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.
Stressing the distinction between techniques used to create ‘democratic’ propaganda by ‘factual information’ and the ‘hysteria-stimulating’ of totalitarian regimes, exhibition designer Misha Black noted that ‘in the field of the purely documentary or descriptive exhibition’, ‘a remarkable technique’ had been developed in Britain during the Second World War.1 This, he said, was the use of the ‘informative and story-telling type of exhibition’, differentiated from ‘the simple display of commodities’, in which Britain is ‘superior to the most efficient foreign competition’. British designers had, Black observed, ‘fully embraced the communicative potential of exhibitions’, pioneering ‘a new approach to contemporary exhibition design’.2 Such communicative exhibitions were, he thought, particularly effective in ‘creating the core of informed opinion on specific subjects’ and their influence could ‘spread as widely as a contagious disease’, showing his interest in the comparative efficiencies of this medium when placed alongside others.3 Black was at the forefront of developing exhibitions as weapons of the British war effort while employed at the Ministry of Information (MOI) and is pivotal to the focus of this chapter about exhibitions’ use as weapons by the British government and allied groups during the Second World War.
This chapter explores the way that exhibitions became weapons of war through the MOI’s programme, intended to teach practical skills and to create patriotic and responsible citizens. These affective exhibitions were formed to inspire particular actions and emotions in audiences at home and in ally countries where they were sent, including pride, optimism, reassurance and, at times, a sense of horror at atrocities. These were all forms of ‘propaganda of integration’, to use sociologist Jacques Ellul’s phrase, creating awareness and acceptance of certain behaviours and conditions of war. Wartime government exhibitions were a development of the art of projection used across earlier public sites and spaces. Their designers were recruited to create ‘good’ citizens on the home front. MOI exhibitions were a form of argumentation aimed at a mass public. All of these exhibitions had photographs at their core, sometimes in the mode of photo-stories, at others as documentary and collage, helping people visualise wartime abstractions and revealing the mechanics of war to the British population.4
Designing Britain’s war exhibitions
Many of those designers who had led the development of exhibitions as communication or information across pre-war contexts reappear in this chapter. Industrial designer Milner Gray was appointed to lead the MOI’s new Exhibitions Branch. Gray had led several design consultancies by the outbreak of the Second World War, as well as being founder member of the Society of Industrial Artists in 1930. London-born Gray studied commercial art at Goldsmiths College London, leaving during the First World War to join the army, later transferring to the Royal Engineers camouflage school. He co-founded the Bassett Gray Group of Artists and Writers in 1921: a group of artists, writers and designers (including his friend painter Graham Sutherland and long-term collaborator Misha Black) who took on design commissions for exhibition stands, packaging, china and textiles. Gray reorganised Bassett Gray to create Industrial Design Partnership, successor to Bassett Gray, from 1934 to 1940.
On arrival at the MOI, Gray requested they appoint Black as, he explained in a memo, ‘a constructive architect on the arrangement and layout of Exhibitions, with special regard to his knowledge of propaganda requirements’.5 Black started at the MOI in January 1941, helping on technical aspects of mounting exhibitions, with Norbert Dutton assisting on organisation and design.6 Other designers were also recalled from their wartime service to join the MOI’s Exhibitions Branch. Many were drawn from the established networks of Black and Gray, including James Holland (who had co-founded the AIA with Misha Black in 1933 and was central to its work through its first decade), prominent architect Frederick Gibberd (a MARS member, who had contributed to the 1938 MARS Group exhibition at New Burlington Galleries) and commercial artist Richard Levin (introduced in Chapter 1).
As across many of the pre-war contexts in which exhibition design was being pioneered, several exhibition branch employees had only recently arrived in Britain. Architect Bronek Katz was born in Warsaw, German-born graphic designer F. H. K. Henrion joined the MOI’s Exhibitions Branch on release from internment as an enemy alien on the Isle of Man and German-born architect Peter Moro joined the MOI’s Exhibitions Branch after being interned for six months at Kempton Racecourse and then on the Isle of Man.7 Hungarian-born architect Ernö Goldfinger (introduced in earlier chapters) also carried out occasional work on MOI exhibitions. Each of these brought extensive previous experience of mounting exhibitions, designed for different contexts and causes, to their work at the heart of government. Although having diverging professional backgrounds – some, like Henrion and Levin, coming from commercial art backgrounds while others, like Moro and Goldfinger, had trained as architects – all were united in finding forms for information design in a shifting ecology of communication. Many of those employed on exhibitions work had trained and practised in numerous locations across continental Europe but became central to shaping the visual representation of Britain’s war effort. Working at the heart of government was a pragmatic decision for Left-aligned designers, who took commissions across many contexts at once. Despite experience at the centre, these designers continued to experience prejudice. Black had been turned down for naturalisation as a British citizen (despite living in Britain almost his entire life).8 At the outbreak of war, Richard Levin had found it difficult to get war work because of his Russian father (despite having been born in Britain).9
Morale-boosting exhibitions in shop windows
At the outbreak of war, exhibitions were principally used by the British government as promotion for trade and industry and vehicles of soft power and national projection. War would change this, convincing politicians and civil servants that exhibitions could add an important new element to Britain’s armoury of propaganda, by showing clearly elements that were otherwise distant or abstract; giving the public a more vivid and absorbing picture of how Britain was fighting, through three-dimensional environments that could envelope people in information.10
The MOI, re-formed to co-ordinate propaganda after the outbreak of war, did not immediately establish a team to create exhibitions and displays, being almost exclusively focused on planning for news.11 Shops and department stores were first to identify the potential of commercial window displays to amplify government messages to the passing public. Early in the war, Display spotlighted shops that were already supporting topical aspects of the war effort: London department store Whiteleys’ display manager had mounted a campaign appealing to the public to save waste paper; London department store Selfridges had joined the waste paper salvage campaign and, elsewhere, gave over their windows to Fougasse ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’ posters, an engaging series visualising the potentially catastrophic consequences of being drawn into seemingly trivial chatter about the war effort.12 Shops around the country followed suit. Display’s July 1940 cover showed the window of Southsea shop Handley’s Ltd, devoted to War Savings Certificates. Such windows, the magazine enthused, had propaganda potential ‘next only to the press and radio’, drawing a direct comparison across media.13
Aware of the impactful and impressive way Nazis used window displays as propaganda, early on in the war the British display industry advocated for shop displays as a way to amplify key messages to the public. Display editor Richard Harman declared ‘One of the biggest mediums of compelling public attention is display’, observing that Goebbels had seized not only newspapers, radio and advertising but ‘the whole of the shop windows of Germany too, for Germany is the most display-conscious nation in the world’ with ‘every display man and window dresser a member of a state display organisation, with a Nazi official at the head’.14 Hitler’s election campaigns had been fought through window displays, the giant word ‘Ja’ (‘yes’) repeated by the thousand in windows in every German town, co-ordinated by Goebbels’ propaganda department. The British MOI, Harman concluded, had a long way to go in recognising the importance of window displays to the home effort.
Seeing the importance of speaking to people on the home front in places where they lived and worked, the MOI finally announced a non-commercial shop window display scheme in July 1940. Themes would be issued fortnightly, the intention ‘to bring pictorially to the public mind some important national fact – sometimes it may be an instruction – that hitherto may have been only an impression gained from radio or newspaper, thus driving home the point concerned and fixing it indelibly on the public mind’. The first theme, ‘Hold Fast and We Win’, was an appeal for the public to show determination while the country was passing through such a testing time.15 The MOI helped shops by providing photo and map enlargements and reproductions of newspaper cuttings. Display commented, ‘Publicity divorced from reason and truth can play no part in the British scheme’, but ‘windows which echo the whole country’s sentiments at the present time will now – not under the compulsion of a pistol or truncheon, but by common consent – appear in windows from end to end of a nation which is destined to become a fortress for freedom’. Here was a statement about the power of consensual and integrational propaganda, helping to build the wartime citizenry, with Display at the helm of the invisible government, ready to reinforce messages.
Launching the government’s exhibitions programme
By late 1940, the MOI, under Director-General Frank Pick, had added exhibitions to their expanding communications environment. Pick had pioneered the use of exhibitions as publicity in his previous roles at the London Passenger Transport Board, Design and Industries Association and Council for Art and Industry, as discussed earlier in this book.16 At the MOI, exhibitions became an element in the series of media deployed in tandem for each campaign, including radio, press, film, posters and booklets. A substantial report by civil servant A. G. Highet, who had a background in publicity for the General Post Office, justified the addition of exhibitions in wartime.17 ‘There are exhibitions and exhibitions, just as there are newspapers and newspapers’, Highet wrote. ‘Generally speaking, the standard of exhibition technique in this country is not comparable with that of the continental nations. This fact increases the importance of Government Departments being ahead of exhibition design here’. Highet’s ambition was for the government to pioneer British use of exhibitions as propaganda.
The major shortcoming of propaganda exhibition design in Britain, Highet believed, was that they were not realising their three-dimensional character. The flat should be combined with the three-dimensional, using developments of ‘the perspective photograph’ and ‘photo-montage’. Properly used in this way, exhibitions would, Highet thought, permit the designer to tell a story ‘chapter by chapter as the visitor walks into or out of the display’, using the metaphor of story-telling to describe their potential impact. He assessed how far exhibitions were a sensible use of public money for this new context, calculating the potential cost of exhibitions on a cost per head basis as roughly one penny per visitor to film displays and that, ‘while the visitor to the cinema may see six films, the exhibition may be designed to explain one problem only’, indicating the way the comparative merits of exhibition to the wartime context were being thought about in relation to other media.18 Highet reflected that exhibitions had much in common with posters and leaflets, reflecting ‘the mind of those responsible for it’, concluding that displays in the windows of vacant shops were the best value for money.
Art historian and National Gallery Director Kenneth Clark advised on the development of an MOI exhibitions programme.19 Clark, who had joined the MOI at its inception, had set up the War Artists’ Advisory Committee (WAAC) in November 1939 with the very different aim of appointing artists to record and document – ‘to draw up a list of artists qualified to record the (Second World) war at home and abroad … to advise on the selection of artists from the list for War purposes and [to] advise on such questions as copyright, disposal and exhibition of works and the publication of reproductions’.20 Under Clark, the National Gallery was hosting a series of wartime exhibitions of war artists, including one in 1941 organised by art historian and art dealer Lillian Browse.21 The project of the MOI’s Exhibitions Branch was different from the archival instinct of the WAAC, being focused towards providing useful information that could impact immediately on people’s emotions and behaviours.
Sending exhibitions to ordinary working places
MOI officials calculated that exhibitions developed as part of a defined strategy could supplement wider campaigns. Architect G. S. Kallmann echoed this, using a musical metaphor to describe MOI exhibitions providing the ‘opening bars’ or ‘the climax’, rather than carrying the full extent of a government information campaign.22 Site was key to reaching audiences; the most suitable identified by officials as ‘where the public normally meets’: ‘stations, cinemas, the large suburban and provincial shops’.23 Six exhibition subjects were to be planned each year for circulation as ‘photographic documentaries, linked together by captions, arranged and numbered so as to tell a consecutive story … the captions to be devised by first-class caption writers’.24 According to MOI guidance, suitable exhibition sites were ordinary working places that were commonly found across the country such as the works canteens of factories, underground shelters (particularly when exhibitions were dealing with the subject of infection), marquees in parks, fairgrounds and markets during the summer and, during the winter, empty shops and stations – in effect, taking the material to people where they gathered either for work or for leisure, an aspiration in the spirit of pre-war exhibition groups such as the Artists International Association (AIA). Museums, galleries and other familiar or established sites for visual culture were notably absent from this wartime list. Larger exhibitions, inviting mass gatherings, were discouraged in the guidance as too dangerous, at least initially.
Exhibitions of different sizes, to fit town halls and shop windows, made a visible and urgent response to war and allowed campaigns to be visually and materially represented, to ‘show’ the war as well as to ‘tell’ it, to justify to the public the rightness of policy directions and to bring war closer, becoming more than a distant abstraction. Such exhibitions stood to persuade the viewer of the veracity of a version of the world as it stood at that point; presenting not a constructed past but the world at that moment in a universal present, lacking in specificity or historicity in order to have a broad appeal and to remove human subjects from class conditions and structures of difference and to foreground a ‘quality of usualness’.25 They stood to connect with the viewer, making an urgent appeal, seeking empathy and engagement. A separate scheme, sponsored by MOI’s Photographs Division, issued groups of photographs in sets of eight or ten to three hundred sites: libraries, art galleries, museums, information centres, all mounted on screens provided by the Ministry. Meanwhile, the Window Display Scheme sent out a set of posters to over a thousand sites for display every three weeks.
The way exhibitions should engage the public was described in internal memos and reports. They must grab visitors’ attention, compelling examination of a theme ‘even by the most disinterested spectator’ through ‘simple statements almost in the form of slogans’, enabling visitors to leave ‘with a few fundamental ideas stamped on their memory’. For a ‘really serious student’, those with a deeper interest, detailed information would be available in the form of ‘elaborated statistics’ and ‘graphs’. ‘Informatory matter’ must be linked with ‘a human appeal’, making it directly relevant to the viewer; ‘the use of mechanical movement’ meaning displays considered visitors’ manoeuvrings through them; the use of ‘personal demonstration’, with people employed to show visitors how to carry out relevant tasks; and ‘the placing of common objects in unusual theatrical settings’ to heighten engagement.26 MOI exhibition designer Black shared this interest in understanding how to reach viewers, comparing exhibitions with other media ‘automatically excluding all distracting elements’ – in not having to compete with other media, ‘the exhibition takes equal place with the film in completely encompassing the spectator and allowing only those distractions which are deliberately planned to accentuate the effect’, he wrote, suggesting the carefully choreographed and controlled routes through which they envisaged visitors moving.27 Whether visitors conformed to this behaviour is less certain.
In government statements, exhibitions had been identified as offering a means of engaging and informing British people, as an integral element of the multimedia environment of the information war, with media and politics becoming entangled in Britain’s armoury of propaganda. Thinking about media theorist Fred Turner’s major claim for exhibitions in the parallel period in the US, we might ask how orchestrated the messages were in shaping and directing not only wartime knowledge but the British ‘democratic personality’. In his book The Democratic Surround, Turner argues that US authorities, seeking to counter the impact of fascism’s mastery over the public through mass media, had built a ‘democratic personality’ during the 1940s and 1950s, through creating alternative communications environments, which Turner calls ‘surrounds’, where US citizens could be developed as rational and empathetic individuals.28 Turner charts how anthropologists and psychologists developed this concept, drawing on the input of refugee artists of the Bauhaus who had newly arrived in the US, with highly developed theories of multi-screen display and immersive theatre. These artists helped visualise and build these ‘surrounds’, enacted across various environments, with major museum exhibitions key. The legacy of these ‘surrounds’ Turner sees continuing today.
The context that Turner analyses has clear parallels with the British setting of this book. Some of the ex-Bauhaus faculty Turner describes as architects of the US ‘democratic surround’ had previously spent time living and working in exile in London in the 1930s, most prominently architect Walter Gropius (living in London from 1934 to 1937) and artist László Moholy-Nagy (living in London from 1935 to 1937). Both took roles in shaping exhibitions culture in Britain (as discussed earlier in this book); neither was central to one institution but survived from precarious and piecemeal employment during their temporary stays.
There are key differences between the US and British wartime environments, however, which make Turner’s ‘democratic surround’ less applicable to the British context. The US government exhibitions programme was more centralised, with much significance attached to major landmark exhibitions mounted at MOMA New York (and a few other cultural contexts such as music venues). A more extensive and de-centralised programme of wartime propaganda exhibitions was developed in the British context, proliferating across the country, in venues of varying sizes and scale, for various campaigns and causes, designed and led by dozens of people (as this chapter will show). Although the MOI were evidently looking to understand the psychology of their audiences, this was much less advanced science than in the US context. It is clear from accounts of the British information war that there was limited knowledge of using mass psychology, behaviourism or psychoanalysis to shape a mass individualism grounded in the democratic rhetoric of choice that Turner describes in the US.29 There was also far less clarity in the British context about the formal or rhetorical distinctions between ‘democratic’ and ‘fascist’ exhibitions than that described by Turner in the US context and more willingness to borrow exhibition devices from across ideological lines. The impact of the British official wartime exhibitions programme is far less easy to evaluate than its transatlantic contemporary and its legacies harder to trace.
Creating exhibitions for the machine age
The type of exhibitions favoured by the MOI had evolved from the reproducible form pioneered at 1930s exhibitions at Charing Cross and exemplified in the 1938 MARS Group show, structured around photographs and photocopies. These were exhibitions for the machine age: portable and infinitely reproducible. Given small budgets, restricted materials (including wood, metal and material) and short lead-in times, makers of these exhibitions needed to innovate, by using a combination of practices and reproductive processes including photo printing, typesetting, block-making, stencils, silk-screen printing, colour spraying, wet and dry mounting, lacquering and punching.30 F. H. K. Henrion described MOI exhibition designers using Photostats to enlarge photographs and type, with type often hand-drawn if fonts were unavailable.31
Copies of exhibitions were circulated, using folding and collapsible screens, on which exhibition material could be directly painted or fixed, made a minimal size for transporting and easy to unpack and mount.32 The use of photographic techniques and of images from MOI’s Photograph Division was key to their success, allowing the exhibitions to be topical and to make a direct appeal. Photographs were used, documenting everyday life in Britain, drawn from an extensive home front collection taken by MOI photographers depicting work, domestic life and landscapes under wartime conditions. Alongside this, the displays were built from pictorial charts, models, statistical figures and symbols, diagrams, incidental murals and decorations commissioned from artists. Guidance for exhibition-makers instructed that alongside central visual elements, ‘especial importance’ should be attached to ‘the scenario and captions’, with ‘intelligent use of contemporary display technique’.33
MOI exhibitions sat alongside themes conveyed through posters, booklets, radio campaigns, sometimes being shown alongside films.34 They were made closely in tandem with other forms publicising the same campaign, not as a ‘slavish copy’ but as a ‘counterpart’, ‘carefully synchronised so that each plays its part in building up a recognisable and memorable character’.35 They needed to be varied enough to communicate a mix of messages and to fit in venues of varying scales across the country. To manage this, exhibitions should fall into two main categories. The first – ‘Inspirational or Prestige’ exhibitions – focused on ‘stabilising home morale’, covering ‘civilian morale’, ‘comparison of our air achievement with that of the enemy, our convoy system, resources of the Empire, the causes of the war, our war aims and the reasons and need for bringing the war to a just and permanent conclusion’. Inspirational or prestige exhibitions were calculated to demand or provoke a strong emotional reaction that would be productive in building a community in support of war actions.36 The second category – ‘Instructional or Utility’ exhibitions – dealt with advice and instruction to the public, for example on first aid, evacuation, rationing and ‘the necessity for conserving essential services’ such as water, light and heat, action to be taken in the case of gas attack (reducing fear by explaining remedial measures) and salvage. These exhibitions would be created in collaboration with the Ministries leading on the relevant areas.37
Citizenship exhibitions: the Ministry of Information’s London Pride
Exhibitions developed by the MOI to inspire or bring prestige were intended to connect with the public through making an urgent, emotional appeal. What mechanisms did they use to appeal to the emotions of their viewers? A detailed discussion of the first exhibition mounted by the MOI’s Exhibitions Branch – London Pride – allows insights into how this affective form was conceived and created.
London Pride, a ‘civilian morale exhibition’ opened in December 1940 at Charing Cross Station’s ticket hall, set out to ‘establish the fact that “London can take it”’ and celebrated the endurance of Londoners in the face of the adversity of the Blitz.38 ‘London Pride’, as the exhibition was called, had a double-meaning: the first literal pride in London and the second a flower of that name, which appeared to take seed almost anywhere, inspiring hope of renewal when it was found growing on bombsites.39 A stylised image of the flower appeared on the right wall flanking the exhibition’s entrance with the words:
LONDON PRIDE. SMALL EMBLEM OF A GREAT DETERMINATION40 London Pride’s materials and materiality, its particular combination of information, political messaging and visual structuring working together, were key to its use and impact.
Showing the perceived significance to communicating the government’s programme of such an apparently small event, held in an Underground station, the Home Secretary Herbert Morrison opened London Pride. Clad in a heavy overcoat to deliver his opening speech, Morrison reassured the assembled audience that the government’s shelter-building programme was well underway. This followed the start of the Blitz a few months earlier.41 Morrison attended the opening with Ellen Wilkinson MP, the first woman to serve in a Labour government. The government’s shelter and post-raid welfare programme had come in for extensive criticism and the exhibition opening offered an occasion at which Morrison could demonstrate to press and public that he intended to make good on the deficiency. His opening of London Pride, an exhibition about a city with which he was closely associated as former leader of London County Council (LCC), was reassuring and calculated to increase public confidence in the government’s ongoing civil defence response to war. Morrison would later become a prominent cheerleader for the multiple government-funded exhibitions of the 1951 Festival of Britain, but his regular support for earlier exhibitions – as will be apparent from his regular appearances across this book – showed his long-running belief in the importance of exhibitions as suitable platforms for government messaging.
Milner Gray was London Pride’s lead designer. Its core material was an extensive series of photographs, carefully selected from the stock of photo-agencies such as Topical Press, one of a growing industry of press agencies developing to support the burgeoning illustrated magazine market.42 Charing Cross Station, by then an established exhibitions venue (as I discuss earlier in this book), was taken over by the MOI for exclusive use for a year.43 Being on a bustling thoroughfare, passed by thousands of travellers each day, in the liminal space between work and home, the exhibition site inhabited an ambiguous place for its viewers between labour and whatever leisure the war context allowed, between daily work and time outside, an ambiguity mirrored in its subject matter, positioned, as it was, somewhere between affecting private domestic actions and public life.
London Pride’s displays were focused around a central island site, panels hung in a cross shape and photographs placed on one side of the angle, with descriptive captions facing them (Figure 7.1). Round the sidewalls were montages giving ‘a panoramic composite view of life in the blitz’, according to Display. A giant, enlarged photograph of Prime Minister Winston Churchill with the caption ‘CARRY ON LONDON’ in capitals amplified its impact and loomed over the right side of London Pride’s entrance, while a crowd scene with the capitalised caption ‘LONDON CARRIES ON’ filled the left side. While the first caption – ‘CARRY ON LONDON’ – took the form of a direct instruction to London, the second – ‘LONDON CARRIES ON’ – played with the same words to provide a commentary on London’s hardiness. The crowd, pictured in a bombed area, were ‘a study of London’s Pride – her triumphant citizenship’.44 Above the entrance, the title fascia ‘London Pride’ was mounted in a raised Playbill slab serif, while the typeface chosen for the central storyboards was a friendly sans serif, giving the text an informal, conversational appeal. Lettering reinforced the atmosphere of the exhibition, a slogan by the exhibition’s entrance declaring with playful alliteration, ‘Citizens of no mean City: they stand to their posts that liberty may live’.45
The sense of simultaneity, of many activities happening at once, was crucial to the impact of the displays. Seen from the entrance, the collage of black and white images crowded into the exhibition, the Prime Minister at one end waving across to the crowd on the other. The communal act of viewing the exhibition reinforced this sense of simultaneity, bringing passersby into a collaborative act of reinforcing and inspiring their sense of citizenry, in concert. This was a ‘story’ about London and Londoners’ resilience but not played out over time; instead this was an urgent story played out in the present. London was shown ‘now’, not only as embodied through its people and buildings but as an abstraction through the presence of a map mounted on the wall to the left of Churchill, as if Churchill was gesturing towards it, parallel perspectival lines leading the eye from his enlarged photograph into the map’s detail, giving visitors a complex sense of scale: both of being on the ground – in and with London – and of having an overview of it, being forced to have a multi-perspectival vision.
The urgency and immediacy of this appeal was the most striking quality of London Pride.46 This came through the expanded photographic elements and was conveyed by the unfaltering focus on what was happening in that moment, combining topical news photographs with textual use of the present tense. Announced on the advertising poster, the exhibition’s subtitle was ‘a photographic record of how London carries on through the blitz’, the present tense – ‘carries’ – crucial to its direct appeal.47 The exhibition sought to democratise its subjects by showing a broad and authentic social mix, diverse and yet in unity.48 Display referred to this as ‘a complete cross-section of London life’, from ‘fire watcher down to the shelterer’, ‘from the King and Queen to the humblest resident of Stepney’.49 Londoners pictured created recognisable types that viewers could identify with – photographs of ‘typical Londoners who have been bombed’, as The Times described them, ARP workers, firemen, nurses, police, postal workers pictured in around fifty or sixty photographs, to create a direct sense of relevance.50 The displays addressed members of the public as individuals within the mass and the displays also presented individuals as having a kind of synecdochic character, whereby one person stood for the whole of society.51 This idea of showing the ‘typical’, which Display echoed in its admiration for the ‘typical character studies of Londoners’, was repeated many times in the exhibition’s text: ‘here are typical Londoners …’52 This was a way of suggesting their proximity to the viewer.
Life-sized photographs showed London ‘characters’ going about ordinary tasks to create a sense of usualness: a woman doing her washing at home pictured scrubbing her clothes using a washboard with accompanying text in the present tense.53
Its [sic] washing day as usual.
The house next door has been bombed.
Still … its [sic] washing day as usual.
Beyond promoting the urgency of the present, text created impact through a looping quality: reassuringly humdrum normality despite the abnormality of the Blitz, emphasised by repetition. Such integration of text and image created a filmic quality to the exhibition, with its clamour of characters united within narrative, text working to advance the action given the images were not in themselves expressive enough of the intended message of Londoners’ resilience, determination and normality in the face of the upheaval and catastrophe of war. What was in view was deeply affecting, calculated to shift attitudes to those around them: to feel connection and to deepen feeling. While the exhibition was consistently upbeat and focused on the congenial, what was happening out of sight, beyond the exhibition, was crucial to viewers’ engagement: the very real horror of a potentially catastrophic war, in the process of wreaking havoc on the lives of ordinary people, mainly hidden from view except for glimpses of bombsites and armaments.54
Photographs conveyed immediacy, the state of things now, showing people settling down for the night in bomb shelters, buildings still smoking after recent bombings, assaulting the viewer with a sense that despite disruption people’s lives were continuing and the sense of war as being common to all, even the monarchy. Displays showed the royal family leaving their protected spaces to engage with the wider populace. A photograph of the King visiting a bombsite was shown with the words ‘“We have been bombed too”, says the King, who goes amongst the people’, an image and caption singled out by The Times who observed that a ‘companion picture showed “Arry [sic] and Bill”’, a pair of rescue workers, ‘telling her Majesty all about it’.55 The mocked accent of Harry and Bill pointed once again to the deep class divide conspicuous through the images, reflecting this difference with seeming affection.
Developed through London Pride was the myth of a universal human condition, drawing all people together, ignoring differences of race and institution, a people happy and engaged despite immediate privations and evident discrepancies of class and situation. In London Pride, women were naturalised as carrying out caring and domestic duties as nurses and housewives, while men carried out more physically challenging duties as police and fireman. Viewers were entreated to relate these scenes to their own daily experiences, to identify with them. This was reinforced by photographs displayed flat at the bottom and angled down at the top – reminiscent of Bayer’s earlier immersive installation work – to meet the gaze of the observer; by the enlargement of images which, being near to human scale, gave them a greater intensity; by strong reflector, angled lighting illuminating every element made possible within Charing Cross Station’s ticket hall despite blackout specifications; and by now familiar display techniques such as port-hole windows allowing a playful way of glimpsing information (Figure 7.2).56
London Pride as ‘photographic essay’
Picking up on its literary form, with its combination of engaging enlarged photographs ‘of heroic size’ and lively captions, Shelf Appeal described London Pride as the MOI Exhibition Branch’s ‘first essay’, enthusing that ‘no picture was used which was not in itself interesting’.57 Display praised it for ‘simple dignity, but ‘with sufficient unusual angles to arouse … interest’. The exhibition appealed first and foremost to visitors’ feelings: ‘Never has a display or exhibition made so big an appeal to the emotions or held so much topical and local interest. London Pride is outstanding’.58 Above a series of vignettes of people carrying on in the midst of wartime damage ran the slogan: ‘London’s devastation is also London’s splendour’ and, further on, ‘Her ruins are the ramparts of freedom’, declarations suggesting London’s destruction might just be the making of her, echoing the belief of contemporary architects in the picturesque possibilities of ruins and the potential that bombing offered for building back better.59
London Pride’s success was built on the propaganda power of photography, the sequential viewing of the exhibition’s storyboards in its photo-story format realised as people moved around the site.60 The exhibition created a blurring of its subject and its viewer: who felt pride in London and who or what was the pride of London, with its long and important history; its buildings, bricks and mortar, largely immutable despite being under siege and subject to further destruction at any moment; its significance for the whole ‘family’ of the United Kingdom – ‘a brave and cheerful family party’, as the exhibition’s text put it. London’s resilience, even in the face of destruction, was part of this serious and sincere narrative. The exhibition spoke direct to a local audience, unlike the GPO film London Can Take It, made a couple of months earlier for a US audience, which described London for outsiders, with a US narrator.61
London Pride resembled weekly magazines’ innovative fusion of typography with photography and its viewers were schooled in seeing such content through their familiarity with the weeklies.62 London Pride, like other Ministry exhibitions, was structured around images drawn from the in-house Photograph Library, which collected and organised photographs from agencies and MOI photographers, for use in official propaganda and in the press.63 The exhibition’s look and feel, of images overlaid with narrative, echoed popular photo-weeklies such as Life, published in the US since 1936, and Picture Post, published in the UK since 1938, with wartime special issues subsidised by the MOI.64 Picture Post fused the English tradition of social comment and reportage with developments in layout, typography and photography that flowered on the Continent in commercial, political and avant-garde circles in the interwar years.65 London Pride shared Picture Post’s intimacy, with a focus in the exhibition on ordinary acts like the private, domestic task of doing washing, from sparsely populated photographs and from the descriptive accounts and personal testimonies that accompanied them. This allowed viewers to connect and identify with the exhibition’s subjects, to create a ‘structure of feeling’, to use literary critic Raymond Williams’s phrase, to think with and to feel through, to allow the material to appeal to them as personal, rather than merely held at a distance.66
Scripting wartime exhibitions
While mirroring illustrated magazines in conveying information through the hybridity of image and text, London Pride’s impact was achieved through its strong accompanying script. It is unclear who wrote London Pride, but the many professional writers from a range of literary backgrounds employed to work across MOI campaigns included poet Cecil Day-Lewis, poet Dylan Thomas (who wrote a commentary for the documentary New Towns for Old, 1942), poet Louis MacNeice (who wrote the script for an Albert Hall pageant in 1943), Eric Knight (who had collaborated on a script for the documentary World of Plenty), novelist Arthur Koestler (who wrote the script for documentary Lift Up Your Head, Comrade) and Lewis Mumford (who wrote the film The Cities).67 Writer Robert Sinclair contributed text to exhibitions How to Fight the Fire-Bomb (on behalf of the Ministry of Home Security) and The March of the Nation (the story of the growth of American aid to Britain). George Orwell wrote text for the exhibition Free Europe’s Forces, ‘the story of the men of our allies who are fighting with us for freedom’ and writer Gavin Starey scripted the Women at War exhibition. Shelf Appeal magazine enthused, ‘All these writers and artists prepare their stories in close touch with the Government Departments and MOI officers concerned, and MOI Exhibitions Branch keeps a firm hand on the preparation of script and design at every stage’.68 Architectural Review described the resulting exhibitions as ‘photogenic’ story-telling, ‘mainly literary in character’, signalling the importance of their text–image combination, which activated all ‘forms of expression’ in ‘synchronisation’.69
Exhibitions’ relative merits as propaganda were carefully considered. So, too, were the materials they were formed from. Photographs, as an immediate, easily reproducible and highly expressive medium, were central to the MOI’s display strategy. Above any other form, photographs were considered the best way of evoking feeling in London Pride, for showing a collective response to a common enemy and for indicating the appropriateness of mass mobilisation in the face of a common threat. The MOI’s Francis Bird elaborated on the sense of photography’s impact: ‘Photographs were one of the most potent instruments of war-time information … The really superb picture … could have the same effect upon public opinion abroad as a great victory’.70 While reading about a remote victory in a news bulletin might resonate, photographs could bring the war ‘closer’. Exhibitions like London Pride used photographs to present seemingly factual accounts of wartime, their constituent elements being library photographs assembled to tell new stories.71 But while photographs could speak generically to this wartime context, they also reverberated, with powerful affect.
Photographs showing London Pride visitors, such as an MOI photograph of a man in flat-cap and overcoat with a child in cap and tie, themselves London ‘types’, involved a complex double-mediation: inviting viewers to identify with these exhibition-goers who were, themselves, in the process of reading and interpreting to identify with the exhibition’s subjects, pictured in the same mode of brave and cheery endurance (Figure 7.1).72 Photographing people interacting with the exhibition became an element in the Ministry’s wider propaganda effort, to be shown elsewhere as evidence of the effectiveness of such media.
Mass Observation reported a steady stream of visitors to London Pride, which ‘seemed to be received as well, or indeed better than most exhibitions at … Charing Cross’.73 Display was fulsome in its praise, describing the exhibition as ‘one of the most attractive propaganda displays we have seen’, ‘the best presentation of British spirit that we have seen’ and ‘the best piece of propaganda display yet seen since the war started’.74 The magazine criticised the MOI’s decision not to tour it to ‘all parts of this country and the neutral countries of the world’. If exhibited ‘in New York, Buenos Ayres [sic], Montreal or Melbourne’, ‘it would be the rage of the town’, Display opined.75 The exhibition did tour but only to a dozen London department stores including Selfridges, Whiteleys and Kennards, while a modest version was created as four sets and toured through the US. Architectural Review said that despite its small scale, London Pride had ‘the full orchestra of Corbusier-MARS effects’, noting its being a ‘semi-portable exhibition’, transferrable to other sites.76 Modern Publicity in War, a survey of 1941 publicity, reproduced images of London Pride to show the best of wartime display techniques.77
London Pride was only the first of the MOI’s extensive series of story-telling exhibitions. Alongside the design of visual elements – photographs, illustrations, pictorial charts, statistics and diagrams – each exhibition’s ‘story’ was told in a sequence of pictures and text, making the textual contribution as central to the experience as the visual one, akin to being physically immersed in an illustrated magazine. Travelling exhibition Life Line, telling the ‘story’ of the Merchant Navy, was a collaboration between designers F. H. K. Henrion and Charles Hasler, working with scriptwriter, folklorist and folk singer A. L. Lloyd. Resulting displays were created from standardised wooden panels, three-dimensional illuminated displays, models and pictograms offering succinct explanations of technical aspects, with a few small exhibits and printed pamphlets giving further information. Life Line had many hallmarks of other exhibitions designed by this team: it centred on expanded headshots of named individuals. The text explained these people as ‘Willem Trotzenbergh – Fireman’ and ‘Saidi Ali – Fireman’, their photographs accompanied in the exhibition by testimonial texts, which described Trotzenbergh as ‘the son of a Rotterdam docker, Willem worked as a lorry driver for a paper factory, but he likes the sea better’, drawing the viewer further into sympathising with and identifying with the workers while portraying the Navy as diverse and egalitarian (Figure 7.3).78
‘Instructional or utility’ exhibitions at Charing Cross
Numerous small government exhibitions at Charing Cross amplified the focus of wartime campaigns, offered practical skills and addressed matters of general war interest. These included Private Scrap Builds a Bomber (encouraging salvage), Gangway Please (explaining war transport), The Story of Lin (a picture of China at war), The Unconquerable Soul (the story of resistance in occupied countries), Ocean Front (the air-sea war against Japan) and Jungle Front (war in the South Pacific). The Navy at Work at Charing Cross allowed visitors to imagine spending the day with men of an HM Destroyer: Bill, ‘thirty-eight, married, an Active Service man’, and Fred ‘twenty, single, a Hostilities Only man’, with documentary photographs showing Bill going about his day-to-day tasks on board.79
Many exhibitions communicated information focused on keeping civilians safe by teaching practical skills and explaining how to prepare for Nazi aggressions, such as gas attacks. Poison Gas, produced by the MOI on behalf of the Ministry of Security, was ‘a gas mask exhibition’, mounted at Charing Cross Station from August 1941.80 A flyer designed by F. H. K. Henrion, showed the uncanny spectre of a gas-masked figure alongside a striking Playbill font (Figure 7.4). Among the questions the displays addressed were ‘How many types of war gases are there? Is a civilian gas mask different from civilian duty respirators? Can you see a gas cloud? What would happen after a gas attack? Can animals be protected against gas?’81 The show’s main message was that, unlike bombs, gas would not kill if civilians used proper protection. Its central theme was trust: who and what equipment they could rely on. Peter A. Ray worked as collaborating designer on the exhibition’s graphic presentation, with text written by features editor of the Star newspaper, Robert Sinclair.82 Eyewitnesses reported that visitors were reading labels, but how much information remained lodged in their minds is impossible to ascertain.83
Poison Gas’s installation at Charing Cross, although in a restricted area, was spatially innovative. It made use of a double-levelled circulation route through the small space, with display units viewed from a raised platform, a structure designed for reinstallation in other spaces and highlighted by Display as an unusual feature.84 Each element was spotlit. The exhibition used photographs and drawings, plus typeset and silk-screened captions alongside physical exhibits to tell its story. A strangely uncanny model of a civil defence worker stood guard at the exhibition’s entrance, clad in protective clothing and gas mask. The figure was echoed in a huge cutout photograph behind it, with three other ‘horrific’ figures, as Shelf Appeal described them, similarly dressed. The slogan ‘Unlike high explosive bombs, war gas on the whole is not a killing weapon providing a gas mask is used’ was followed by the challenge ‘Are you ready?’, using a narrative device to shift focus from fear to preparedness.85 A box-frame inserted into the wall beyond the entrance altered the scale from life-size to miniature, showing tiny gas-carrying enemy aircraft models on strings representing the Blitzkrieg flying over a town, floating text warning of enemy threat.
Visitors’ emotions were carefully controlled and directed. While anonymous, fully gas-suited figures gave an air of foreboding, across the way were friendly images that softened and personalised the struggle. Under the slogan ‘THE PEOPLE TO TRUST’ were three ‘heroic-size’ head and shoulder photographs of civil defence workers in tin hats, gazing into the distance, ‘men and women with faces one trusts’, Shelf Appeal described them. By showing these particular faces, displays were intended to instil confidence in the trustworthiness of all people set to defend them (Figure 7.5).86 Photographic collages explained how to protect children of different ages, through images that viewers could identify with, while Display praised ‘the big bold photographic treatment’.87 The reproduction of photographs on such a notably large scale had been made possible through recent technological innovations.88 Shelf Appeal also commended the use of photographs and commented on the merits of the exhibition as a ‘form of public education’, enabling ‘a complex argument to be stated in a more detailed manner than would be permitted by the conventional methods of publicity’ (original emphasis). Poison Gas succeeded in functioning, Shelf Appeal said, as ‘a three-dimensional manual of defence against gas’, emphasising its textual and instructional form.89
Learning civil defence: Fire Guard at Charing Cross Station
The extent to which these text-heavy exhibitions were breaking through to their audiences was in question. Various internal MOI reports noted that exhibitions were overly reliant on text and that, while visitors did read it, it was difficult to assess its impact.90 One of the exhibitions mentioned was Fire Guard, which explained how to cope with incendiary bombs and promoted the role of firefighters on the home front, trying to drum up conscripts. Shelf Appeal explained that the exhibition set out to impress ‘the average citizen’ with the importance of firefighters’ role in ‘Europe’s most modern army’, referring to the Fire Guard organisation set up in summer 1941 to promote involvement in this unpopular activity.91
Peter A. Ray designed Fire Guard, adapting and reusing the two-level structure he had previously created for Poison Gas. Ray worked with F. H. K. Henrion, using collaged photographs and diagrams, posters, drawings and two massive abstracted wooden firefighter figures carrying buckets, designed by Bruce Angrave (Figure 7.6). Shelf Appeal described Charing Cross Station, site of Fire Guard, as the ‘only satisfactory site at which to hold an exhibition with the purpose of quickly informing, instructing and reminding typical citizens’. A great merit of the station space was that it could carry on during blackout hours as its designers had devised a switch to turn out main lighting and leave only showcases, a ‘Fire-bomb Fritz’ model and stairway lights, as Shelf Appeal explained. The magazine also noted a recent Mass Observation report on home propaganda had revealed that exhibitions had been more successful in arousing people’s interest and secured better results than many other better-known methods.
Being economical and aiming for self-sufficiency: Battle for Fuel exhibition at Dorland Hall
The need for fuel efficiency was crucial to the war effort but how should the government appeal to the public on such a seemingly unpopular theme? The major exhibition Battle for Fuel held at London’s Dorland Hall in autumn 1942 attempted to address this, employing a range of devices to speak to different audiences. Architectural Review described the approach of Battle for Fuel as combining ‘highbrow’ and ‘lowbrow’.92 So-called ‘lowbrow’ elements were seen on the ground floor, ‘with jolly imitations of pit galleries and a real horse and miner’. Meanwhile, a ‘highbrow’ element, the Review said, included ‘contraptions of metal and string’ in the style of Moholy-Nagy or Gabo, designed by architect Peter Moro and hung in the stairwell, quizzing visitors ‘Are you a fuel saver?’ as they climbed the stairs. A huge collage of images of fuel use – domestic and industrial – set the scene.93 Another room owed a clear debt to Herbert Bayer’s concept of ‘extended vision’, to expand visitors’ gaze, using photographic panels hung at eye level and overhead in a dark room, with dramatically lit panels controlled from an interactive panel.
A popular element across many government exhibitions was the introduction of cartoon characters, as friend or foe, to add narrative tension and humour to practical suggestions and to make displays more engaging and endearing.94 In Battle for Fuel this device allowed designers to add jovial elements to serious and humdrum subjects. In a display entreating ‘Always Fill the Oven’, a cartoonish Hitler commented mendaciously on the sight of a single apple going into an oven – a conspicuous waste of energy – in verse:
while visitors nearby were entreated ‘Don’t Wash under Running Taps’, with cut-out hands by a sink and a cartoon Hitler clinging nervously to the taps, trying to coax the user to squander water: ‘… show me you’re a girl whose clean hands help the Fuhrer’.96 These suggested that wasted resources in the form of energy and water played into the hands of the enemy by depleting the stocks that could be used to fight.
Wartime exhibitions such as this used multiple strategies to engage, affect and instruct. At Battle for Fuel a room on the theme ‘Warmth or Victory’ showed photographs, expanded floor-to-ceiling, with slogans encouraging efficient fuel use, while another on ‘Comfort or Guns’ showed cartoons of domestic scenes dotted with practical suggestions for saving fuel such as ‘Wash up in big batches’, inviting viewers to consider the direct correlation between individual self-sacrifice and national triumph (Figure 7.7). Flow-charts elucidated the relationship between home fuel use and the grid; a hand-drawn cross-section of a house, with headshots of its inhabitants, indicated how each had wasted gas and electricity that day, cautioning visitors against replicating these behaviours.97 For those needing statistics, Isotypes showed technical information, such as what the units of fuel – coke, paraffin and electricity – equated to in terms of hours of use, while quizzes and diagrams explained how to be a ‘fuel saver’.98 The most cinematic section of Battle for Fuel was a room carrying a photo-story-like display with expanded photographs accompanied by textual commentary showing people going about ordinary domestic tasks, while explaining their feelings about adjusting to new behaviours, such as shorter-than-normal baths or colder rooms, with a nod towards the kind of innovations connecting still and moving images championed by contemporaries.
Like many government campaigns on the home front, the emphasis here was on the impact of personal behaviours on the wider war effort, such as using unnecessary gas and electricity, and assorted means were used to appeal to the many viewers. The Queen visited Battle for Fuel and the MOI recorded hundreds of daily visitors, reporting that as well as being important to the war effort it managed to be entertaining.99 An MOI Home Intelligence Division Weekly Report confided that although some believed this exhibition ‘the best of its kind’, others were questioning the wisdom of spending so much money and using so much lighting on publicity of this kind.100 Given tight budgets this lack of confidence was significant: exhibitions did not appear to be meeting the value for money criteria.
Appraising the impact of government exhibitions
The organisers of government exhibitions were attempting to appeal to a mass public in the mode of high-circulation magazines like Picture Post or John Bull, and other contemporary initiatives such as BBC information programme The Brains Trust, broadcast from 1941, where a panel of experts answered an audience’s questions. At various points during the war, government officials and other bodies sought to evaluate the impact exhibitions were having. Despite the proliferation of government exhibitions of different shapes, sizes and scales, they were regularly omitted from discussions of the government’s publicity campaigns and there continued to be lingering uncertainty as to the real impact they were actually having in shaping public opinion.101
A confidential internal MOI memo of September 1941 noted that the impact of their exhibitions was unclear and the case for public accountability for such high levels of government spending unproven. ‘I have not been able to obtain any definite information as to what value we are getting for our money by way of public attendance’, the official wrote. In some regions exhibitions were, they observed, ‘definitely unpopular’; in a couple no exhibitions had been installed; and no work was being done to record public attendance, even at Charing Cross.102
Other bodies were also interested in the impact government exhibitions were having. Mass Observation reported regularly on the MOI’s many free-to-visit propaganda exhibitions held across the country. In autumn 1941 they reported on visiting twenty-two at Worcester, Bolton, Portsmouth, Port Sunlight and Stockport.103 They observed two main types: ‘Photograph and Poster Exhibitions’ and ‘Exhibitions showing Practical Demonstrations’. The first type – ‘Photograph and Poster Exhibitions’ – they considered ‘technically excellent’, ‘vivid and striking’, but attendances were noted to be ‘extremely poor’, often with barely any visitors during an hour. Mass Observation attributed low numbers to lack of ‘window dressing’ and their being held in public libraries, museums or town halls that did not ‘symbolise novelty and topicality in the ordinary way’, with atmospheres ‘unfavourable’ and too ‘studious’. The second type – ‘Exhibitions showing Practical Demonstrations’ – enjoyed comparatively good sites and shop windows, according to their observers. They benefited from ‘concrete objects and processes’, which drew bigger audiences and created lively, informal atmospheres.
The trade press were also watching to see how government exhibitions were playing to the public. In 1941, Shelf Appeal appraised all MOI ‘exhibitions of ideas’ presented in ‘graphic form’ to date. They observed their heavily textual, story-telling formats as developed through a process that ‘parallels editorial production practice’ but were not impressed with the exhibitions’ visual qualities, bemoaning images as ‘the cobwebbed files of the picture agencies and service photographs’.104 The advantage of an exhibition as propaganda, the magazine thought, was in being able to ‘dress up an argument in an attractive garb of colour and picture’, and to ‘slip their argument almost unobtrusively into his consciousness’, exerting influence while the public were going about their daily lives. Although Shelf Appeal believed exhibitions to have the potential to appeal ‘to all levels of intelligence simultaneously’, several exhibitions missed the mark and failed to speak ‘in the language of the people who read John Bull’ (the popular magazine with a mass circulation of one million during the First World War).105 Exposing again the patrician intention of the exhibitions – and the gaping disjuncture between those addressing and those being addressed – the magazine suggested exhibitions were ‘too suave, too professional, too pleasing to be good propaganda’, concluding that the MOI were deluded if it thought anyone would make a special journey to see such exhibitions.106
Early in 1943, the MOI’s Exhibitions and Displays Division requested an MOI Home Intelligence Special Report to assess public reactions. This report focused on two exhibitions visited in February 1943, both of them forms of atrocity propaganda, relying on shock reactions for their impact: RAF Exhibition of Bomb Damage on Germany shown at Hastings and The Evil We Fight shown at Doncaster.107 The Hastings RAF show was mounted on the first floor of Woolworth’s, a shop chain that prided itself on being reasonably priced, fitting with the MOI’s aspiration to appeal to a wide public in ordinary places. The exhibition was assessed on a weekday six days after opening, which reported it had attracted 72 visitors during half an hour in the morning and 110 in half an hour that afternoon, while on Saturdays, the report noted, there were about four times those visitors. Women were noted to be the majority, with men mainly in service. The most common response of visitors to the photographs of RAF bomb damage meted out on Germany was ‘a general feeling of “grim satisfaction”’ or a ‘deep feeling of patriotism, and pride’. Interest in the subject matter was noted, as well as admiration for the photographs themselves.
The Evil We Fight, the second exhibition, referred to in the MOI report as ‘Nazi Atrocity Exhibition’, was held in Doncaster (Figure 7.8). It dispensed with the MOI’s normally moderate tone, shocking visitors by showing the extent of Nazi atrocities and those responsible for them. The MOI’s report noted that some visitors described being appalled and shocked by the images of ‘half starved Greek children’ and ‘a pit full of half naked women obviously raped’, while others thought it not extreme enough. The report recorded this as ‘an outstanding event’, praising ‘the layout and clarity’, but noting that some young people ‘“thoroughly enjoyed the gruesome details”, without realizing their full significance’. A couple of months later, the MOI assessed the attitudes of ‘housewives’ towards official campaigns and instructions, concluding that working-class housewives were most receptive to instructions and that radio and cinema were favourite media for information and instruction. They thought neither posters nor leaflets ‘cut much ice’, and exhibitions were not even mentioned, showing how superficially they had penetrated the public imagination.108
Learning to grow: Dig for Victory exhibitions
The ‘Dig for Victory’ campaign (sometimes titled ‘Grow More Food’ or ‘Grow Your Own Food’) called for British people to grow in whatever spaces they had available, to provide access to fresh food and free up space on ships carrying essential wartime machinery. Spearheaded by the British Ministry of Agriculture, the campaign was fought across many media, from posters to booklets, films and exhibitions. Bronek Katz, F. H. K. Henrion and Charles Hasler collaborated on the MOI’s travelling Dig for Victory display, showing how to make best use of outside space to grow food, demonstrating everything from sowing seeds to tackling garden pests.109 Despite modest budget, material shortages and ordinary sites, the designers created a striking show. A mock grocer’s stand carried onions and potatoes, each information display covered in a striped awning, as if part of a stall (Figure 7.9). Its introductory board was a wooden frame and poles doubling as enormous spades (Figure 7.11), with references to the subject of the poems hanging on the information panels they carried:
This is a spade to symbolise
Our will to grow our own supplies …110
These set the scene, with a mix of quirky pictograms and whimsical rhymes.
Making a serious point about the connection between milk consumption and the capacity of ships, Panel 1 mused:
This is a cow who smacked her lips
On food that came to her in ships...
While Panel 4 continued:
These are the things that YOU can sow
To supplement what farmers grow.
With vegetables throughout our land
We’ll fell the scheme the Axis planned.
The displays used a mix of drawings, photographs and models to provide information and instruction, some of them whimsical and quirky, many relying on anthropomorphic presentations of non-human characters. Cartoon slugs and other garden pests were denoted as ‘the enemy’ with swastikas suggesting that, by attacking the food supply, such pests were stealing crucial space on ships that had then to be given over to food (Figure 7.10).
Dig for Victory employed various means to ‘force home’ its message: ‘surrealist shock-tactics, as well as cheap jokes’, according to Architectural Review.111 The Isotype system was once again adopted in the touring Grow More Food, the pictorial language a central means of presentation across MOI media (as it had been in interwar exhibitions, as noted in Chapter 3).112 Imagery was shared between government campaigns in different forms as is apparent from a comparison of the exhibition's information board and posters associated with the campaign. Both shared spade structures (Figure 7.11). Abram Games’s 1942 Dig for Victory poster entreated military personnel in barracks to supply their own ‘cookhouse’, playing with imagery to show garden implements as the legs of a dining table and a vegetable patch as carpet, an eloquent and economical means of showing the potentially short distance between home-growing and eating (Figure 7.12).113
Learning self-sufficiency: Off the Ration exhibitions
Encouraging self-sufficiency in growing fruit and vegetables and rearing hens, rabbits and pigs for food was the focus of the Charing Cross 1942 MOI and Ministry of Agriculture exhibition Off the Ration. F. H. K. Henrion’s display combined photographs, illustrations and demonstrations by land girls of real rabbits kept in cages with diagrams showing how one rabbit could produce twelve smaller rabbits (Figure 7.13).114 Henrion recalled the publicity he created using black and white photographs ‘with flat colouring and tones above and typography’ (Figure 7.14). Of the displays themselves he recalled ‘there were lots of people who went through the station and saw the exhibition’ and that despite its small site ‘we had live pigs, chickens, it was extremely successful, encouraging people to keep rabbits, pigs, chickens, and grow veg on plots’.115 Despite these claims of success, it is almost impossible to judge the impact of such small displays; both because of very limited visitor data and because they were only one element in wider campaigns, expressed across multiple media. Travelling shop window displays for the same campaign also explained how to keep rabbits, giving statistics about rabbit reproduction and instructing how to feed them from waste, how to buy stock and to make hutches (Figure 7.15).116 These displays succeeded in being visually appealing whilst informative, using a mix of photographs and illustrations to explain eating: photographs of rabbits with their stomachs cut away as illustrations to show what they ate, for example.
A larger open-air version of Off the Ration was held at London Zoo from August to October 1942, one of the few places in London that continued to offer entertainment to families during the Second World War. MOI photographs of the zoo installation show children visiting, suggesting displays were tailored to families, that children were part of the audience for propaganda and recruited to play their part in the war effort. Off the Ration, again designed by Henrion and Bronek Katz for the Ministry of Agriculture, achieved an upbeat tone through colour, jaunty displays, cartoon-style presentation and live demonstrations of animal handling and bee-keeping, anticipating the festive atmosphere of the Festival of Britain a few years later (to which both Henrion and Katz would be major contributors).
Drawings of bears and chickens by children’s illustrators Lewitt-Him (the collaboration between Polish-born Jan Le Witt and George Him) were accompanied by verses, keeping the mood light. A label attached to the lion’s cage instructed:
Do not roar for meat like me,
keep a modest cabbagery.
While a cartoon hen, declared:
…I’m a modern British hen
I’ve got a concrete house.117
The humorous illustrations were interspersed with photographs, diagrams and instructive labels showing how to kill vermin and use tools. The serious intention to inform and instruct was for all ages.
Learning to care: Ministry of Information Make Do and Mend exhibitions
The MOI’s ‘Make Do and Mend’ campaign for the Board of Trade encouraged people to get as much wear as possible from the clothes they owned. This was another of the government’s most far-reaching campaigns, fought through multiple means – film, posters, pamphlets and also exhibitions. There is a sizeable literature on the campaign, analysing its successes and failings, but my focus here is on the practicalities of creating a three-dimensional contribution to the campaign. Typographer Charles Hasler designed touring exhibition Make Do and Mend: Household & Clothes Economy to explain how clothes were made, how their rationing operated and to give tips for extended use of clothing. An accompanying pamphlet for exhibition hosts explained how to mount the display, with photographs suggesting layouts, based on a small area typically around 35ft by 45ft (around 10m x 14m).118 Wooden panels were made to be remounted by hosts at each new location (Figure 7.16). Exhibition panels arrived packed in fourteen cases with two-piece hinged screens, fascia boards, banners, tabletops; a central kiosk was the most complex display. Care of the material – photographic paper, mounting boards and plywood – was, the leaflet explained, considered of paramount importance given material restrictions.
Describing how work on exhibitions had shaped his career, typographer Charles Hasler, who joined the MOI’s Exhibitions Branch in 1942, recalled: ‘I more or less completed my typographical education in the MOI exhibitions division during the war after coming out of the army’.119 Hasler believed MOI exhibitions were an interesting context for developing typography because of their visual and scripted format. He explained, ‘Most creative typography then went into exhibitions as most of these [were] officially sponsored … and for the first time were scripted’.120 Hasler believed photography was also a key part of the exhibition design mix: ‘the copy was typeset, proofed, and photographically enlarged, and mounted’. These images might be enlarged by as much as four times, line film used and printed on white document paper, staining or negative printing used where necessary.
Hasler drew on mid-nineteenth-century Playbill slab serif fonts from Egyptian fonts for Make Do and Mend and other MOI exhibitions, a font family he would return to a few years later as chair of the Festival of Britain’s Typography Panel.121 He believed that Egyptian letterforms worked well in exhibitions because of their constructional qualities and three-dimensional possibilities.122 Aside from aesthetic considerations, choice of fonts for exhibitions depended on what was available in restricted wartime conditions. Typefaces soon got worn and damaged so that some, particularly hard-to-replace imported ones, ended up without enough characters.123 To compensate for this, exhibition designers developed a practice of creating typeset captions photographically to enable lettering to be produced at any size and to preserve their characteristics.124 The war restricted the colours available, as Hasler explained: yellow was out, for example, because it was derived from steel, meaning that technical innovation was necessary to allow for limited materials.125
Poster panels incorporated a range of media including photographs, cartoons and line drawings, with a written commentary on subjects such as ‘Make War on Moths’ and ‘Forget About Clothes Convention’, ‘no new hat for special occasions’, ‘hats are only for very bad or very sunny days’. Again, these were focused towards the urgency of now, towards overcoming immediate practical issues, and used familiar phrases, rhymes and comic devices to drive the message home. Moth grubs – growing into clothes moths – became ‘the fifth column in your wardrobe’, making the problem immediately relevant through a comic transfer that likened the pests to an enemy group working to undermine Britain's solidarity from within.126 An MOI Home Intelligence Report of 1942 reported Make Do and Mend exhibitions as ‘very popular’, recommending more be organised by Women’s Institutes, Co-operative Guilds and Mothers’ Unions, to run alongside classes in mending.127
From Potato Pete to Victory Over Japan: exhibitions on the John Lewis bombsite
Aside from the popularity of Charing Cross Station for small exhibitions, the blitzed John Lewis site on Oxford Street in London’s West End quickly became a recurring favourite for major exhibitions. A September 1940 air raid had flattened the department store, leaving it a decimated shell. Large and centrally situated, the site was adopted by the MOI for public exhibitions, attracting visitors going about their everyday lives, its extensive basement, originally used as the staff canteen, made it suited to housing major exhibitions including the MOI’s Britain’s Aircraft, Victory Over Japan and The Army Exhibition.
Potato Pete’s Fair was one of the strangest of the series of government events held on the John Lewis bombsite. A free public information event dressed up as a celebration during its two-week run, the Fair aimed ‘to teach 100,000 Londoners 198 ways to cook potatoes’.128 It included ‘Nursery Rhyme Land’, in which popular rhymes were rewritten to have a potato angle, a ‘Magic Potato’, a ‘U-boat Shy’ with a ship-saving theme in support of the campaign for home-grown foods, a lucky dip, a ‘cookery nook’ and a cinema showed Walt Disney’s popular Mickey Mouse cartoons.129 Display described Potato Pete’s Fair as ‘the most unusual Christmas Bazaar’. ‘Whoever thought … that a Christmas Fair could be built around the potato?’ Despite grim wartime conditions and restricted materials, Display was convinced that everything in the Fair was planned as near as possible ‘to traditional fairyland lines’: ‘Tom of spruce and fir cuttings from re-afforestation plantations were used to give a seasonal background and the scented air was most exhilarating’. Display declared, ‘If ever the art of display has been put to the test it has surely been in that colourless everyday tuber, for, from pre-war ignominy, the potato has been so presented that it now occupies a high place in all our approaches to dietry [sic], and “Potato Pete” has become a national figure’.130 Cartoonist David Langdon contributed work to this campaign, while Walt Disney had presented the Ministry of Food with a family of anthropomorphic root vegetables: Pop Carrot, Clara Carrot and the upper-class, monocle-wearing Carroty George.131
Taking up the potato theme, the Ministry of Food’s Lord Woolton, working with the Potato Publicity Bureau, drove forward a campaign encouraging cultivation of potatoes for food. ‘Edible farinaceous tubers of vegetable plant Solanum Tuberous’, as a tongue-in-cheek piece in Display described them, became a focus for many exhibitions and window displays and the major element in ‘Dig for Victory’ campaigns, in all its forms. Display complained potatoes were not the most inspiring subject for moving and fabulous displays, ‘prosaic, colourless, and uninspiring’. Nevertheless, the magazine noted shopkeepers up and down the country were embracing the challenge by mounting displays of potato salads and potatoes arranged in the shape of a ‘V for victory sign’.132 The patrician tone of these displays was conspicuous, explaining things that were likely already evident to the majority of viewers and even the most ordinary aspects of life being considered a valid focus for displays.
Demonstrations ran alongside exhibitions, with the Ministry of Food running a full publicity programme, where dieticians dressed in white overalls, to reinforce their professional standing, showed visitors how to cook healthily. A ‘Mobilise Your Vitamins’ display showed cartoon carrots and cabbages marching behind shopping baskets being transformed into finished dishes. Such displays were mobile, easy to install and dismantle, a means of ‘establishing personal contact with the “man in the street” and the “woman with the shopping basket”’.133 Demonstrations enabled friendly contact and sociable conversation, adding a lightness and human touch.
Inspiring citizens: The Army Exhibition: The Equipment of a Division
The most ambitious amongst the many exhibitions held on the John Lewis bombsite was The Army Exhibition: The Equipment of a Division (Figure 7.17). Designed for the War Office and touring onwards to three major venues, it explained how the army was organised; from communications to food, transport, clothes, camouflage, munitions, medical services and the rather laborious process of equipping a division.134 Designers made the most of the varied vantage points across the site, with bombing exposing spaces above and below ground bridged in places, in the spirit of earlier exhibitions such as Gropius, Bayer and Moholy-Nagy’s Ausstellungsstand der Baugewerkschaften (Exhibition of the Building Workers Unions), Berlin 1931, which had used ramps to create views across and between displays (as discussed in Chapters 1 and 2). Architectural Review admired the layered aspect of The Army site: the magazine had been campaigning for the adoption of the English Picturesque in urban reconstruction projects, remarking on the exhibition’s potential for ‘unexpected vistas’, with ‘blasted walls and bared girders’ achieving a ‘picturesque unity’. ‘The eighteenth century squire had to build them specially’, the Review mused, ‘to us the enemy’s bombing has given them, and here is a way to make them a positive part of the urban scene’. The magazine’s agenda for a new urban picturesque would be most conspicuously fulfilled at the Festival of Britain's South Bank Exhibition.135
Designed by a team including architects Bronek Katz (on the exterior), Frederick Gibberd (on the engineering section) and Peter Moro (on clothing and signals) and F. H. K. Henrion (on the concluding section), The Army boasted 23,000 exhibits ranging from full-sized ‘Churchill tanks to optical lenses’.136 An eye-catching yellow and grey introductory panel explained the exhibition’s premise, with a huge map showing the African battle area viewed from the Mediterranean and the way men and machines were moving around a vast area (Figure 7.18). The colourful exhibition circuit of 56,000 square feet contained sections such as ‘A gun’s life – and yours’, ‘Every bit of fuel counts’, ‘To beat the dive bomber’ and ‘Every ounce of salvage counts’, communicating its message about the might and modernity of the British army through graphs, full-sized military equipment, striking enlarged graphics and integrated text panels built out of the rubble of the open-air site under small, awninged display boxes and panels.
The exhibition’s hands-on elements included guns children could hold and armoured vehicles to climb on. A striking 30-foot tower of jerricans, suspended in a metal frame built by designer Richard Levin (introduced in Chapter 1), illustrated the amount of fuel used by an armoured division in two and a half minutes with an eye-catching snapshot. Forty thousand visitors saw the exhibition in its first two days, and Architectural Review declared it ‘the most ambitious and successful of all exhibitions so far staged’ by the MOI and ‘as up-to-date’ as the 1938 MARS exhibition and ‘yet in no way high-brow’, referring to the particular criticisms levelled at MARS’s esoteric presentation at the earlier New Burlington Galleries show, discussed in Chapter 3.137 The Army toured to Birmingham, where it was again installed on a bombsite but lacked the visual impact of the multi-level London site, touring onwards to Glasgow and Cardiff.138
Justifying ongoing military campaigns: Victory Over Japan
Victory Over Japan, a large ‘win-the-war’ exhibition, as contemporaries described it, was two years in the making, one of a series of exhibitions justifying ongoing military campaigns.139 Running alongside a broader campaign through news, films, photographs and articles, the exhibition was focused towards persuading the public of the importance of continuing to fight in Japan, once Germany was defeated.140 Held on London’s John Lewis Oxford Street bombsite, a 10,000 square-foot site that had hosted a string of government exhibitions focused towards materialising wartime abstractions, it opened in August 1945, days after the declaration of the end of war with the surrender of Japan following the devastating bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Exhibitions allowed politicians to stage their military strategy. Prime Minister Clement Attlee was present at the opening of Victory Over Japan, with ambassadors and senior military officials in attendance, processions of Dominion troops, accompanied by the band of the Scots Guard. In his speech Attlee described the exhibition as a ‘record’ and a ‘tribute’, showing ‘the nature of the enemy … fanatically brave and barbarously cruel’ and praising the Fourteenth Army fighting in Burma. The exhibition’s purpose, Attlee explained, was so that those who had not had to suffer the hardships of fighting could see all that had been achieved and pay tribute to ‘the spirit of selflessness and willing sacrifices by which our men were inspired’.141
Attempting to enable visitors to identify with soldiers fighting on the Eastern Front, Victory was highly experiential, using ‘jungle realism’, as The Times dubbed it. Visitors were exposed to simulated jungle conditions, an aspect not previously developed in government exhibitions. They entered through a dark and steaming jungle, so hot inside that one visitor recalled ‘my collar soon became a damp rag round my neck’.142 Giant mock cobwebs, created by enormous model spiders, brushed against their faces; jungle sound effects suggested running water, insects, birds, the ‘chattering of monkeys’ and ‘wails of jackals and hyenas’; and the temperature was kept at 120 degrees.143 This experiential approach to display was developing in other popular entertainments of the period, as I discuss later in this chapter. London pensioner Herbert Brush recorded visiting Victory in his diary for Mass Observation, describing queues of visitors stretching up Oxford Street. ‘There is nothing like a “free show” to draw the people from all parts’, Brush reflected. After the simulated jungle, Brush recalled photographs including one of the Emperor – ‘an insignificant little man’ – pictures of manufactures and a girl using a typewriter. ‘I looked down on it from a platform above while a running commentary was made through a loudspeaker on the events of the war, and each point was marked as it was mentioned, by coloured lights’.144 The exhibition’s photographic central displays were ranged around a striking illuminated globe (Figure 7.19). The installation traced the history of the war in the Pacific, showing model submarines, suicide bombs, documents and photographic panoramas. Misha Black claimed 1.5 million people visited Victory during its four-month run, touring in its entirety to Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester, Glasgow and Cardiff, with four smaller replicas covering fifty other towns.145 It was widely reported on in the media but its effectiveness as propaganda is, once again, tantalisingly hard to assess.
Exhibitionary exchanges with the US
A series of exhibitions highlighted Britain’s close relationship with its new ally, the US, which had entered the war in late 1941, following the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. These exhibitions included John Olsson, the Story of an Average American held at Charing Cross Station in 1943 (Figure 7.20). John Olsson celebrated the Anglo-American alliance, using expanded photographs and specially designed display furniture to explain life in the US.146 It was created jointly by the MOI and the Exhibit Unit of the US Office of War Information (OWI).
In tandem with exhibitions organised by the MOI at Senate House in London’s Bloomsbury, as part of its wartime operations, the OWI Exhibit Unit developed wartime exhibitions for home and abroad, taking space at Senate House for its London-based operation. The Unit identified exhibitions as filling a particular niche: although slow compared to films, they remained relevant for longer and were particularly good for supplying background information and conveying ‘emotional concepts’.147 Henrion was, at the time, working across both the MOI and the OWI. As at the MOI, the central focus for OWI exhibits was ‘to present American life in effective visual terms’, with ‘top flight pictures of people’, showing ‘their characterful determination’, ‘the scope and fruitfulness of the land’, ‘the impressive scale of our public works’, plus transport, mineral resources, industry and armed forces, as OWI papers reveal.148 Young America exhibition, designed by F. H. K. Henrion for the OWI, was shown in central London at Dean’s Yard, Westminster in 1944. A series of photographic boards explained the structure of US society, with a particular focus on school, community, church and society.149
US exhibits that travelled to London included shows about the training of US Army Officers, the US Naval Academy at Annapolis, life on a Wisconsin dairy farm and a portrait of an anthracite miner. At the forefront of the OWI’s planning around exhibitions, as at the MOI, was a consideration of what this form was capable of. Acknowledging that, compared to news or ‘syndicate picture mediums’, small targeted exhibits were slow, the OWI nevertheless considered that they worked ‘longer once they reached the field’ and that while other media had their place, exhibitions were ‘best suited to supplying background information and conveying emotional concepts’. The OWI gathered files on subjects as diverse as ‘American Types’, showing airplane mechanics, dairy farmers and cowboys, community nursing, anthracite coal mining and irrigation,150 and ‘How America Lives’, showing a family in a sleigh, ice fishing, baking bread and opening Christmas presents.151 Many of the nearly four thousand photographs in ‘How America Lives’ were gathered from existing government sources.152
Roy Stryker and his team in the US Farm Security Administration’s Historical Section prepared OWI exhibition photographs.153 Stryker had become well known for spearheading this documentary photography programme from 1935 onwards, commissioning photographers including Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Ben Shahn and Louise Rosskam. These same photographs were recycled for wartime US exhibitions. Unlike their British counterparts, the OWI’s exhibitions were purposely lighter on reading and more focused around pictures, with minimal textual accompaniment to be as accessible as possible. ‘Pictures tell the story’, an explanatory text explained. ‘The picture – and especially the picture sequence – is a language understood by everyone: it knows no illiteracy. Words tell your story. Pictures make it real’. A pamphlet produced by the Historical Section gave practical hints for preparing ‘exhibits-with-a-punch’, to ‘reduce exhibit design to its simplest “dos” and “don’ts” and to the simplest methods and materials’.154
The British Library of Information, an organisation representing British interests in the US, established a small section early in 1941 to organise and design US-based exhibitions, working with the British government’s American Division and the MOI’s Exhibitions Branch (Overseas Displays and Exhibitions Scheme) to oversee photographic displays touring the US on subjects such as Women of Britain, Nutrition in Wartime, Bomb Damage and Social Services in Britain, liaising over policy to ensure alignment.155
Britain at War, 1942, was one of the first photographic exhibitions organised by the MOI to be sponsored and held at MOMA New York, before touring round Canada. British magazine Art and Industry reported the exhibition aspired ‘to cover the whole of the visual aspect of the war in terms of design’ with sections including the Army, the Navy, the RAF and the Home Front.156 It reported with admiration on Peter A. Ray’s ‘War-time Shapes’ section, which used forty photographs portraying the shape of things brought about by war conditions. The images were clearly influenced by Moholy-Nagy’s ‘new vision’, with functional objects of war such as ‘static water tanks for AFS use’, ‘anti-blast window netting’, ‘bus light shades’, the ‘painted base of lamp-posts’ and ‘anti-incendiary bomb sandbags’ seen through unusual angles and perspectives, making use of reflections, light and shadow.
Back the Attack and Nature of the Enemy: the US Office of War Information in London and Washington
The plaza outside New York City’s Rockefeller Center became a regular site for OWI exhibitions at home. An exhibition of photographs introducing the United Nations was shown in March 1943, with a mock-up of the Atlantic charter and exploring the nature of the four freedoms in Roosevelt’s speech: a vast sculpture of a serpent wrapped around a book labelled ‘press’ a metaphor for the threat to freedom of speech.157 Soon after, the OWI installed its emotive The Nature of the Enemy at Rockefeller Plaza in summer 1943.158 The exhibition was one element used by the US government to help justify entering the war. With strikingly vast photographs towering over visitors’ heads, the exhibition dramatised wartime episodes, such as the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The Nature of the Enemy used waxwork models to create tableaux, mounted on raised platforms, to dramatise grotesque Nazi scenes including Hitler Youth and the concentration camps (Figure 7.21). Visitors were offered the chance to imagine they could interact directly with the war at a ‘Buy a Bond and Bomb Berlin’ stand. The exhibition was considered so successful that it was reproduced for travelling.159
Looking at an OWI installation on home soil shows the different framing of the two exhibition-making bodies. The presentation of Nature of the Enemy, in being focused mainly through vast photographs and waxwork tableaux, was quite different from the compound display trickery of MOI exhibitions, which drew on lots of photographic techniques, objects and playful texts in tandem. It is evident, however, that there was much cross-fertilisation between exhibitions across all of these contexts and that those developing OWI exhibitions looked not only to the examples of their allies, including Britain, but also to recent German exhibitions mounted under the Nazis. The holdings of the OWI archive at the US Library of Congress (LOC) contain material about the Ausstellungsstand der Baugewerkschaften (Exhibition of the Building Workers Unions) in Berlin of 1931 by Bayer, Gropius and Moholy-Nagy (as discussed in Chapters 1 and 2) and Bayer’s Die Neue Linie exhibition, mounted to introduce the journal of the same name, launched in 1929. It contains documentation of Nazi exhibitions, such as an exhibition of leisure-time and vacation activities, designed by Herbert Bayer and held in Hamburg in 1934.160
More significantly, the archive contains a large illustrated album of designer Willi Hackenberger and Herbert Bayer’s Nazi exhibition Das Wunder des Lebens (The Wonder of Life) sponsored by the Reich Committee for Public Health Service and held in Berlin in 1935.161 This exhibition was obsessively focused on eugenics and bloodlines and included Hitler’s family tree, images of healthy ‘Aryan’ types and famous men who were members of large families. Pictorial material presented Jewish and other ‘undesirable’ people, who, according to Nazi ideology, biologically threatened German public health and graphics pointed to the relative fertility of ‘inferior’ versus ‘superior’ beings. Clearly Bayer’s earlier experience of developing exhibitions, including those in the Nazi context, had provided the techniques and skills of creating three-dimensional argumentation that would be operative once he was called upon to produce US wartime propaganda. Certainly the core formal elements of such exhibitions – expanded illustrative photographs, persuasive text, enacted in and through space – were common across the ideological divide.
The OWI’s exhibition Back the Attack was directly influenced by the London Army Exhibition, as is evident from the many images of the London show held in the archival files at Washington’s Library of Congress.162 It was mounted in the shadow of the Washington Monument in September 1943, a collaboration with the Adjutant General’s Office, and set out to unveil the US army’s war effort, with a reconstructed field post office and adjutant general’s department tent that visitors could tour around. However, Back the Attack was lacking in display acumen, putting documents and objects on show without apparent regard for creating visual excitement. While the Anglo-Soviet relationship was being celebrated in UK exhibitions (as discussed in Chapter 6), the OWI designed the American–Soviet war exhibition in June 1943, installed at New York City’s Museum of Science and Industry. This was structured through floor-to-ceiling collages of expanded photographs showing Russian life and people and some reconstructed war elements including reproduction Russian dugouts.163
OWI–MOI exhibitions in Paris: La Guerre et La Paix and Pacific ’45
The MOI and the OWI collaborated on displays to be shown in France, mounting a joint propaganda exhibition at the Grand Palais, Paris from April to June 1945 named La Guerre et la Paix (War and Peace). The ambitiously large exhibition’s purpose was to show French people – a few months after liberation – and others a ‘total picture’ of the Allied war effort and to explain what they had learnt from participation in war. The exhibition was jointly funded by Britain and the US and consisted of around five thousand images including photographs, maps, charts, diagrams, models and objects. It served as a focus for distributing literature and showing documentary films in the Palais’s 1000-seat movie theatre, with sections focusing on ‘the price the people paid’ during the occupation and ‘culture is carried on’.164
In this technologically advanced exhibition, the opening statement was projected onto a screen:
IN THESE HALLS IS A RECORD
– A record of a free people’s struggle against the attack on their liberty
– A record of their labors and their unity in the face of destruction
– A record of their triumph in the worst of all wars
The words were accompanied by an animated montage showing continuous moving images of marching soldiers, workers and ships being launched. Contemporaries reported the ‘definite feeling of exhilaration’ felt by visitors to the exhibition, with ‘countless’ people visiting.165
Pacific ’45, an OWI exhibition about the war against Japan, was held nearby, in a former Ford showroom on Paris’s Champs-Élysées. Former New York Magazine Art Director Francis Brennan (OWI’s wartime chief of visual presentation for strategic planning and graphics chief for military publications and propaganda) transformed the space into the open doors of a landing ship, as if beached on a Pacific Island. Visitors entered up a ramp to see illustrated panels, a huge mural of an island invasion, illuminated dioramas about the Pacific war and a huge plastic globe. The exhibition was again strikingly advanced technologically: a synchronised floormap with soundtrack explained the American strategy in the Pacific since Pearl Harbor. A United States Information Agency press release boasted that ‘nothing like it has been seen in exhibit-conscious Paris’.166
MOMA’s Road to Victory in Britain
The Road to Victory: A Procession of Photographs of the Nation at War, the major exhibition mounted at MOMA New York in 1942, reinforced public support for America’s entry into the Second World War. It was also the US wartime propaganda exhibition most admired and reported on in Britain. Media theorist Fred Turner cites The Road to Victory as highly significant as a central focus for the development of a US ‘democratic personality’ during the Second World War, when psychologists started to engineer a public personality for the US citizen to counter concerns over the impact of fascism.167 Originating at MOMA New York, with the support of the OWI, Road to Victory went on tour to Britain the year after. One British critic described the MOMA exhibition as the consummate example of ‘synchronisation’ between forms, for its use of a textual language of ‘almost pictorial descriptiveness’, alongside striking expanded photographs.168
As with other US government exhibitions discussed earlier in this chapter, the images in Road to Victory were chosen by photographer Edward Steichen from existing photographs held in US government collections. Many had been repurposed from the 1930s Farm Security Administration programme’s chronicles of the Great Depression.169 To make them into large photographic murals, negatives were enlarged in sections, on strips of photographic paper forty inches wide, pasted on to wallpaper covering gallery walls, seams airbrushed, retouched by hand and varnished.170 Steichen worked with exhibition designer Herbert Bayer and poet Carl Sandburg, who wrote a special text. Entering the exhibition at MOMA, visitors were faced with panels of buffalo and Native Americans and Sandburg’s opening panel that read, in biblical evocation,
In the beginning was virgin land and America was promises – and the buffalo by thousands pawed the Great Plains …171
These words inducted visitors into an environment where they could move among images and sound at their own pace.
The MOMA exhibition went on to tour in the US to San Francisco, Cleveland, Detroit and Chicago. A modified version of Road to Victory travelled to London’s Dorland Hall, opening in March 1943 with the revised title America Marches with the United Nations. In the London context, the exhibition became a vehicle for signalling US solidarity with Britain and for persuading British audiences of the merits of the embryonic United Nations, with Dorland Hall’s high-ceilinged space given over to explaining the mechanics of the new international organisation. The exhibition’s entrance, designed by Milner Gray, welcomed visitors with a message as if spoken by the people of American: ‘To the people of Britain … you kept open the road to victory. America is proud to march beside the nation which gave our world hope and time’. Small versions of the same photographs of Native Americans were displayed beside very similar opening words:
In the beginning was virgin land – and the buffalo by thousands pawed the Great Plains.
The strikingly enlarged photographic display of landscape and people that had dominated MOMA’s rooms, creating an internal ‘road’ through which visitors wound, was shown in London but the photographs were smaller and wall-mounted, making it far less striking and impactful.172 As in the MOMA show, the primary impact of America Marches was visual, its photographs illustrating scenes of everyday life in the US and elements of the diverse landscape, interspersed with excerpts from Sandburg’s original script used at MOMA, but edited down for its London showing. An example of Sandburg’s text accompanied an extensive collage at Dorland Hall, showing photos of people in a range of interiors accompanied by the words:
Many people, many faces,
in their homes,
their home towns,
their churches, shops,
schools
Sandburg’s words were comforting, poetic and light on information, unlike the MOI’s exhibition texts, which set out to impart complex information with extensive descriptions and labelling. After its London showing, America Marches was revised yet further for presentation to travel around Britain.173
Alongside creating exhibitions for home audiences, the MOI’s Overseas Displays and Exhibitions were circulated around the world, particularly from 1942 to 1943. To avoid heavy wartime shipping costs, the MOI developed a system of sending designs as small prints on thin tracing paper and photographs as negatives, to be transported by air then constructed into full-sized three-dimensional colour displays by press offices in each location. As well as sending photographic exhibitions to the US, displays were created for Latin America, the USSR, China, Portugal, Sweden, the Middle East, ‘French North Africa’ and ‘Empire countries’, as Architectural Review described them.174 Shop windows were used to display material in Latin America and Portugal, while exhibitions of enlarged photographs of bomb damage in enemy territory were sent to the US and USSR.
A large-scale exhibition about the campaigns leading up to the liquidation of the Italian Empire was sent by fast transit to Cairo for distribution to India, Abyssinia, Palestine, Iraq, Iran and New York (for re-transmission to Latin America and China), to Canada, South Africa and Russia. Shop spaces were used to host exhibitions originating in Britain. The Brussels Bon Marché department store played host to the touring 1943 exhibition RAF in Action, developed by the MOI with the Air Ministry Exhibition section. This was sent onwards to the US, Latin America, Cairo, Canada, New Zealand and India, telling a story about RAF activities through photographs and props including flying equipment, rubber dinghies, a model bomber suspended from the roof set against a 40-foot canopy mural of cumulus clouds and a 12-foot high plaster figure of the winged ‘Victory’ with a quote from Churchill commemorating ‘the few’. Display panels illustrated key RAF victories such as the bombing of the German city of Duisburg.175
Displaying the ‘four feathered freedoms’: For Liberty
Aside from the MOI’s regular use of the John Lewis bombsite for its exhibitions programme, the site was taken over in 1943 by the AIA for For Liberty: Paintings on War, Peace and Freedom, a major exhibitionary ‘demonstration’. Although the AIA’s pre-war politics had positioned the group as adversarial and oppositional to official policy, particularly on the government’s non-intervention in the Spanish Civil War, once the Second World War started several of these same artists and designers were employed in government. The foremost of these was AIA founder Misha Black, who found himself at the epicentre of the government’s exhibitions programme, whilst continuing to lead the AIA. F. H. K. Henrion, who worked on For Liberty, was also employed at the MOI. He talked about the anomaly of the MOI working closely with the AIA in an interview, explaining that ‘suddenly during the war to be anti-Fascist became fashionable … so while they were very unpopular before the war, the AIA became even government backed in some of their exhibitions’.176 This was not the only example of a pragmatic alliance between Leftist activists and official propaganda bodies during wartime. (As discussed in Chapter 6, the same had happened through Allies inside Germany.)
In For Liberty, a free-to-enter exhibition held from March to April 1943, the AIA explored the ‘four freedoms’, the universalist values set out by US President Roosevelt to Congress in his State of the Union Address of 1941. These were freedom of speech and expression; freedom to worship; freedom from want; and freedom from fear. This ‘is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation’, Roosevelt declared.177 These values and their materialisation in three-dimensional form an exhibition provided a platform from which the AIA could position themselves, by articulating what they believed was at stake, whether the war was lost or won.
Artists were being criticised by some contemporaries for not using their work to ‘fight’ the war. Art and Industry’s editorial of April 1942 asked ‘Is British Art Fighting?’, asserting that ‘British art today should be in the forefront of the battle, encouraging, stimulating, inspiring, driving; encouraging to the faint-hearted, stimulating to the weary, inspiring to the whole nation, driving on to ever increasing effort, a scourge to the sluggard and the selfish, evidence of a flaming will to win. Put it to work’.178 Art critic Herbert Read responded, ‘The function of art is to provide us with values worth fighting for. Art is a persistent search for truth’.179 For Liberty took up Read’s proposition that art’s function should be about representing values that spurred people to fight. Its catalogue, likely written by Misha Black, explained that the art on display showed ‘that the function of art in wartime is not only to record what is happening and to give enjoyment and recreation but to stimulate and encourage by vividly representing what we are fighting for’.180 It attempted to reinforce the commonalities of a like-minded community, rather than simply explaining the progress of war, which was the focus of government exhibitions such as The Army held on the same site that year (discussed earlier in this chapter).
For Liberty was sponsored by Leftist broadsheet News Chronicle; their addition to the catalogue amplified its focus on safeguarding values: ‘the future Britain against intellectual poverty’.181 ‘Time will cement the alliance between newspaper and artist now being brought into being. It is an alliance with wide horizons and of incalculable power’. Asserting the idea of exhibitions as cementing alliances, creating strength and resilience, the foreword stated: ‘today, in this exhibition, the power is used to forge the weapons of mind and spirit essential for victory over Fascism’, boldly suggesting that those who had the tools to build an exhibition today had the toolkit to create the new world of tomorrow. In this rhetorical vision, an exhibition put on show a common set of ideas and values and had the agency to forge a bond between newspaper and artist, between members of the AIA network and between artists and the public.
From their founding in 1933, the AIA had focused on mounting exhibitions away from established cultural institutions, ‘in the thick and bustle of every-day life: in tube stations and public shelters, in the busy shopping streets of the East End and West End of London’, as they described it.182 Being part of the bustle of everyday life was akin to a missionary instinct and continued to be talismanic for the AIA, even in the midst of war. This aspiration (discussed in more detail in Chapter 4) was taken to its limits as practice in For Liberty, with the choice of a bombsite, by its very definition a place in flux, temporarily suspended between past use and future reconstruction. Here, on Oxford Street, was a department store – a space of capital – blown open to the elements; its normal value as commercial space suspended. The bombing had revealed, at ground level, a structure, ‘like the ruins of a Greek temple’, as journalist Kingsley Martin described the exposed concrete columns of John Lewis.183
Contemporaries believed that wartime West End bombing, while causing devastating damage, had opened up novel opportunities for replanning this quarter. It also allowed for novel creative interventions. The use of a space recently bombed by a highly visible act of Nazi aggression was a bold act of creative defiance, which the AIA turned to positive advantage with publicity announcing ‘German Bombs Provide Exhibition Site’.184 Henrion, who designed the exhibition’s installation, recalled Oxford Street ‘teeming with service men on leave’. The entrance was striking: the Fire Brigade painted the site in bright, saturated colours, which Henrion recalled as becoming ‘like a Graham Sutherland painting, orange and blue, etc’ (Figure 7.22).185 This made a strong impact on visitors and the press, ‘this trumpet call of colour made a direct emotional appeal of such poignancy that it will not be blurred easily by any exhibition work done since’, Architectural Review reported.186 Display announced that the department store’s windows had been reborn, ‘girders and stanchions are painted red; wrecked walls a vivid yellow’, imagining Henrion’s painted interventions as creating a phoenix from the ashes.187 Aside from brightly painted colours, Henrion’s entrance represented the four freedoms as doves – ‘the four feathered freedoms’, as Display described them. Architectural Review praised the stylised doves as ‘surrealism stripped of all that so often appeared to be bogus’.188 Henrion also designed publicity for the exhibition: posters, letterheads and the catalogue (Figure 7.23).189
Downstairs, in what had been the John Lewis staff canteen, 150 paintings and sculptures by AIA members were exhibited. Taking up the idea of the exhibition as not only documenting but making manifest invisible values and truths, the catalogue explained that artists were formulating and expressing ideas, as well as ‘illustrating and interpreting fact’.190 It was crucial to this presentation that painters, sculptors, designers and writers collaborated together across medium. This, the AIA stated, was ‘a new feature … which carries AIA policy a step further’, with members ‘working to a theme and arranging the works in such a way that they became part of a whole scheme and not separate units. We hope to develop this new technique in future’ (original emphasis).191 In this statement was an assertion of the power of exhibitions to create bonds between people across types of creative work – art, design and literature – and, indeed, across backgrounds. In line with this, the exhibition’s epicentre was the ‘Four Freedoms Room’, showing twelve specially created paintings by different artists, including John Tunnard and Carel Weight, linked by a poem that responded to the exhibition’s theme, commissioned from Leftist poet and commentator Cecil Day-Lewis. The poem concluded with the optimistic words, ‘And our heirs shall unfold, like a cluster of apple-blossom, in a fine tomorrow’.192 The line was inscribed under Betty Rea’s sculpture New World, showing sculpted heads of four children looking joyfully upwards and placing children’s futures as a central concern of the exhibition.
The displacement of an art exhibition from established galleries and museums to a West End bombsite, untethered from constraints of institution and unbounded by walls, was mirrored in the trajectories of For Liberty’s makers, many themselves displaced as refugees from Central and Eastern Europe and living outside the shelter of established relationships in Britain. Aside from Henrion, these included Polish painter Feliks Topolski, who arrived in 1935 and contributed a painted panel shown on For Liberty’s staircase. Hungarian-born sculptor Peter Lambda, who had arrived in Britain in 1938, contributed an imposing portrait bust of Soviet premier Joseph Stalin celebrating the Anglo-Soviet relationship as allies and Hungarian-born sculptor Peter László Peri contributed the sculptures Fascist Rule and This Is How We Are Fighting.
The position that exhibitions afforded their makers – in providing a mouthpiece and a sense of local connection – parallels that characterised by photography theorist Ariella Azoulay in her description of stateless people becoming members of the citizenry of photography through connecting with the public through photographs.193 Austrian Expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka (whose work in Britain I discuss at length in Chapter 6) made a painting for For Liberty’s ‘Four Freedoms room’ provocatively entitled What We Are Fighting For? This was the final and most bitterly critical of the paintings Kokoschka made in England, attacking the behaviour of both Allied and Axis powers by depicting an emaciated corpse lying in the centre surrounded by a scene of bloody devastation.194
Minister of Information Brendan Bracken opened For Liberty. He had likely identified as politically expedient the exhibition’s message about future peace, which chimed with the MOI’s efforts and allowed them to ally themselves with this influential group of artists.195 In the AIA’s own estimation, For Liberty was their most successful exhibition, attracting 36,000 visitors in one month, and panels toured onwards to the Peter Jones Art Gallery at Sloane Square.196 The press, particularly right-wing newspapers, criticised the exhibition as producing propaganda for political or social aims while critic Jan Gordon, in The Studio’s ‘London Commentary’ column, praised the exhibition as a constructive, ‘practical’ exhibition that could ‘suggest to artists ways in which they may develop their own possibilities’, bringing together paintings with a ‘deliberately propagandist tendency’ following specific themes, although Gordon considered it mainly unsuccessful as propaganda.197
For Liberty offered artists, many marginalised by dint of displacement, a mouthpiece from which to express their views on war and to make a direct address to the British population. The organisation of For Liberty was led by women including painter Beryl Sinclair and sculptor Betty Rea, with dozens of women showing work as part of For Liberty, finding in the AIA a freedom and egalitarianism that was lacking in other exhibiting institutions.198 The exhibition offered this group an opportunity to explore and represent the values that drove the war effort from a site in central London: a bold act of defiance.
Ursula and Ernö Goldfinger’s exhibitions for the Army Bureau of Current Affairs
Aside from the solidarity exhibitions discussed in Chapter 6, architect Ernö Goldfinger and his wife Ursula Goldfinger continued to collaborate on making exhibitions. From 1943 to 1947, the Goldfingers designed nine exhibitions for the Army Bureau of Current Affairs (ABCA), the army education scheme set up in 1941 and directed by William Emrys Williams. Williams, co-founder of Penguin Books, was passionate about life-long learning. While running the ABCA, he was Secretary of the British Institute of Adult Education (BIAE). He also organised the Art for the People exhibitions scheme, founded in 1934, to tour important works of art to small towns, intending them to be seen by working-class audiences.199
Through the ABCA, Williams hoped to ensure army men and women were fully briefed about developments affecting them. He deployed exhibitions as a key medium for this process of democratisation, considering them useful for wartime promotional campaigns and for sharing current affairs to inspire soldiers.200 The ABCA produced dozens of easily transportable photographic exhibitions (up to 120 per year), to be toured to army commands for a fortnight at a time on topics such as Battle of Egypt, Convoy to Russia and Soviet Armed Forces, employing many different designers.201 Williams appointed the Goldfingers to start developing a series of exhibitions covering a wide range of subjects: from traffic to planning your home.202
In their ABCA work the Goldfingers could address issues of national importance but with relative freedom to bring their Communist-aligned political perspectives. They designed nine ABCA exhibitions on subjects as diverse as LCC Plan for London, Health Centres (1944),203 Planning Your Kitchen (1944) and Traffic (1944), highlighting the inefficiency of traffic crossings.204 Their Cinema Exhibition of 1943 explained the workings and intention of the mass medium of cinema. Across several strikingly designed panels, each combining an arresting combination of primary colours as structural elements, with clever photomontages and a visually appealing mix of typefaces, many of them hand-drawn by Goldfinger, they explained the range of uses of film, from entertainment to applications in scientific research, propaganda and publicity.205 Reviewing wartime exhibitions in Architectural Review, architect G. S. Kallmann described the Goldfingers’ Cinema Exhibition as ‘exquisitely balanced, but perhaps unknowingly the onlooker may be more attracted by the pattern than by the story’,206 and going on to suggest that Goldfinger’s exhibitions were less successful than other contemporary information exhibitions because he was a ‘less compromising’ designer, who prioritised ideological focus over other considerations.207 As I discuss in Chapter 8, the ABCA continued to commission the Goldfingers after the war including exhibitions on Planning Your Home, Planning Your Neighbourhood (about re-planning Shoreditch) and A National Health Service.208
Cashing in on atrocities: The War in Wax
Avoiding sensationalism while evoking reaction and emotion had been a guiding principle of MOI exhibitions, as was articulated in government planning documents. The level to which atrocities committed by Britain’s enemies in prisoner-of-war camps and other acts of violence should be exposed in MOI exhibitions was discussed during the planning of Victory Over Japan. Their conclusion was that atrocities should ‘neither be pushed nor developed’.209 Commercial exhibitions were not subject to such constraints, unashamedly attracting and confronting visitors with the horrifying spectacle of atrocities in the process of being meted out. The Daily Express held a 1945 exhibition of photographs from German concentration camps. Mass Observation diarist Herbert Brush visited, writing that there were ‘awful pictures, enough to make one feel ill, but everyone wanted to see them. Heaps of human skeletons’ but that a five-minute visit had been long enough.210
Up the road from the MOI’s Victory Over Japan, the sensationalist, privately mounted exhibition The War in Wax showed from 1945 in a disused shop at 60 Oxford Street, attracting large crowds. Keeping its potential to shock to the fore, the exhibition’s hoarding announced ‘The World’s Most Modern WaxWorks’, including ‘the Horrors of the German Concentration Camps All in Life-Like and Life Size Figures’, with ‘Over 100 figures’. Entry cost 6d for the Main Hall and Children’s section, while visiting ‘the Concentration Camp’ cost visitors an additional 6d (Figure 7.24). A leaflet further explained that the exhibition included ‘Life size and lifelike figures of Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, The Allied Generals, Hitler, Mussolini, Quislings, Etc’ and showcased important historic episodes including the ‘Casablanca Conference’, ‘Desert Victory’, ‘Burma Road’, ‘Woman at War’, ‘The Fall of Kharkov’ and ‘The Horrors of the German Concentration Camp’.
Londoners had seen exhibitions of horrifying waxworks. By 1943, Madame Tussaud’s wax museum had been trading on London’s Baker Street for over a century, containing the popular ‘Chamber of Horrors’ exhibit, showing wax tableaux of notorious murderers and infamous historical figures.211 I have not found images of The War in Wax’s interior installation, but it likely simulated the sensationalist exhibition on Baker Street, by acting as a wartime showcase of horrific acts and atrocities represented with waxworks of Nazi leaders and suffering in the concentration camps. In a confusing swerve away from such horrors, and clearly intended to attract family audiences, The World in Wax also boasted of ‘A Fascinating and Delightful Children’s Section of Mechanical moving figures including Cinderella, Snow White, Etc’.212
The production from midway through the war of waxwork simulacra of key leaders in the global conflict had allowed for wartime displays intended to bring the horror of war close to the British public, addressing head-on public fascination with horror. Manufacturers reproduced infamous figures in wax. Display featured a Hitler waxwork figure created by Gems, ‘swinging to and fro’ from a gibbet in front of the slogan ‘Don’t let him have the factory – Give him the works’; a tableau created as ‘factory propaganda’, which the magazine reported as ‘the first tableau of its kind in the country’.213 At The War in Wax visitors were confronted with the entangled orders of simulacra: real politicians, currently meting out appalling horrors on the world, shown alongside fairytale characters, offering the possibility that all were mere fictions.214 These displays, with mechanical fairytale figures, were influenced by the robots and animatronics pioneered for entertainment in the United States at the same time. A humanoid robot nicknamed ‘Elektro’ had featured at the 1939–40 New York World’s Fair: walking by voice command, speaking a few words, smoking cigarettes – with its robot dog, ‘Sparko’ that could bark, sit and beg to humans.
Display reported that models such as those at The War in Wax ‘put the accent on reality’, by allowing the exhibition to be more lifelike, but that there was ‘no showing this for the churlish and delicate stomach’ given that ‘reconstructed in detail are scenes of brutality practised by Germanic sadists on helpless and long-suffering victims of Nazi persecution’. While some might have recoiled from this, for Display this was a draw: ‘Each and everyone who experiences even a moment’s complacency, who harbours selfish thoughts at the expense of those less fortunate on the Continent, should see this exhibition’. ‘Here is an instance of private enterprise leaving officialdom at the starting post; no form of propaganda is there better than visual presentation’.215 Not all were as enthusiastic as Display about the benign intentions of the War in Wax. Austrian émigré photographer Wolfgang Suschitzky, chancing upon the exhibition’s hoarding, photographed it, later explaining how appalled he was by the sight of such an exhibition: ‘Walking one day along Oxford Street toward Charing Cross Road, I came upon this shop front. I was too revolted to go in and investigate’. This, Suschitzky said, was ‘the only obscene photograph I have ever taken’, referring to the shockingly salacious treatment of a devastating subject.216
Exhibitions had proliferated during wartime across multiple contexts of diverse scales, to aid in fighting the war, with the involvement of many designers. Their impact on people’s behaviours and emotions remained difficult to assess but the characteristics and quirks of the form itself were becoming a distinctive visual and spatial language. Architect Gerhard Kallmann, in a major feature for Architectural Review, described all these exhibitions as starting to draw from the same tedious pattern book, with each exhibition using every element, developing a ‘distressing slickness, a stylism which petrifies all liveliness until a sickly sauce exhibitionnaise with all the well-known ingredients is poured over the lot’, likening these elements to an unappealing British salad cream that smothered the taste of the exhibition’s individual and distinctive elements. Despite this, the form was still considered useful by the government and endured as an element of postwar official communication, as the next chapter shows.
1
Black pointed to a focus on exhibition design in
a special ‘England’ number of Graphis, under
the heading ‘The British Exhibition’, Graphis, March–April 1946, pp. 212–13; Black, ‘Propaganda in Three
Dimensions’, p. 129.
2
Black wrote that ‘a nucleus now exists in
this country able to compete on equal terms with their foreign
counterparts’. Black, ‘Design for Ceremony and
Exhibitions’, in Herbert Read (ed.), The
Practice of Design (London: Lund Humphries, 1946), p. 196; Black, Exhibition Design, p. 11.
3
Black, ‘Propaganda in Three
Dimensions’, p. 129.
4
Ellul, Propaganda.
5
TNA INF1/132 internal memos from December 1940.
The fact that Black was Russian and had not yet become naturalised
meant he could only be employed on a fee basis.
6
Designer Peter Ray was initially employed as a
consultant to design exhibitions but ended up designing graphics as
head of the MOI’s Story Presentation Unit.
7
It is not clear from the records when Katz
arrived but after the war he stayed in Britain, working in
architectural practice with Reginald Vaughan, including making a
major contribution to the Festival of Britain in 1951.
8
Eventually Black was granted citizenship in
1950: TNA HO 334/344/14923, ‘Naturalisation Certificate:
Moisei Tcherny. From Russia. Resident in London. Certificate
BNA14923 issued 7 September 1950. Note(s): Alias: Misha
Black’.
9
Gill Levin, interview with the author over Zoom,
28 May 2023.
10
By the Department of Overseas Trade (through
British Industries Fairs and representation at international trade
fairs and exhibitions) and the Lord Privy Seal’s Department
and the Post Office, as noted in an article in Display
magazine, vol. 27, no. 1, April 1945, p. 2. Highet describes the
Post Office and Privy Seal exhibitions in his ‘Note on
Exhibition Technique’ TNA INF1/132.
11
See Henry Irving, ‘The Ministry of
Information on the British Home Front’, in Simon Eliot and
Marc Wiggam (eds), Allied Communication to the
Public During the Second World War (London:
Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), p. 24; Ian
McLaine, Ministry of Morale: Home Front Morale
and the Ministry of Information in World War II
(Abingdon: Routledge, 2021).
12
Display cover of June 1940 (arranged by
Whiteley’s ‘display manager’ Mr H. Storey);
Selfridges news, Display, June 1940, p. 74.
13
Display, July 1940, cover, pp. 98,
112.
14
Richard Harman, editor of Display, in a
lecture to DIA, reported in Display, April 1940, pp. 28, 30;
a point repeated in Display, June 1940, p. 74.
15
Display, August 1940. The second theme
was the Royal Navy, Display, July 1940, pp. 99, 115,
130.
16
Michael H. C. Baker, London
Transport in the 1930s (Hersham: Ian Allan, 2007), p. 10.
17
Written for MOI by A. G. Highet, ‘A Note
on Exhibition Technique’, p. 3. TNA INF1/132, undated. Henry
Irving (of MOI Digital project https://moidigital.ac.uk) confirms that Highet had
contributed to MOI’s planning phase, coming from a background
in PR for the GPO.
18
Calculated costing up to £2 per square
foot, basing his estimate on the 150 displays mounted soon before
the war by the Post Office and the Lord Privy Seal’s
Department.
19
In December 1940, as indicated in a note written
on TNA INF1/132 ‘Home Planning Committee: Programme for
Exhibitions’, p. 5.
20
Brian Foss, ‘British Artists and the
Second World War. With particular reference to the War
Artists’ Advisory Committee of the Ministry of
information’ (PhD thesis, University College London, 1991),
p. 3; Brian Foss, War Paint: Art, War, State
and Identity in Britain 1939–1945 (New Haven,
CT and London: Yale University Press, 2007).
During the Second World War Clark also led the Arts Panel of the
Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA); see Sue
Breakell, ‘Exhibiting “The Taste of Everyday
Things”: Kenneth Clark and CEMA’s Wartime Exhibitions
of Design’, in Liz Farrelly and Joanna Weddell (eds), Design Objects and the Museum (London:
Bloomsbury, 2016). For Clark’s
relationship with design advocacy see Sue Breakell,
‘“The Exercise of a Peculiar Art-Skill”:
Kenneth Clark’s Design Advocacy and the Council of Industrial
Design’, Visual Culture in
Britain, vol. 16, no. 1, 2015, pp.
42–66.
21
Kenneth Clark, ‘War Artists at the
National Gallery’, The Studio, 1941, pp. 2–12;
also War Pictures at the National Gallery,
London (National Gallery, 1944). Dame Myra Hess also held a series of concerts at the
National Gallery in 1939–44 in aid of the Musicians’
Benevolent Fund.
22
Kallmann, ‘The Wartime
Exhibition’, p. 103.
23
TNA INF1/132, part of document entitled
‘Home Planning Committee: Programme for Exhibitions’,
written November 1940, p. 4 under heading ‘suitable
sites’.
24
TNA INF1/132 ‘Home Planning Committee:
Programme for Exhibitions’, part 1 (addendum).
25
As Stuart Hall described it in his analysis of
Picture Post, ‘The Social Eye of Picture
Post’ [1973], Typography Papers,
8, 2009, p. 82.
26
TNA INF1/132, Displays and Exhibitions Division,
28 Nov 1940, Home Planning Committee, Programme for
Exhibitions.
27
Black, ‘Propaganda in Three
Dimensions’, p. 129.
28
Turner, The Democratic Surround, p. 6.
See also Fred Turner, ‘The Family of Man and the
Politics of Attention in Cold War America’, Public Culture, vol. 24, no. 1, 2012, pp. 55–84.
29
See, for example, Simon Eliot and Marc Wiggam
(eds), Allied Communication to the Public During the Second World
War (London: Bloomsbury, 2019) or Robert Mackay, Half the Battle: Civilian Morale in Britain
during the Second World War (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2002).
30
TNA INF1/132, Memo from Gray to Aynsley, 28 July
1941. Also, Charles Hasler and F. H. K. Henrion both discussed the
techniques they had used to make MOI exhibitions.
31
Richard Hollis interview with F. H. K. Henrion
in 1986 Imperial War Museum Catalogue 9592/
1986–11–12: www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/80009378.
32
TNA INF1/132, Displays and Exhibitions Division,
28 Nov 1940, Home Planning Committee, Programme for
Exhibitions.
33
Report of the MOI’s Home Planning
Committee. ‘Home Planning Committee: Programme for
Exhibitions’, TNA INF1/132, written November 1940.
34
‘Home Planning Committee: Programme for
Exhibitions’, TNA INF1/132, pp. 2–3.
35
Categories and definitions:
‘Non-structural exhibits’, TNA INF1/132.
36
Lucy Noakes, Dying for the
Nation: Death, Grief and Bereavement in Second World War
Britain
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020).
37
Categories and definitions (using original
emphases): ‘Non-structural exhibits’, TNA
INF1/132.
38
TNA INF1/132, ‘Home Planning Committee:
Programme for Exhibitions’, p. 3.
39
A few months later Noel Coward would write a
popular song about it, which opened ‘London Pride has been
handed down to us; London Pride is a flower that’s
free’.
40
IWM, D1753.
41
‘Courage Of London in War-Time’,
The Times, 18 December 1940, p. 6. The Blitz began in
earnest in London in September 1940, lasting eight months, and in
November 1940 the Blitzkrieg had started to attack other large,
provincial cities in Britain, continuing until May 1941.
42
Display, March 1941, p. 273. The Topical
Press Agency was founded in 1903, employing almost 1,500
representatives worldwide by its peak in 1929, selling the work of a
team of photographers based in London. As well as contemporary press
photography, the company also focused on sales of stock
images.
43
TNA INF1/132, National Archives memo to Aynsley
from Milner Gray of 15 October 1941 saying that with Treasury
approval of the ATS Large Touring exhibitions, the USSR Large
Touring Exhibition and the use of the Charing Cross site for the
period of a year, the volume of sanctioned work for which the Branch
was responsible had so increased that further additions to staff
have become necessary.
44
Display, March 1941, p. 273.
45
The Times, 18 December 1940, p. 6.
46
Typography historian Robin Kinross describes the
use of photographic elements to communicate urgency as
‘unEnglish’, given that this was characteristic of
modern European graphic design beyond Britain before the 1940s,
discussing Henrion’s poster ‘Aid the Wounded’
of 1942; ‘Design in Central-European London’, Typography Papers, 8, 2009, p. 107.
47
Walter Benjamin, in his essay ‘On the
Concept of History’ wrote, ‘For every image of the
past that is not recognised by the present as one of its own
concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably’, with
Benjamin’s belief in the importance of the quality of
contemporaneity (Aktualität) central to his
writings.
48
Stuart Hall has written about Picture
Post as showing the tendency to ‘the democratization
of the subject in photography’; Hall, ‘The Social
Eye’, p. 82.
49
Display, March 1941, p. 273.
50
The Times, Issue 48802, 18 December 1940,
p. 6.
51
‘Synecdochic’, in the sense that a
part of the population was suggested to stand in for the whole, to
use a phrase drawn from Buchloh, ‘From Faktura to
Factography’, p. 111.
52
Display, February 1941, pp.
266–7.
53
Hall describes the ‘quality of
usualness’ in ‘The Social Eye’, p. 82.
54
John Berger in Understanding a Photograph (London: Penguin, 2013), pp. 20–1 asserts that reading a
photograph is only possible through knowing what is beyond the
frame. Walter Benjamin criticised the new style of photographic
documentary flourishing in Germany in the 1920s: ‘It has even
succeeded in making misery itself an object of pleasure, by treating
it stylishly and with technical perfection’; Hall,
‘The Social Eye’, p. 83 quoting Benjamin, ‘The
Author as Producer’, New Left Review, vol. 62,
July–August 1970.
55
The Times, Issue 48802, 18 December 1940,
p. 6.
56
Display, March 1941, pp.
272–3.
57
Shelf Appeal, July/August 1941.
58
Display, March 1941, pp.
272–3.
59
See Erden Ertem’s PhD on the picturesque
campaign in Architectural Review, ‘Shaping “The
Second Half Century”: The Architectural Review,
1947–1971’ (MIT, 2004).
60
Display, February 1940, pp. 454–8
and 465.
61
London Can Take It, directed by Humphrey
Jennings for the GPO Film Unit in 1940, was distributed throughout
the US by Warner Bros.
62
Allan Sekula, in ‘On the Invention of
Photographic Meaning’, in Victor Burgin (ed.), Thinking Photography Communications and
Culture (London: Palgrave, 1982) discusses how people need to learn photographic
literacy – that photographs are not intrinsically legible or
significant.
63
MOI’s Photograph Library, which collected
and organised photographs, was based at Senate House. For further
information about MOI’s Photograph Library see https://moidigital.ac.uk/blog/photographs-motorbikes-and-ministry-information-interview-anne-olivier-bell/.
64
An important precursor to these magazines was
Parisian illustrated magazine VU (founded in 1928), which, as
Tim Satterthwaite shows in Modernist Magazines
and the Social Ideal (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), assembled photographs in essay form.
Picture Post was launched by Hungarian refugee Stefan
Lorant in 1938. Other, less successful picture magazines included
Weekly Illustrated and the socialist
Clarion.
65
As discussed in Hall, ‘The Social
Eye’, p. 70.
66
Raymond Williams uses this term in Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1977), p. 128.
67
Kallmann, ‘The Wartime
Exhibition’, p. 106.
68
Display, August 1941, p. 81; also
mentioned in ‘These Exhibitions of Ideas Are Planned’,
Shelf Appeal, July/August 1941.
69
Kallmann, ‘The Wartime
Exhibition’, pp. 105–6.
70
Francis Bird, Press,
Parliament and People (London: William Heinemann, 1946).
71
A parallel process was followed in the United
States Office of War Information where photographs gathered by the
FSA were reused to show ‘ordinary’ families.
72
IWM D Series of photographs,
D1750–1766.
73
Mass Observation, File report 531,
‘Exhibition at Charing Cross Underground Station, December
1940’.
74
Display, February 1941, pp.
266–7.
75
Display, March 1941, p. 273.
76
Architectural Review, October
1943.
77
F. A. Mercer and Grace Lovat Fraser (eds), Modern Publicity in War (London and New
York: Studio Publications, 1941), p. 50.
78
Images from Life Line, UoBDA Henrion
collection.
79
IWM D series photographs D17703 and
D17705.
80
The front cover of Display, October 1941,
called it a ‘gas mask exhibition’. With another
version made to tour to thirteen sites around the country, according
to Shelf Appeal, July/August 1941. The travelling version was
discussed in ‘The Ministry of Information’s Exhibition
“Poison Gas”’, Art and Industry,
November 1941, pp. 142–3, as moving to each site for six
weeks. MOI’s Poison Gas exhibition was hosted at the
Laing in 1941, reported on in local newspapers.
81
Back of leaflet about the exhibition held at
UoBDA Henrion collection, ‘Exhibitions’.
82
Poison Gas general contractors, according
to Art and Industry, November 1941, were Beck and Pollitzer
(Contracts, Ltd) and the displays constructed by Leon Goodman
Displays Ltd, according to ‘These Exhibitions of Ideas Are
Planned’, Shelf Appeal, July/August 1941, and also
noted in Shelf Appeal, September 1941, p. 17.
83
Shelf Appeal, September 1941, pp.
16–17 stated that MOI had evidence (from staff watching) that
the text matter was read by visitors both in Charing Cross and in
the travelling version.
84
Display, October 1941.
85
Supplied by Gems Ltd, as featured in
Display of January 1941, p. 249. Shelf Appeal,
September 1941, p. 16.
86
Shelf Appeal, September 1941, p.
17.
87
Front cover of Display, October
1941.
88
Richard Hollis interview with F. H. K. Henrion
in 1986 Imperial War Museum Catalogue 9592/
1986–11–12: www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/80009378.
89
Shelf Appeal, September 1941, pp.
16–17. Poison Gas compared favourably to the recent
MOI exhibition Life Line, Shelf Appeal believed, as
the former was focusing on making the subject interesting whereas in
Life Line the designers only seemed interested in its
form.
90
TNA INF1/132.
91
‘Britain Shall Not Burn’, Shelf
Appeal, November 1941. Photograph of Fire Guard in
UoBDA, Henrion collection, D4201 has a label on the back explaining
the exhibition.
92
Kallmann, ‘The Wartime
Exhibition’, pp. 95–106.
93
IWM D10625 and 10635.
94
Richard Farmer, The Food
Companions: Cinema and Consumption in Wartime Britain,
1939–45 (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2011). Jo Fox discusses the mode of
engagement of home front propaganda in ‘Careless Talk:
Tensions within British Domestic Propaganda during the Second World
War’, Journal of British
Studies, vol. 51, no. 4, October 2012,
pp. 936–66.
95
IWM D10623.
96
IWM D10629.
97
IWM D10273.
98
IWM D10235.
99
Caption to IWM D10826.
100
MOI Home Intelligence Division Weekly
Report, no. 108, Part II, 11. SECRET 29 October 1942: https://moidigital.ac.uk/reports/home-intelligence-reports
(accessed 24 May 2022).
101
For example, Shelf Appeal, July/August
1941, p. 2 where details of departmental spend on publicity omits
exhibitions.
102
TNA INF1/132 ‘Exhibitions and Photograph
Displays’, Note from Mr Woodburn to Mr Welch of
24/9/41.
103
Mass Observation File Report 869, September 1941
was based on exhibitions observed in August 1941. See XIII
Exhibitions and Demonstrations [n.p.].
104
Shelf Appeal, July/Aug 1941.
105
Howard Cox and Simon Mowatt, ‘Horatio
Bottomley and the Rise of John Bull Magazine’, Media History, vol. 25, no. 1, 2019, pp. 100–25.
106
Shelf Appeal, July/August 1941. Life
Line appeared on the cover of this issue of Shelf
Appeal with an illustration by exhibition designer Peter A.
Ray to illustrate a general survey article about the MOI exhibitions
scheme entitled ‘These Exhibitions of Ideas Are Planned to
the Last Drawing’. Poster for Life Line is in MODA
collection Hasler collection CH/5/3/6/27.
107
MOI digital, Home Intelligence Reports, www.moidigital.ac.uk/reports/home-intelligence-reports/home-intelligence-special-report-inf-1-293/idm140465678899040/.
108
MOI digital, Home Intelligence Reports, www.moidigital.ac.uk/reports/home-intelligence-reports/home-intelligence-special-report-inf-1-293/idm140465679558080/.
109
Museum of Domestic Design & Architecture
(MODA) Charles Hasler collection CH/1/2. Hasler had joined MOI in
1942.
110
Image in MODA Charles Hasler collection
CH/1/2.
111
Kallmann, ‘The Wartime
Exhibition’, p. 104.
112
Young America of 1944, which gave Britons
insight into the lives of their US allies, used Isotype to explain
the percentage of US population across each job category. During the
Second World War Otto Neurath got involved with the British MOI in
contexts including isotypes for films such as Paul Rotha (dir.),
World of Plenty, 1943: https://media.dlib.indiana.edu/media_objects/w95050635.
113
Abram Games, Over My
Shoulder (London: Studio, 1960), pp. 8, 12.
114
UoBDA Henrion collection, Exhibitions Box.
Ministry of Information No. IWM D7868 – ‘MOI
“Grow More Food” Exhibition at Charing
Cross’.
115
Richard Hollis interview with F. H. K. Henrion
in 1986 Imperial War Museum Catalogue 9592/
1986–11–12: www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/80009378, REEL
2.
116
IWM D8534.
117
IWM D10038 and IWM D 17481.
118
MODA, CH/1/2/1 collection.
119
MODA CH, letter to Neil Morgan, 22 June 1984, p.
2.
120
MODA CH, letter to J Groves, 4 February 1985, p.
4.
121
According to MODA archive, he joined the MOI
Exhibitions Branch in 1942.
122
MODA CH, letter to Neil Morgan, 22 June
1984.
123
MODA CH, letter to Neil Morgan, 22 June 1984, p.
2.
124
As Hasler explained in ‘Type-Face Letter
Forms’, Architects’ Journal, 6 September 1951,
MODA CH/1/2/1.
125
MODA CH, letter to Neil Morgan, 22 June 1984, p.
2.
126
MODA CH/1/2/1 collection, ‘Make War on
Moths’ panel.
127
www.moidigital.ac.uk/reports/home-intelligence-reports/home-intelligence-special-report-inf-1-293/idm140465682632112/.
128
Ashley Havinden, Advertising
and the Artist (London: Studio Publications, 1956).
129
Display, April 1945, p. 4. Entry was free
but admission to some special features was by 2d ticket redeemable
at any London greengrocer’s for 2d worth of potatoes. There
had been widespread fascination amongst avant-garde artists from the
1920s with the mass cultural form of cartoons, as Esther Leslie
discusses in Hollywood Flatlands: Animation,
Critical Theory and the Avant-Garde (London: Verso,
2002).
130
Display, vol. 27, no. 1, April 1945, pp.
3–4. See also BFI, Potato Pete Fair – 08275.
131
Farmer, The Food Companions, p. 47. David
Langdon obituary, Guardian, 22 November 2011.
132
Display, March 1943, p. 182.
133
Display, vol. 27, no. 1, April 1945, pp.
2–3.
134
As Peter Moro explained to Louise Brodie in
interview, BL Sound Archive [Part 14 of 15].
135
Kallmann, ‘The Wartime
Exhibition’, p. 100. See also Atkinson, ‘“The
First Modern Townscape”?’.
136
Michael Havinden et al. (eds), Ashley Havinden: Advertising and the Artist
(Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 2003), p. 12.
137
‘The Equipment of a Division’,
Architectural Review, August 1943, p. x.
138
Birmingham iteration was in March 1944, MODA
Hasler collection CH/1/2 and TNA INF2/44/256 – Army
Exhibition at Cardiff – general view of the exhibition; TNA
INF2/44/57 – Army Exhibition at Cardiff; TNA INF 2/44/258
– Army Exhibition at Cardiff. IWM sought to acquire items
from the exhibition for their collections, as a letter of 17 October
1943 from L. R. Bradley at IWM to C. Bloxham at MOI confirms (IWM
Ministry of Information folder, CN2/1/GOV/65/1–18).
139
As The Times described it in
‘“Victory Over Japan” Exhibition’,
The Times, 21 August 1945, p. 6. Jenna Lundin Aral,
‘Information as Spectacle: Second World War Exhibitions by
the Ministry of Information’, Journal of
Design History, vol. 31, issue 1, February 2018, pp. 46–65.
140
Three small exhibitions at Charing Cross in 1944
had developed this theme: Jungle Front, Ocean Front
and Our Eastern Job. TNA INF1/966, Memo 14 May 1943.
141
‘14th Army’s Work in
Burma’, The Times, 22 August 1945, p. 7.
142
Herbert Brush, quoted in Simon Garfield, Our Hidden Lives: The Everyday Diaries of a
Forgotten Britain 1945–1948 (London: Random
House, 2004).
143
‘“Victory Over Japan”
Exhibition’, The Times, 21 August 1945, p. 6; 22
August 1945; 24 December 1945.
144
Quoted in Garfield, Our Hidden Lives, p.
82.
145
IWM MOI folder, CN2/1/GOV/65/1–18, letter
from Director IWM to H. Cecil Taylor, 24 August 1945.
146
Tools for British Civilian Use, an
exhibit consisting of 24 printed cards produced by the British MOI
in collaboration with the US OWI, illustrated the ‘enormous
production capacity of the United States during World War
Two’ 1942–5. US LOC LOT 4750G Tools for Civilian
Use.
147
US National Archives RG208 ‘Description
of Exhibit Unit Program’, 3 February 1943.
148
USNA, Maryland: OWI 208-EX (records of OWI/ the
historian relating to the Domestic Branch 1942–5), Box 3,
Entry 6A.
149
UOBDA F. H. K. Henrion collection.
150
LOC LOT 9445 G, American Types.
151
LOC LOT 9763 G, How America Lives.
152
Including Office of Emergency Management Wm.
Nelson (now OWI Gilmore); Bureau of Reclamation; Interior
Department; FSA’s Roy Stryker (now OWI); National Park
Service; Interior Dept; War Department; Department of Agriculture.
Images also came from the Feature Picture Section and Mr
Flynn’s News Picture Section of the Bureau of Overseas
Publications, OWI.
153
USNA, Maryland: OWI 208, entry no. 7, box no.
29, Office of Facts and Figures 1941–2.
154
LOC Prints and Photographs collection, LOT 8898
F Exhibit panels, posters, etc., produced under the auspices of the
US Farm Security Administration. Included in this file were
photographs of Herbert Bayer’s 1930 The New
Line.
155
TNA INF1/132 Memo: ‘Proposals for the
organisation of MOI Exhibitions in the USA and for the operation of
an exhibitions branch from New York’, 1941. American Division
had requested (Milner Gray memo 17 April 1941 NA INF 1/132) that the
MOI had a staff member solely responsible for keeping contact with
American exhibitions and sending small exhibits to America. These
duties were carried out by the Senior Assistant responsible for
distribution. See also David A. Lincove, ‘The British Library
of Information in New York: A Tool of British Foreign Policy,
1919–1942’, Libraries &
the Cultural Record, vol. 46, no. 2, 2011, pp. 156–84.
156
‘War-Time Shapes. Ministry of
Information’s New York Exhibition’, Art and
Industry, April 1942, pp. 94–7.
157
LOC LC-USW 3–19418-E.
158
LOC LC-USW 3–31093-C and USNA
RG208.
159
USNA RG208 785063, letter from Robert Carson to
Robert R. Ferry, 1 June 1943.
160
LOC LOT 5490 F.
161
LOC LOT 8426.
162
LOC Prints and Photographs collection, LOT 7312,
no. 1.
163
LOC Prints and Photographs collection, LC
– USW 3–31090_C.
164
USNA RG208 Box 3 Entry 6A 735006.
165
USNA RG208 785063, ‘Exhibits –
Pacific Show’.
166
USNA RG208 785063, ‘Unclassified to
Bourne Washington from Stoffel Paris’.
167
Turner, ‘The Family of Man and the
Politics of Attention’, p. 62.
168
Kallmann, ‘The Wartime
Exhibition’, p. 106.
169
Turner, The Democratic Surround, pp.
102–9.
170
Monroe Wheeler, ‘A Note on the
Exhibition’, The Bulletin of the Museum
of Modern Art, vol. 9, nos. 5–6, June 1942, pp. 18–20.
172
Turner, The Democratic Surround, p.
104.
173
America Marches was illustrated in Art
and Industry, 1952, p. 112. There is a sequence of photos in
IWM’s D series D13797 etc. America Marches travelled as far
as Australia, as shown in USNA RG208 Progress Report, May
1944.
174
Kallmann, ‘The Wartime
Exhibition’, p. 97.
175
Front cover of Display and Signs,
February 1945, from the Brussels Bon Marché store.
176
Richard Hollis interview with F. H. K. Henrion
in 1986 Imperial War Museum Catalogue 9592/
1986–11–12: www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/80009378, REEL
2.
177
Franklin D. Roosevelt Annual Message to
Congress, January 6, 1941; Records of the United States Senate; SEN
77A-H1; Record Group 46; National Archives.
178
Editorial, ‘Is British Art
Fighting?’, Art and Industry, April 1942, p.
89.
179
Herbert Read, ‘Is British Art
Fighting?’, Art and Industry, July 1942, pp.
2–4.
180
For Liberty catalogue, p. 2.
181
Catalogue, p. 5.
182
BL, AIA Bulletin no. 81, January
1944.
183
Martin, Editor.
184
Reverse side of MOI distributed ‘For
Liberty’ photograph in Henrion collection, UOBDA.
185
Richard Hollis interview with F. H. K. Henrion
in 1986 Imperial War Museum Catalogue 9592/
1986–11–12: www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/80009378.
186
Kallmann, ‘The Wartime
Exhibition’, p. 103.
187
Display, April 1943.
188
Kallmann, ‘The Wartime
Exhibition’, p. 100.
189
In the same year as For Liberty, Henrion
was commissioned to paint classroom murals for the Thorncliffe works
college, Chapeltown, Sheffield, where Churchill tanks were built:
RIBA 72699–72704. Adrian Shaughnessy, FHK Henrion: The Complete Designer (London: Unit
Editions, 2013).
190
Catalogue, p. 12.
191
BL, AIA Bulletin, no. 81, January
1944.
192
Cecil Day-Lewis poem, 12 March 1943, was
reproduced in For Liberty’s exhibition catalogue, p.
12. Day-Lewis was also employed by MOI during the war.
193
Ariella Azoulay, The Civil
Contract of Photography (New York: Zone Books, 2008).
194
Wolff, The Aesthetics of Uncertainty, pp.
108, 111.
195
Display, April 1943, p. 5.
196
Peter Jones exhibition held from 14 December
1943 to 14 January 1944 was reported in AIA Bulletin, no. 81
and visitor numbers reported in ‘The First Ten Years’,
AIA Bulletin, no. 78, July 1943.
197
Jan Gordon, The Studio, November 1943, p.
163. For a further exploration of For Liberty, see Harriet
Atkinson and Jane Dibblin’s documentary film Art on the
Streets (2023).
198
Katy Deepwell, Women
Artists between the Wars: ‘A fair field and no
favour’ (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2010).
199
Kallmann, ‘The Wartime
Exhibition’, p. 98.
200
Dunnett and Stamp, Ernö
Goldfinger, p. 61.
201
‘Rebuilding Britain’,
Display, April 1943. S. P. Mackenzie, ‘The Coming
of ABCA, 1941–1942’, in Politics
and Military Morale: Current Affairs and Citizenship
Education in the British Army 1914–1950
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
202
Erin McKellar, ‘Living, Working, Playing:
Ernö Goldfinger’s Planning Exhibitions,
1943–46’, in Gaia Caramellino and Stephanie Dadour
(eds), The Housing Project: Discourse, Ideals,
Models and Politics in 20th Century Exhibitions
(Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2020).
203
Builder, 29 December 1944 (see Dunnett
and Stamp, Ernö Goldfinger, p. 61 and an image on p.
72).
204
Elwall, Ernö Goldfinger, p.
65.
205
Sketches for Cinema are held at RIBA GolEr/
401/4 ‘ABCA – Cinema’.
206
Kallmann, ‘The Wartime
Exhibition’, p. 104.
207
Kallmann, ‘The Wartime
Exhibition’, p. 106; Elwall, Ernö Goldfinger,
p. 61.
208
Referenced by F. R. Yerbury in Modern
Homes, 1947, p. 73.
209
TNA INF1/966, 17 April 1944.
210
Herbert Brush visited on Tuesday 22 May 1945;
Garfield, Our Hidden Lives, p. 29.
211
Kate Berridge, Madame
Tussaud: A Life in Wax (New York: W. Morrow, 2006).
212
Janina Struk, Photographing
the Holocaust: Interpretations of the Evidence
(London: I. B. Tauris, 2004), p.56.
213
Display, August 1942, p. 76 and
Display, August 1943, p. 50. Manufacturers included Gems
Ltd and Stagg Display, Birmingham.
214
Baudrillard famously gave the example of
Disneyland to demonstrate the function of the third order of
simulacra and the production of a hyperreality that lets us believe
that we can tell reality from representation, the real from the
imaginary and the copy from its original; Simulacra and Simulation (London: Semiotext(e),
1981).
215
Display, August 1943, p. 50.
216
Quoted in Charmian Brinson and Richard Dove
(eds), Working for the War Effort: German-Speaking Exiles in the
Performing Arts in Britain after 1933 (Elstree: Valentine
Mitchell, 2021).