In the 1952 article ‘Exhibitions: In or Out?’ designer Milner Gray reviewed the current state of exhibition design, noting, with sadness, fewer exhibitions being made and those that were being marked by ‘a quite surprising dreariness’ and ‘emptiness’.¹ After nearly two decades of innovation in the forms and possibilities of this ‘strangely rewarding’ medium, Gray noted the ‘threatened extinction’ of story-telling exhibitions: ‘the boil has burst and the bailiffs are in’.² Several things had precipitated this end, Gray thought: the expense of creating exhibitions and, more importantly, designers’ urge to over-complicate with ‘architectural fiddlesticks’, which was ‘getting in the way of the story’.³ Gray’s sentiments were shared by his close collaborator Misha Black, who observed exhibition designers getting so carried away with their love of design trickery for its own sake that display forms had become untethered from the specific problem to be solved.⁴

Despite this sense of foreboding from Black and Gray, the end was not up for propaganda exhibitions: Misha Black’s survey Exhibition Design of 1950 showed such exhibitions thriving across trade, industry, agricultural and international contexts.⁵ Black, who had built his early career through designing international exhibitions, from his work on the Rio Tinto stand at the 1929 Ibero-American Exposition in Seville onwards, contributing elements to the 1938 Glasgow Empire Exhibition and the 1939 New York World’s Fair, continued to lead the design of British contributions to multiple international exhibitions after World War Two. These included the 1952 Colombo Plan Exhibition, where Black acted as consultant to the government of a newly independent Ceylon, designing the United Kingdom Pavilion and South East Asian Territories Pavilion. He designed the UK Pavilion at the 1953 Rhodes Centenary Exhibition in Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia (still under British colonial rule), exhibits for the Tenth Triennale in Milan, a vast exhibit on Power for Progress for the British Industry Pavilion at Brussels Expo 58 and exhibitions in Mexico and Israel as consultant to UNESCO, which from its inception in 1946 had a lively programme of exhibitions, with one of their first addressing the question of human rights.⁶

As the Cold War intensified, exhibitions became a way of the British government engaging across national borders, acting as the focus for fraught exchanges between opposing powers and platforms for international diplomacy, as many recent accounts show.⁷ Biennials and triennials, with their capacity to reconfigure global geographies and to support new regional cultural collaborations, were also gaining momentum in this period. Allowing for the ‘production of locality’, to use anthropologist Arjun Appadurai’s phrase, these international art events were becoming useful sites for creating local identities in the face of cultural centrism.⁸ The Bureau International des Expositions (BIE), formed in 1931 as the intergovernmental organisation in charge of overseeing and regulating World Expos, continues to guide Britain’s regular contributions to exhibitions, biennials and triennials to this day.⁹

By 1953, the end of the period of this book, exhibitions had been used for two decades in Britain as domestic propaganda, for public communication of messages by activist groups and by the government. While the culture of international expos was booming, by the mid-1950s exhibitions were far less frequently used by the British government for conveying political and economic information to home audiences. This was symptomatic of the increasing specialisation of government communication means, with print and broadcast forms identified as more useful and appropriate for conveying political and economic information, as critic Raymond Williams identified in his landmark study Television: Technology and Cultural Form.¹⁰ Public interest in visiting such exhibitions was waning too. As a mode of mass domestic communication, exhibitions had already been found wanting: often unable to connect with the public in the way their makers had intended, appearing lofty, esoteric or patronising, overly verbose, excessively directive and only allowing for limited numbers of viewings on small and dispersed sites.

Some designers, such as Clifford Hatts, attributed exhibition’s decline as a medium for mass domestic communication in the postwar world to the advent of mass television-watching by the British public, with television recognised as the more ‘successful’ communicative medium, having a ‘condensed clarity’ lacking in exhibitions.¹¹ Hatts’s belief in television related to his decades of design work across the two media, building his early career working on exhibitions through Misha Black and Milner Gray’s highly acclaimed practice, Design Research Unit, including on the Festival of Britain. Then, in the mid-1950s, Hatts had moved to work as a BBC TV designer, joining exhibition designer Richard Levin who had been appointed the BBC’s Head of Design in 1953. In his book Television by Design of 1961, Levin proposed that the distinction between television and any other form of communication ‘the world has ever known’ was in its being linked by networks.¹²

Many others whose early careers had been built through commercial exhibition design, including Misha Black and Milner Gray, also took on design work for television, as part of the mixed ecology of their multi-disciplinary design practices. But most showed a continuing engagement with ideas of ‘integration’, the complementary possibilities offered by different media that had so intrigued László Moholy-Nagy in his writings of the 1930s (as discussed in the Introduction). This was an interest that continued to preoccupy designer F. H. K. Henrion, as indicated in his 1956 speech ‘Design for Television’, which outlined the multiple roles available to designers for enhancing television as visual medium; in his admiration for US multi-media designer Will Burtin’s postwar exhibitions about everyday life for the United States Information Agency; and in Henrion’s continuing experimentation with the relationships between two- and three-dimensional design.¹³

Exhibitions as the ‘beehive of creativity’

Many major contributors to shaping exhibitions’ use across all of the moments of this book had a common status as incomers to Britain. This is no coincidence: these exhibitions, operating outside of the established cultural institutions and mounted in Underground stations, village halls and on bombsites, mirrored the displaced status of their makers, untethered by war from networks and institutions in their places of origin. This form of exhibition was created in the crucible of exile, providing the ‘beehive of creativity’ that Czech-born philosopher Vilém Flusser, himself a wartime refugee to Britain, had described as surrounding the expellee, with their urge to synthesise ‘new information’.¹⁴ Exhibitions, for many of these newly arriving artists and designers, had operated initially as nodes of resistance and social connectors, offering the focus for interventions into contemporary discourse and providing a training ground for work in multi-disciplinary practice.

Ultimately exhibitions provided the bridge to new life and work, either in the United Kingdom or at another remove. In a 1967 essay, Misha Black wrote at length about his, by then, four decades of design practice, citing his experience of working on the 1951 Festival of Britain exhibitions as creative, extraordinarily formative indicative structures for collective working.¹⁵

It may seem ironic that the archetypally patriotic work of creating national propaganda at the heart of government was largely led by recent arrivals in Britain. Identifying what such designers contributed develops our understanding of British visual culture as characterised by diversity over a long period. This is one of the motivating ideas that has driven and shaped my writing of this book.

The fact that this kind of propaganda exhibition in Britain has remained largely invisible, written out of historical accounts, except when seen as a critical mass in the Festival of Britain, is partly a reflection of the perception of such cultural forms as of low status. The lack of remaining evidence should not deter us, however, from reconsidering these exhibitions as integral to British art, design and visual cultures in the tumultuous twenty years from 1933 to 1953 that are the focus of this book. They allow additional insights into the extended creativity of the documentary movement in Britain and into aspects of political culture ‘from below’ that have largely been overlooked. They provide a vivid index to concerns, debates and wider social and cultural movements of the time, through alternative means, in their use across projection, promotion, policy and activism; as manifestos, demonstrations, counter-arguments, solidarities, warfare and welfare.

Evidence of the impact of these small events remains limited and piecemeal. As I have shown, this was often because exhibitions were only one element in a wider campaign or movement, because they were intended to be short-lived and immediate, because they happened outside archiving institutions or because the public response was muted and limited. As I complete this manuscript, which has been so long in the making, I am still making contact with people who can provide new pieces of the complex and time-consuming jigsaw from which this book has been created. It is possible that the exhibitions I have long assumed were undocumented may have fulsome archives in lofts, garages or even in prominent archives that somehow I have failed to find, but I will leave it to others to pursue them.