This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.
Political grandstanding has consumed parts of the contemporary art world in recent years. In some quarters, abstract activist concerns, often phrased as “anti-fascism”, have overshadowed aesthetic production. This feels both like a consequence of the culture wars, but also a phenomenon novel in intensity and focus.
As is often the case, art history holds a precedent. The campaigning activities of Artists’ International Association (AIA), founded in 1933 in London, far outstripped even the best-coordinated actions of today’s art world. Constituted by the designer Misha Black and a small group of artists including Pearl Binder and Clifford Rowe, AIA’s membership quickly reached over a thousand and included many luminaries of British art.
The Association’s activities involved large exhibitions, extensive community organising and prolific propagandistic publishing. Yet the group’s work is all but forgotten today. Comrades in Art, an ambitious survey at Towner in Eastbourne accompanied by a new book by curator Andy Friend, reanimates AIA’s intense activism. It calls into question the very link between art and grand politics, which AIA’s work helped to define.
AIA started out as a radical Left grouping. The book illustrator Binder had visited Russia in the early 1930s, as did Rowe, whose work with the London Communist Party landed him a job in Moscow. Both were inspired by the social status the Soviets reserved for artists in the advocacy for workers’ empowerment and international revolutionary solidarity.
That depression-era Britain had few employment opportunities for its creative workforce only amplified the sentiment. Friend’s project doesn’t dwell in shallow parallels between those conditions and ours, but the correspondence is inescapable.
Rowe’s mural-sized painting The Struggle Between the Unemployed and the Police Forces (1932-33), which frames the exhibition, depicts a London street battle, with the masses demanding “bread and work”.
The artist made this canvas for a Red Army exhibition from newspaper reports of the National Hunger March. This could serve as a conceptual manifesto for the early AIA. The concern was class struggle and its rising authoritarian repression.
The aesthetic mixed British pictorial traditions with internationalist agitprop. The resulting work held its subject in close regard, yet secondary to a desire to reorganise society in the image of the artist.
In Eastbourne, a series of 1933 lithographs by James Boswell, which depict London consumed by civil war, betray the conflict at the core of AIA’s progressive-revolutionary fantasy. The communist dream soon became entangled with the fear of civilisational peril. AIA’s most notable exhibition, Artists Against Fascism and War, brought together 179 practitioners and opened in 1935 against a darkening political climate.
This artistic project was underwritten by AIA’s original members alongside the likes of Duncan Grant, Eric Gill and Henry Moore. Inevitably, not all the work in that show shared an overtly propagandist line. The call for entries noted the relationship between “Fascism and Culture” but asked merely for “sympathy” with AIA’s aims.
By 1935, however, the variety of responses to the tide sweeping through Italy and Germany by artists from diverse aesthetic traditions gave way to consensus propagated through international networks.
This alone is remarkable: the scale of the art world’s itinerant exchanges (Binder attended a Paris congress earlier in the year, for example) is hard to comprehend given that the ubiquitous art biennial is a 21st century phenomenon.
Perhaps akin to the original exhibition, the Artists Against Fascism section at Towner leaves the viewer a little unsure about what, precisely, made some of the works anti-fascist. The mix of styles and subjects appears unrestrained.
Counterintuitively it is some of the abstract and surrealist work that draws attention — and not always congruently with the project’s stated aims, either. John Piper, whose 1934 oil and sand Abstract Construction is more intriguing than many of the representational works near it, was not a fan of political “group programmes”, for example, and his rationale for joining AIA may have been a little self-serving.
Paul Nash’s remarkable 1929 English coast landscape Event on the Downs, meanwhile, more readily inspires national sentiment today than its peacenik counterpart.
AIA staged multiple shows in later years, including post-war, and the clash of content and framing became even more puzzling. Towner hangs Rowe’s 1936 drably English The Fried Fish Shop interior (with Stalin) near Ithel Colquhoun’s surreal spellbinding geometrical Dance of the Nine Opals.
At this point, even a visitor indifferent to the plethora of archival pamphlets and posters on display turns to them for help in interpreting art’s role in the anti-fascist effort. The central conceit behind both AIA’s activities and the survey becomes clear as the display gratuitously includes a quotation from … the present UN Secretary-General, António Guterres.
This is not quite a gotcha: how would one argue with artists opposing war in 1935, or blame them for failing to stop it in 2026? The curatorial impulse to signal an ethical position where the work itself does not do so recasts artistic activism as a non-aesthetic pursuit, confusing the effect art has on politics with the influence of politics on artists. The ambition of AIA’s mass activism is humbling. But its forgetting should be a bitter lesson to self-proclaimed art campaigners.
Comrades in Art continues at Towner, Eastbourne, until 18 October. The book of the same title is published by Thames and Hudson (£40)
