BOOKREVIEW: Comrades in Art: Artists against Fascism 1933-43
S. E. Anderson
by Andy Friend.
Thames & Hudson, 360 pp., £40, September 2025, 978 0 500 02741 7
Taking British Communist art seriously means, to a degree at least, taking British Communism seriously. This is difficult to do when looking at Viscount Hastings’s mural from 1935, The Worker of the Future Clearing Away the Chaos of Capitalism, in what is now the Marx Memorial Library in Clerkenwell. The library is a 1960s reconstruction of an 18th-century school, which by the early 20th century housed, among other things, the printing house of Iskra, the newspaper of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. ‘Lenin’s office’ still exists in a back room, though it is as fake as the library’s neo-Georgian façade. The mural, though, is authentic, and now dominates one wall of the main reading room. It is a confident if galumphing effort in the style of Mexican muralism, in which a supersized proletarian overturns St Paul’s Cathedral on one side and the Houses of Parliament on the other, while Lenin, William Morris, Marx, Engels, Robert Owen and a multitude of workers look on in approval.
The pedigree of the mural was impeccable – Hastings painted it with the assistance of the muralist Clifford Wight, and both men had worked with Diego Rivera in the US – but today it is as embarrassing as it is poignant. The worker’s burly shirtlessness and his anime eyes, the faux-naive style, the lack of even the slightest irony or awareness of its own ridiculousness – these all make the mural at once heroic and preposterous. It is fascinatingly alien – whenever I visit the library, I can’t keep my eyes off it – but its fundamental wrongness is a large part of that fascination. What’s more, there’s the rather different pedigree of its artist. As Andy Friend writes in his history of the golden age of British Communist art, ‘the Eton-educated Hastings’ was ‘a City stockbroker with Plantagenet forebears whose Mayfair residence, club and tailoring expenses were paid for by his father’, the 15th Earl of Huntingdon. He met Rivera in San Francisco in October 1931; both Hastings and Wight appear in a mural from 1931 at the California School of Fine Arts, The Making of a Fresco Showing the Building of a City. Comparing Rivera’s murals – or those of Siqueiros or Orozco, or Soviet painters such as Deineka or Pimenov, or German socialists like Käthe Kollwitz – with Hastings’s work tells you a lot about the failings of British Communism. This is the art of a lesser offspring, the failsons of the October Revolution, always overshadowed by the mass Communist parties of Europe, of Asia, of Latin America. It would seem impossible to take the British part in all this seriously.
But, as Friend shows, the British secret services disagreed. Comrades in Art begins with a letter intercepted by MI5, and what they made of it. It was sent, in December 1932, by the painter Clifford Rowe to the industrial designer Misha Black; in it Rowe suggested the formation of an ‘artist revolutionary union’ in London that might be able to serve alongside those formed in the Soviet Union. This letter, Friend suggests, was the starting point for Artists International, soon renamed the Artists International Association (AIA), which brought together Communist artists in a series of gallery exhibitions and political events. The AIA created the sort of art which has had critical manure heaped on it since the 1940s: realist, figurative, agitational, achingly sincere. It was a product of the sort of Communist culture that has been difficult to excavate since it was buried by George Orwell and his innumerable followers in the British intelligentsia, for whom the entire Communist episode was a criminal enterprise undertaken by middle-class cultists. The figures who were at the helm of the AIA – Misha Black, Pearl Binder, Clifford Rowe, James Holland, James Fitton, James Boswell, Betty Rea, Nan Youngman, Clive Branson – are largely forgotten. The first two may be known to aficionados of design and of children’s books and illustration, but the others, the painters and sculptors, had until recently all but disappeared from the canon of 20th-century British art. More traditionalist work from the period has, by contrast, been extensively excavated in recent years; there has been yet another raft of publications and exhibitions about the Bloomsbury Group, as well as renewed interest in Edward Bawden and Eric Ravilious. Friend’s previous books have included splashy illustrated tomes on Ravilious and on John Nash, but here he turns from figurative British artists in love with British tradition towards figurative British artists who wanted to destroy it. An exhibition of AIA work, also called Comrades in Art: Artists against Fascism, is being held at the Towner Gallery, Eastbourne, until 18 October.
Unlike the viscount, most of the AIA’s leading figures were from fairly humble backgrounds; rather than being upper-class hobbyists, most were upwardly mobile, with roots in the working or lower middle classes. Misha Black had been born in Baku into a relatively wealthy Jewish family, but came to Britain as a refugee from the pogroms of the late Russian Empire. Rowe’s father was a City clerk; he was raised by his aunt, who ran a corner shop. Binder was a tailor’s daughter from Salford; Boswell was a New Zealander whose father was a schoolteacher; James Holland’s father was a naval blacksmith at Chatham Dockyard. Most of them were educated at art colleges in the 1920s, early examples of the inestimable role in social mobility played by that now defunct network of schools. As Friend writes of the meeting in 1933 at which the AIA was officially founded, in Misha Black’s rooms in Little Earl Street, ‘no one in the room had been to Oxbridge; no one was in revolt – however temporary – against their adolescence at Eton or Harrow; none were members of avant-garde groups such as Paul Nash’s Unit One; and few had even the slenderest of savings to ride out the slump.’ As high-minded, educated, socially mobile, skilled people, the AIA founders were natural, typical British Communists, but at least half of them had the class credentials to match their politics. This wasn’t always noticed. Critics often assumed the group was made up of people like Hastings: in Left Review, a publication to which the AIA founders regularly contributed, Tom Wintringham wrote of its first group show in Charlotte Street that it showed ‘more real acquaintance with, more real feeling for, the working-class movement than for the working class itself’. This might have been because of closeness rather than distance. Even so, there were exceptions. The sculptor Betty Rea, the group’s secretary from 1935 on, had been ‘presented at court as a debutante’ and was a close friend of Ravilious.
‘The Struggle between the Unemployed and the Police Forces’ (1932-33) by Clifford Rowe.
The group’s core – Clifford Rowe, Pearl Binder and the ‘three Jameses’ – were frequent visitors to the Soviet Union in the 1930s. One of the group’s more impressive works, Rowe’s The Struggle between the Unemployed and the Police Forces (1932-33), was painted there, as a direct commission. These artists had all spent time in the USSR under Stalin without finding the experience particularly off-putting. That wasn’t true of some of their peers. David Bomberg, a far greater artist (his Ronda Bridge from 1935, reproduced here, leaps out from the page), would later exhibit with the AIA, but he was deeply unnerved by his own visit to the Soviet Union in the early 1930s and kept his distance from the Party. Others were perhaps flattered into acceptance – Binder, a talented lithograph artist and illustrator, one of the most sympathetic personalities in the group, was even granted her own show in the USSR – but more likely, as for so many people of their generation, these artists looked at a Depression-era Europe and North America brought low by poverty and brutality, heard it justified by appeals to the rules of market economics, perceived the possibility of a drift towards the even more violent settlement of fascism, and chose to believe that the Soviet Union was the antithesis of all this, as it said it was. Even at this distance, there’s a certain romance to it all, a world of people tailed by the secret services who seem always to be on boats to and from Leningrad, or on sleeper trains across the steppe, something animated here in Binder’s lithograph of a ‘Russian Railway Journey’, with its intertwined couple stuffed snugly into a couchette.
Friend, who became a historian of British interwar art having worked in local government and as an executive at the construction firm Laing, is perhaps an unlikely guide to these Marxist-Leninist painters, printers and sculptors. He thrives in the backrooms of art history, in the meetings, the minutes and the secret service archives, but there are moments when one doubts his commitment to these artists in particular. By the mid-1930s, the AIA, which at first had ambitions to be something like a trade union for artists, had fully embraced Popular Frontism in art, as specifically requested by its Soviet handlers. This causes Friend to lose some focus. The AIA’s exhibitions, often held in aid of, say, the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War, were essentially benefit gigs, for which works were canvassed from practically anyone of note in British modern art who wasn’t a fascist (roughly, everyone except for Wyndham Lewis). So there are long stretches of the book where the AIA founders fade from view and Friend reverts to the comfort zone of Ravilious, Vanessa Bell, Henry Moore et al, also bringing in formations that the AIA supported but did not create, such as the ‘Pitmen Painters’ of Ashington, County Durham. By 1939, when the AIA mounted an exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, Ravilious and Bawden were on the selection committee. Some who joined later were genuinely committed to the founders’ explicitly Communist original project – the Hungarian émigré concrete sculptor Peter Laszlo Peri, or the artist Felicia Browne, who would be killed fighting the fascists in Spain – but others got involved as a sort of charity work, donors to the cause rather than fighters for it.
‘Jewish Restaurant, Brick Lane’ (1931) by Pearl Binder.
Friend writes that the AIA has been quite poorly served by historians, ‘despite biographical and archival evidence that attests to participation at one time or another of a clear majority of the country’s leading artists in its collective endeavours’. There is one recent exception in Christine Lindey’s Art for All: British Socially Committed Art from the 1930s to the Cold War (2018). Published by Artery, a tiny socialist press, it is in Friend’s bibliography, but he doesn’t engage with it. This is a shame, as it is a much more coherent book. Lindey focuses on the AIA’s core painters and sculptors, has much less interest in the fellow travellers and donors, and brings in a slightly later generation of socialist artists based in Britain, such as the cartoonist Ken Sprague, the draughtsman Paul Hogarth, the émigré painters Eva Frankfurther and Josef Herman, and John Berger, the Daily Worker’s art critic and a lifelong enthusiast for a certain idea of socialist realism. Lindey’s book is unrepentantly Communist, and because of this takes more trouble to explain the AIA’s eventual eclipse, both because of the Cold War and the soft McCarthyism of 1950s Britain, and also, perhaps more significantly, the critical shift towards abstraction, Pop and a much less socially committed form of figuration under Auerbach, Bacon and Freud.
Eyes trained in recent decades to appreciate the non-revolutionary, semi-modernist English figuration of the likes of Ravilious may now be better able to appreciate the work of the AIA’s core members, which is formally conservative compared with, say, Soviet art of the 1920s, which the AIA artists were all too young to have taken on board – the likes of Lissitzky, Malevich, Popova or Rodchenko were all absent from their sense of what Communist art might be. Even so, their work was hardly insular: the Mexican muralists and the German Expressionists are especially clear influences, Kollwitz as much as Rivera. In a few instances, the art is terrific. Rowe’s The Struggle between the Unemployed and the Police Forces began as a commission for a Red Army exhibition on its fifteenth anniversary; the Soviets had requested a work representing ‘the English class struggle’. It is immediately more convincing than Hastings’s mural, with an electric energy and a real sense of the epic: the event it refers to – an unemployed workers’ demonstration in November 1932 which ended in a battle with the police – did not turn out to have been an early shot in the British revolution, but you might, looking at the painting, believe that it had. Some of its excitement comes from mild cheating: the riot actually took place in Hyde Park, but Rowe moves it a mile up Piccadilly to Trafalgar Square, giving the scene a ferocious, crackling urbanism, a dream, never thus far fulfilled, of revolution breaking out in the centres of imperial capitalist power.
Pearl Binder, best known as an illustrator and children’s book writer (she helped found Puffin Books, by sharing her collection of Soviet children’s books with the Penguin editor Noel Carrington), is revealed here as an important artist. Her prints are excellent, particularly her atmospheric, highly personal lithograph scenes of Jewish life in the East End. Their hint of German Expressionism can also be found in the work of James Boswell, as in his series of lithographs The Fall of London, though they lack Binder’s eccentric eye. Meanwhile, the industrial landscapes celebrated as harbingers of the socialist future in the Soviet painting of the time are rendered, in James Holland’s With a Ladder and Some Glasses – on the often neglected subject of industrial London – as scenes of capitalist misery. Much of Boswell’s satirical work, which usually takes aim at the English upper classes (His Majesty’s Servants, Empire Builders, You Gotta Have Blue Blood), resembles George Grosz without the horror or the sex.
There is a trace of Dada savagery in some of the work by artists in the AIA core, for example Rowe’s poster from 1935 on the occasion of George V’s jubilee, which underscored the image of a crowned skull, its mouth dripping blood, with the words ‘25 YEARS OF WAR HUNGER UNEMPLOYMENT’. But mostly this is rather polite art. One of the group’s greatest successes was the Everyman Prints, a series of lithographs offered for sale at affordable prices in the early years of the war. Some of these have a lot of charm – as in James Holland’s Newsreel, in which a shadowy crowd watch a film showing a painted ‘French hussy’ kissing a greatcoated soldier – but taken together, they look like nothing so much as the future décor of Communist schoolteachers’ living rooms.
Although some AIA artists had a wobble during the Nazi-Soviet Pact, for the most part their work was firmly committed to the war effort – with mixed results, as in the cartoonish realism of Carel Weight’s Blitz painting It Happened to Us!, or the chocolate-box socialist realism of Nan Youngman’s Gleaning at Godmanchester. Even here there are some exceptions. The painting that most closely matches Rowe’s Struggle is Clive Branson’s Bombed: Women and Searchlights (1940), a kaleidoscopic image of technology, war and human forbearance, like a Léger raised on Spam and long, dark winters. Perhaps because Lindey concentrates on the AIA’s postwar work, Friend ends the book at the AIA’s high-water mark, the exhibition For Liberty, which was held in the bombed-out ruins of John Lewis, off Oxford Street, in 1943. We don’t learn much about what happened afterwards, bar the telling fact that Misha Black was decades later given a knighthood; he preferred not to draw attention to his one-time role in organising the London branch of an artistic Comintern.
By the same token, Friend seems keen to downplay the extent of the AIA’s Stalinism. He enlists two works by Rowe as evidence that his apparently full-throated support for the Soviet Union in the 1930s was actually rather ambiguous. One is a sketch, Lenin and the Peasants, made during the cataclysmic famine that was inflicted on Ukraine, south-western Russia and Kazakhstan in 1932-33 (which Rowe may, or may not, have witnessed). Peasants sit around a table beneath a statue of Lenin; their table is bare. See? The other is a curious canvas from 1936 called The Fried Fish Shop, ostensibly an extremely English realist urban scene of the sort the Euston Road School would soon specialise in. Friend, drawing on the arguments of Rowe’s son-in-law, claims that the painting is a parody of the CPGB, with the man behind the counter of the chip shop modelled on Harry Pollitt, and the man eating chips at the centre of the painting a caricature of Stalin. If this is true – and there’s little evidence it is – it’s unclear whether Rowe intended the painting as a critical commentary or not. In any case, London in the 1930s wasn’t Moscow, and there was no need to smuggle Aesopian meanings and ambiguities into paintings. Similarly, we’re told that Hastings’s use of Lenin but not Stalin in his mural for the Marx Memorial Library was politically pointed and deliberate, though the Stalin cult was then only in its earlier, milder stages in the USSR itself. (No doubt, however, the choice of Lenin over Stalin has helped secure the mural’s continued survival and popularity.)
The links between the AIA and the USSR were real, if sometimes marked by mutual incomprehension. Friend quotes officials of the International Bureau of Revolutionary Artists in Moscow advising Binder and her group to make contact, in the Popular Front manner, with ‘well-known artists’ (which they did); to ‘establish close contact with the colonies’ (which they did not, though AIA artists after the war did better in this regard); and to ‘prepare now for Fascist repression by using different addresses,’ which showed a lack of awareness of how much easier life was for British – as compared to, say, German or Austrian – Communists. The right-wing press, in its reviews of AIA exhibitions, loudly refused to be ‘duped’ by the Popular Frontist ‘ruse’. The AIA’s exhibition Unity of Artists for Peace, Democracy and Cultural Development in 1937 was, according to the headline in the Sunday Dispatch, a ‘RED GALLERY OF HORRORS insulting Union Jack’, while the Daily Mail considered that its ‘promotion of peace and liberty for artists conceals a strong attempt to attack one political creed, Fascism, and to defend another, Communism’. That this was the AIA’s project was no more a secret than the Mail’s enthusiasm for the Blackshirts, though Popular Frontism did necessitate a degree of plausible deniability.
‘Bombed: Women and Searchlights’ (1940) by Clive Branson.
In Friend’s account, one problem with transforming the coterie of Communists and fellow travellers that made up the original AIA into a Popular Front of artists was the core group’s vehement views as to what did and did not constitute a popular, socialist art. Most of them were contemptuous of Surrealism, Constructivism and any other contemporary current in art that Herbert Read might have organised an exhibition about. In 1936, when the first Surrealist exhibition in London was held, Boswell made a caricature of wealthy snobs in their finery gliding into the gallery, noses in the air, and photomontaged onto it a catalogue statement by Read in which he made grand claims for the Surrealists’ revolutionary politics. This was unfair, not least because the AIA’s strategy for raising money was to attract exactly this sort of person to their own exhibitions. Picasso was held in disdain: some AIA artists, and AIA-linked critics such as Anthony Blunt, maintained that Guernica was a lesser work of political art than their own efforts. This is an enduring embarrassment, and points to something important about the often literalist tenor of AIA art. What Guernica did, like the Soviet art of the 1920s, was demonstrate that you could be artistically and politically ‘progressive’ at the same time: that you could use the formal innovations and distortions of extreme modernism as an intensifier of the horrors and struggles of anti-fascism – and that if you did so, people would understand you.
Comrades in Art is published at a time when figurative easel painting is somewhat fashionable, especially work from the interwar years. The Charleston-Ravilious cult is evidence of this, but so too is an increased interest in the art of the New Deal, in the Harlem Renaissance and the subsequent tradition of ‘Black figuration’, and in the critical rehabilitation of those American socialist artists, such as Alice Neel, who did not turn to abstraction when realism’s star faded. As well as Comrades in Art, Thames & Hudson recently published John P. Murphy’s New Deal Art, which makes a passionate case for the once scorned, state-sponsored socialist art of 1930s America. One of its practitioners, Arshile Gorky, who painted murals for LaGuardia Airport, would later describe New Deal art as ‘poor art for poor people’. The links between the AIA and socialist artists in the US lead Friend into long, lavishly illustrated digressions on figures like Stuart Davis, Ben Shahn and Hugo Gellert. What is particularly interesting here is the light shed on the ways in which the Cold War and state funding affected artists’ trajectories.
The great mural-painting projects of the 1930s in the US were owed not just to the efforts of activist groups and Communist enthusiasts, but also to enormous state sponsorship, organised through the ‘alphabet agencies’ of the New Deal – the likes of the Works Progress Administration, Federal Art Project and the Public Works Administration. The artists were put to work on hundreds of murals and posters across the country. In the UK, as Friend notes, equivalent clients were thin on the ground: two were public – London Transport and the General Post Office – and one private, the poster programme of Shell-Mex. There was no national public programme under Macdonald, Baldwin or Chamberlain to support artists and give them public commissions, as there was under Roosevelt. But this brief era ended in the US, undermined politically – by constant and eventually successful right-wing lobbying against New Deal ‘boondoggles’ – and then aesthetically by the rise of Abstract Expressionism, which came about not least because as state funding dried up, New Deal-linked artists such as Gorky, Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock were forced to turn to private buyers, and to make work not for public spaces but for commercial galleries.
‘The Fried Fish Shop’ (1936) by Clifford Rowe.
The mid-1930s was the peak of public socialist art in the US, while in the UK it remained marginal. But after the war, large increases in arts spending and public commissioning meant that some of the AIA artists were, Cold War notwithstanding, able to work on a much greater scale, with the likes of Peter Laszlo Peri carving and casting entire sculptural complexes on council estates, and in schools and universities. Many influential critics – not just Blunt and Berger, but also the wholly non-Marxist Kenneth Clark – favoured a modern realism, including a 20th-century version of figuration, as the proper art of a welfare state, as opposed to anything from the Dada, Surrealist or Constructivist tradition. This way of thinking is reflected in the collections of so many British municipal art galleries. When a shift took place, not solely to abstraction but also to the Pop of Paolozzi, Hamilton and Boty, it was because of a change in aesthetic, not political, allegiances. Those who switched from realism to high modernism – Victor Pasmore, for instance – did not repudiate their earlier socialist beliefs, and often still took social commissions after their change of style, as in Pasmore’s abstract murals and sculptures for civic centres and council estates.
AIA art was made in response to distressingly familiar challenges: fascism, war and a capitalism that was demonstrably failing to raise living standards for the majority. Friend accordingly wants to make contemporary connections, to suggest that the present has something to learn from the anti-fascist art of ninety years ago. That’s as may be. There are many different ways to make political art, and AIA’s way was in some respects limited and parochial, though also sincere and robust. At this distance, what seems most sharply apparent, as with so much second-rate art, is the degree to which it is rooted in its time. So much of this painting is Bovril and soot and Lyons tea houses, artefacts of a disappeared industrial, homogeneous, class-ridden Britain, yet which occupies spaces – like Clifford Rowe’s Trafalgar Square – that we can still recognise. At one point, Friend compares James Boswell’s The Lonely Heart, a line-drawn cartoon of a corpulent upper-class woman, sunk into ennui, with Patrick Hamilton novels such as The Midnight Bell or The Plains of Cement, and this is much more apposite than comparisons to Stuart Davis or Diego Rivera, let alone Picasso. Elizabeth Spurr’s Everyman Print Washing Day, with its powerfully built working-class woman at the washing line, could be Winston and Julia’s view out of their window on a miserable day in Airstrip One. The AIA artists were in many respects admirable: these were the people who rang the alarm while England slumbered, through the disasters that overtook Berlin in 1933, Vienna in 1934, Barcelona and Addis Ababa and Shanghai in 1937. But there is a reason, beyond politics, that their art has had to be rescued from the condescension of art historians. ///
s. e. anderson
author of The Black Holocaust for Beginners
"If WORK was good for you, the rich would leave none for the poor." (Haiti)
--------------------------------------------