to forty-five British towns, to be shown in schools and galleries, as well as touring across the US, with paintings selected by a panel chaired by Herbert Read. Exhibits were themed: ‘How the child sees the present struggle’, ‘How refugee and evacuated children re-discover and re-build life and their national culture’, ‘How the refugee or evacuated child sees its new surroundings’, ‘How the children of the United Nations feel united in a common purpose’ and ‘How they see their future’.¹¹⁶ The exhibition reminded the public of the plight of vulnerable refugee children who were liable to be forgotten in the fraught context.

‘Comrades in arms exhibitions’: Aid to Russia at 2 Willow Road

Britain’s newly close relationship with the Soviet Union, as they joined the Allies midway through the Second World War, became the subject of a series of exhibitions, extending the hand of friendship, offering a materialised form of alliance and providing an occasion for fundraising. The Anglo-Soviet relationship was profoundly unstable: for twenty years after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the British Left had been broadly supportive of the Soviet experiment, with many British artists such as illustrators Pearl Binder and Clifford Rowe spending time living and working in Russia. But, as historian Paul Corthorn notes, the British Left’s relationship with Russia had become increasingly fractured by the late 1930s, as knowledge became widespread of Stalinist show trials and the purges, with increasing condemnation in Britain of Stalin as a ruthless dictator.¹¹⁷ This opposition changed once again after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, when Stalin entered the Second World War on the side of the Allies and Britain was thrown into a temporary alliance with the Soviets, culminating in the Anglo-Soviet Alliance of May 1942.¹¹⁸ British Labour and the Left expressed renewed respect for the Soviet Union, which was seen as a key partner in the fight against Hitler. This resurgence of solidarity with the Soviet Union was expressed through many exhibitions and events in Britain, despite the potential conflicts involved in that support (Figure 6.7).

Some wartime Anglo-Soviet exhibitions were officially sanctioned and mounted by the government through the British Ministry of Information (discussed at length in Chapter 7), including Comrades in Arms (A Picture of Russia at War) held at Charing Cross Station in April 1942 and featuring portraits of Churchill and Stalin, as well as cartoons given as ‘the gift’ of propaganda from Stalin to Lord Beaverbrook in September 1941.¹¹⁹ Keen to express support for the Soviet Union, artists and designers developed exhibitions outside government to show solidarity and to fundraise. One of the first was Aid to Russia, mounted by architect Ernö Goldfinger and his artist wife Ursula Goldfinger at their recently built home at 2 Willow Road, Hampstead in June 1942 to fundraise for the Aid to Russia Fund. Ernö Goldfinger, born into a Hungarian Jewish family in Budapest, had studied architecture in Paris before moving to London in 1934. His wife, painter Ursula Goldfinger, had trained as an artist in Paris under Purist painter Amédée Ozenfant.

By the time they mounted Aid to Russia, Ernö Goldfinger had gained almost two decades of experience as a highly productive exhibition designer. It is evident that exhibitions offered him the outlet for his architectural talents that was, at the time, unavailable elsewhere.¹²⁰ Goldfinger had mounted an exhibition on the life of Karl Marx at the 1925 USSR Exhibition Pavilion, a structure designed by Russian architect Konstantin Melnikov and re-erected in Paris in 1933.¹²¹ After moving from Paris to London in 1934, Goldfinger, a MARS Group member, designed the children’s section of the 1938 New Architecture exhibition at New Burlington Galleries (discussed in Chapter 3). He had designed various toy and exhibition displays for toymakers Paul and Marjorie Abbatt, including the Children’s Section of the British Pavilion at Paris 1937, as well as the ICI stand at Olympia in 1938.¹²²

6.7 Poster for Soviet at War, mounted by the Ministry of Information and held at Charing Cross Station in April 1942. Uncredited artist. 1983/4/5522 © TfL from the London Transport Museum collection. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.

For Aid to Russia, the Goldfingers worked with Virginia Penn as exhibition secretary and her architect husband Colin Penn, President of the Association of Architects, Surveyors and Technical Assistants (AASTA).¹²³ Pivotal to the selection process was well-known art critic and collector Peter Watson, who had co-founded Horizon magazine with writer Cyril Connolly.¹²⁴ Ernö Goldfinger acted as exhibition treasurer with Ursula Goldfinger as registrar; their strong social and cultural networks and influence meant they succeeded in gathering works from sixty eminent contemporary artists including Pablo Picasso, Kurt Schwitters, Fernand Léger, Jacob Epstein, Paul Klee, Paul Nash, Roland Penrose, Eileen Agar, Henry Moore and Rita Kernn-Larsen, as well as lending works from their own collection.¹²⁵ The exhibition poster carried a simple pencil line drawing by Rolf Brandt: a pair of legs carrying a canvas inscribed with the signatures of artists contributing to the show.

An exhibition opening party was a convivial vehicle for gestures of solidarity, offering an occasion of levity on which to connect with others, to generate publicity, to gather donations and to inspire purchases for the cause from art collectors. The Goldfingers’ home was a highly suitable space, its middle floors – with connecting living and dining rooms – having movable walls that offered extended wall space as a gallery hang. Aid to Russia opened on 4 June 1942 as a gathering of the great and the good, with Madame Maisky, wife of the Russian Ambassador, present and zoologist Sir Peter Chalmers Mitchell in the chair.¹²⁶ Nancy Cunard, heiress and anti-fascist activist, attended. Cunard’s booklet Salvo for Russia, containing four radical poems (including one by Cunard) and ten engravings critiquing war by Julian Trevelyan, John Piper, Mary Wykeham and Surrealist artist and occultist Ithell Colquhoun, was on sale, produced in aid of the Comforts Fund for Women and Children of Soviet Russia.¹²⁷ By the time the exhibition closed three weeks later, it had been favourably reviewed in the New Statesman, the Observer and The Times.¹²⁸

The same month as Aid to Russia, Goldfinger designed Eastern Front, another solidarity exhibition for the Society for Cultural Relations with the USSR, a body for Anglo-Soviet friendship and to aid cultural understanding of the USSR. In this case the exhibition was held at the showrooms of the Rootes car manufacturers on Piccadilly in June 1942.¹²⁹ The Rootes showrooms were a regular exhibition space during the war, hosting MOI exhibitions such as Colonial Life of 1943, developed for the Colonial Office, which included sections on colonies at war and education in the colonies (Figure 6.8).¹³⁰

Artists Aid Russia at the Wallace Collection, London

Soon after Aid to Russia closed, the AIA’s exhibition in solidarity with the Soviet Union, Artists Aid Russia, opened at Hertford House, central London base of the Wallace Collection. Ernö Goldfinger was at the helm once again. Collection objects evacuated from Hertford House had left space for 900 paintings, shown from July to August 1942, raising £2,000 in aid of Mrs Churchill’s Aid to Russia Fund.¹³¹ Graphic designer F. H. K. Henrion created the exhibition’s catalogue and poster, recalling the poster was ‘printed on a page of newspaper, which had to be passed by the censor to decide whether the words were acceptable to be made public. Airbrush was used over the palette, which was faded out, three colours used’ (Figure. 6.9).¹³² The catalogue cover carried a painter’s palette and a hammer and sickle, with a quote from English Romantic poet William Blake’s 1793 poem ‘The Sword and the Sickle’:

6.8 A young boy looks at a display panel about education in the colonies, at the Colonial Life exhibition, produced by the Ministry of Information and held at the Rootes car manufacturers on Piccadilly in June 1943. Richard Stone © IWM D 17418. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.

This poem connected the English Romantic tradition with the Communist sickle symbol to celebrate the Anglo-Soviet relationship.

6.9 Artists Aid Russia, Hertford House, 1942. F. H. K. Henrion designed the exhibition’s catalogue and poster. F. H. K. Henrion Archive, University of Brighton Design Archives. © Estate of F. H. K. Henrion. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.

Ernö Goldfinger designed another solidarity exhibition: Twenty-Five Years of Soviet Progress, held at Hertford House in November 1942, the committee chaired by eminent architect Sir Edwin Lutyens. This time, the exhibition was a group initiative by the National Council for British-Soviet Unity, the Society for Cultural Relations with the USSR, the Anglo-Soviet Public Relations Association and the Russia To-Day Society.¹³⁴ Unlike the two earlier art exhibitions Goldfinger had co-organised, Twenty-Five Years was a documentary exhibition, aimed at educating the public about life in the USSR since the socialist state was founded, structured around information boards. Hertford House’s ornate, chandeliered rooms were banked with documentary photographs sourced from books, government departments and news outlets, including images of Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt, with hammers and sickles aplenty, advocating for Soviet politics, geographical resources and peoples of the USSR, its leaders, the sixteen states, health care and education and recent war action. Anti-fascist posters and cartoons were included in the agglomeration of information.

A strongly pro-Soviet introductory board presenting the overarching theme of Twenty-Five Years explained the founding of the Soviet state in November 1917 in the unmistakable tone of Soviet propaganda, giving an account of the ‘sacrifice’ and ‘hard work’ of the Soviet people in founding ‘a new civilisation’. It glowed: ‘They planned production for the well-being of the common man. Today the Soviet People win the admiration of the world for their heroic resistance to the Fascist aggressor. In the name of the British People we greet them as the defenders of civilization’.¹³⁵ This text abandoned any tone of reticence or scepticism about the Soviet record of the past decades and instead trumpeted their achievements.

Goldfinger designed charts further championing Soviet systems of healthcare. While working on official propaganda for the Ministry of Information and Office of War Information (as I discuss further in Chapter 7), F. H. K. Henrion designed exhibition publicity for Twenty-Five Years: a poster and flyers with striking red and green abstracted hammer, sickle and tank silhouetted against each other (Figure 6.10). Alongside the pictures, maps and charts, flyers promised films, lectures (on subjects as diverse as Soviet medicine, women and agriculture), stamps, songs, music and costumes. The Russian Ambassador was called upon, once again, to open the exhibition, alongside Royal Academy President, architect Edwin Lutyens. Elements of Twenty-Five Years then travelled on to be shown at Leicester City Museum & Art Gallery, before touring onwards alongside a programme of British-Soviet cultural events.¹³⁶

Goldfinger continued creating exhibitions that celebrated these links, from his own home to shops and galleries around London. In March 1943, Goldfinger followed up Aid to Russia with Red Army Week Exhibition at his home at 2 Willow Road, selling art in support of the Hampstead Anglo-Soviet Committee.¹³⁷ At the same time, Goldfinger mounted 25 Years of the USSR and the Red Army to raise money for a new Stalingrad hospital, held from February to March 1943 in an empty shop on Regent Street (Figure 6.11).¹³⁸ The exhibition, structured through ‘chapters’, combined documentary photographs with posters designed to drum up support for the USSR. F. H. K. Henrion designed an ‘Aid the Wounded’ poster to mark Red Army Day, 23 February 1944, encouraging donations to the Joint Committee for Soviet Aid ‘under the Patronage of H.M. The Soviet Ambassador’.¹³⁹ Russian aid was not the only cause on British minds. In 1943 Hertford House hosted another fundraising exhibition, this time organised by the AIA: the Artists Aid China Exhibition was held from 31 March to 25 May 1943 in support of the Lady Cripps United Aid to China Fund.¹⁴⁰

6.10 Twenty-Five Years of Progress: National Exhibition of Soviet Life in War and Peace, held at Hertford House, poster designed by F. H. K. Henrion. © Estate of F. H. K. Henrion. Image courtesy of the Architectural Press Archive/ RIBA Collections. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.

6.11 25 Years of the USSR and the Red Army, held in an empty shop on Regent Street, from February to March 1943. Ministry of Information official photographer © IWM D 016084. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.

Ursula and Ernö Goldfinger’s Two Mrs Britains exhibition for London Women’s Parliament

Aside from the collaborations for aid to Russia, the Goldfingers lent their skills to organisations for other political causes. In 1943, Ernö and Ursula Goldfinger were appointed by the Communist-aligned London Women’s Parliament (LWP) to design an exhibition about women’s role in fighting fascism, a solidarity exhibition connecting and supporting women. The LWP, chaired by Mary Morse, had been set up to stimulate discussion of women’s problems and to lobby to achieve a better deal for women through parliamentary action. The Goldfingers worked with organiser Freda Grimble, a stalwart of women’s organisations. The Goldfingers mounted their anti-fascist LWP exhibition The Two Mrs Britains at the Piccadilly Circus branch of Boots the Chemists in September 1943, another exhibition to find a useful base in a disused West End shop. It told the story of two women – ‘the Mrs Britains’ – from the First World War to the present day, through a series of images setting the two women’s progress against images of world events (Figure 6.12).¹⁴¹

Photographs of the two central characters were taken by Viennese-born photographer Edith Tudor-Hart. The child of Jewish socialists, Tudor-Hart had trained as a photographer at the Bauhaus in Dessau and fled persecution to Britain in 1933. After arriving in Britain, she had been commissioned to take photographs for several magazines such as The Listener during the 1930s. A life-long Communist Party member, it was later revealed that Tudor-Hart had acted as a courier and spy recruiter for the Soviet Union.¹⁴² Tudor-Hart’s photographic models for the Mrs Britains were Muriel Smith, who Ernö Goldfinger had spotted working at Chalk Farm Bus Depot, and a Mrs Fiorentini from Tottenham, who he had met on a bus.

6.12 Display board for The Two Mrs Britains at the Piccadilly Circus branch of Boots the Chemists in September 1943, with photographs of the Mrs Britains by Edith Tudor-Hart. Uncredited photographer. Image courtesy of Architectural Press Archive / RIBA Collections. All rights reserved and permission to use the figure must be obtained from the copyright holder.

In the exhibition’s narrative, shown through a photographic visual series, one of the Mrs Britains’ hopes for a better future after the First World War had been dashed by unemployment and the rise of fascism. The other, her politically active daughter-in-law, was ensuring through vigorous campaigning and greater involvement in all aspects of life that the fruits of victory would not again be squandered.¹⁴³ The Goldfingers’ striking exhibition boards consisted of a thread of visual narrative about the two central women, progressing from 1914 onwards. Edith Tudor-Hart’s images followed the main protagonists through everyday life – working in a factory, cooking for their children or looking for work with their children in tow. This thread enabled viewers to follow and identify with the individuals through a narrative that was set against contextual images of current affairs, which the Goldfingers sourced from a range of agencies and publishers.¹⁴⁴ The Goldfingers’ visual skill even in collaging stock images is shown in the lacing of the Tudor-Hart image, suspended midway on the panel, echoing a ship’s rigging.

Poet Miles Tomalin wrote the exhibition’s script, with emotive texts urging women to engage with politics: ‘WOMEN! – you can be proud of the great part you are playing in this mighty war against the evils of Fascism … WOMEN! – fight now for victory as you have seen Betty Britain doing’. Such labelling was intended to activate women through photographs, drawings and graphs, making them ‘more conscious in their responsibilities and opportunities’, as organisers explained, and inspiring pride in the part they were playing to fight fascism. The pictorial boards culminated in the question: ‘WOMEN OF BRITAIN ARE YOU WITH HER IN THE FIGHT?’ How they responded I do not know, as the archive does not reveal.

Exhibitions of solidarity were focused towards a limited number of alignments: the principal ones being support for Spain and Russia and acknowledging struggles for resistance against fascist regimes. In focusing collectively on these causes, artists and designers themselves created conditions of alignment and solidarity with each other in Britain, a new or temporary home for a large number of those who were central to developing this form. The Ministry of Information’s wartime exhibitions programme – the focus of the next chapter – saw exhibitions being used to convey a wide range of agendas and ideas, with the mode of communication honed as ‘story-telling’.