Art, Architecture and Visual Culture
Chapter 1 provides the pretext to the ways in which exhibitions began to be used as propaganda from 1933, exploring how the British government had used exhibitions for promoting trade and industry and as acts of diplomacy earlier in the twentieth century, with mixed success. The chapter traces the varying routes through which exhibition designers learnt skills for the job: in training, apprenticeships, and art and architecture schools in Britain, including through the arrival in London of the German Reimann School, offering specific courses on exhibition and display design.
The conclusion considers where this form of exhibition ended up after 1953, as the Cold War intensified, suggesting that while the programme of international exhibitions continued as the focus for ‘soft power’ and diplomatic exchanges, exhibitions fell out of favour for communicating with domestic audiences. It finishes by reflecting on the significance of incomers to Britain in shaping this form and how this form may also have had significance in shaping their lives.
Chapter 5 focuses on the culture of counter-exhibitions that developed in Britain as political arguments during the 1930s, analysing two examples: the Workers’ Empire Exhibition, mounted by anti-empire campaigners in Glasgow in 1938 as a direct critique of the Glasgow Empire Exhibition, and Twentieth Century German Art, mounted in London by a group of anti-fascist campaigners as a direct response to the Nazi degenerate art exhibitions.
Chapter 4 explores how the definition of ‘exhibitions’ became stretched during the 1930s so that they operated as strategic forms of public ‘demonstration’, intersecting with wider protest cultures in Britain, at a time when permissible public activities were severely limited. This form was taken up by two groups in particular: anti-fascist and anti-imperialist group the Artists International Association (AIA), formed in 1933, and the pacifist Cambridge Anti-War Council, who created impactful exhibitions for demonstrating peace, incorporating a number of forms and materials, including the emerging pictogram language of Isotype developed by Otto and Marie Neurath. The AIA regularly described their exhibitions as ‘demonstrations’, using them as playful ways of appropriating space at a time when many public behaviours were closely guarded by British legislation.
Chapter 3 discusses how exhibitions operated as Modernist manifestos in Britain, intended to draw audiences into a vivid visual and textual engagement with their work and ideas. The chapter focuses on three ‘manifesto exhibitions’ in Britain: the Unit One Exhibition mounted by the Unit One group in 1934, the International Surrealist Exhibition mounted by the Surrealist group in 1936 and the Exhibition of the Elements of Modern Architecture mounted by the Modern Architectural Research Group (or MARS) in 1938. Each of these groups used exhibitions as ways of demonstrating their future vision and staging their transitional identities in three dimensions. Exhibitions offered hybrid visual-textual-spatial forms for promotion and self-proclamation. The chapter indicates how the text-heavy ‘story-telling’ form of exhibition developed to create the blueprint for wartime exhibitions.
Chapter 2 focuses on exhibitions’ increasing use in Britain from 1933 to 1939 as propaganda for promoting diverse ideas and agendas, by official bodies and activist groups, as a means of ‘manufacturing consent’ through non-coercive means. Many of them were mounted at Charing Cross Underground Station ticket hall. Government bodies such as the General Post Office and London Passenger Transport Board took them up for promotional purposes. Through a range of examples, the chapter shows how exhibitions were used for projection and promotion, for sharing policy and for agitating for political change on issues including substandard housing and poor air quality. Exhibition design was principally shaped by refugee and migrant artists and designers from diverse contexts, many of whom arrived in Britain during the 1930s.
Chapter 6 traces how exhibitions mounted in Britain from the 1930s became the focus for solidarities: providing a shared project and denoting fellow membership of particular groupings. Exhibitions brought a focus and a conduit for such solidarity: providing a voice to newly arriving refugees, becoming the focus for connections and convivialities between individuals that allowed them to form cohesive social contacts at a time when they were rebuilding their lives in new locations and allowing artists to signal connection with causes and people near and far, across time. Particular alignments included aid to Spain during the Spanish Civil War, support for political and religious refugees, support for people living under fascism, aid to the Soviet Union and aid to China.
Chapter 7 explores how exhibitions became weapons for war through the Ministry of Information’s programme, which aimed to supplement other campaigns by mounting exhibitions teaching practical skills and to inspire pride, intending to create patriotic and responsible citizens through them, in audiences at home and in ally countries.
This chapter proposes that in the immediate postwar period, exhibitions funded through the public purse operated as welfare, supporting and instructing the British population, initially through the Ministry of Information, subsequently the newly constituted Central Office of Information. It analyses exhibitions’ role in the period immediately following the war as a communications medium supporting government processes of domestic postwar recovery and reconstruction and the development of the British welfare state. Government exhibitions also explained investment in the national nuclear programme and excused processes and transitions of decolonisation. In the immediate postwar period, the British government also continued to use exhibitions to connect with foreign audiences: as vehicles of ‘soft power’, to project an identity as model social democracy, in preparation for a new type of global conflict in the form of the Cold War and to recalibrate Britain’s standing on the world stage, despite waning international influence. Through exhibitions, the government created a presentation of Britain’s unity in diversity, compelling home audiences to engage with ‘British’ values in an increasingly uncertain world.
The introduction sets out the book’s parameters, explaining its timescale as 1933 to 1953; introducing the key ways in which exhibitions were used in Britain and key terminology developed in the book; discussing theoretical debates and historical contexts; and explaining the particular framing, research processes and key evidence drawn on.