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PORTSIDE CULTURE

HOW ARTISTS RESISTED FASCISM A CENTURY AGO  
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Louis Bury
September 19, 2025
Art in America
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_ This book is a portrait of the World War II-era antifascist
movement in Britain among artists. _

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Comrades in Art
Artists Against Fascism 1933-1943
Andy Friend, Frances Spalding
Thames & Hudson
ISBN-13: 9780500027417

In the early 1930s, frustrated with bank closures, steep pay cuts, and
hunger marches, a group of British artists banded together over
socialist ideologies as well as propagandistic goals. Most founders of
what would become Artists International Association (AIA)—Pearl
Binder, Clifford Rowe, Misha Black, James Fitton, James Boswell, James
Holland, Edward Ardizzone, Peter Laszlo Peri, and Edith Simon—had
working class backgrounds; all were staggered by the Depression.
Binder and Rowe in particular had separate experiences living in the
USSR, where they were exposed to workers’ cooperatives that helped
them imagine alternative ways to organize labor. As one artist
(Holland) put it, British artists at this time were “faced with a
choice of a cut-throat competition for what crumbs of patronage
remained or using their abilities to discredit a system that makes art
and culture dependent on the caprices of money markets.”

 
This Communist-inflected founding ethos, however, soon faced a problem
of scale, as Andy Friend describes during his new book _Comrades in
Art: Artists Against Fascism, 1933–1943._ The group originally
called itself Artists International and, in the words of founding
member James Boswell, served as “a mixture of agit-prop body,
Marxist discussion group, exhibitions and anti-war, anti-fascist
outfit.” But as its membership increased, and the threat of fascism
escalated, the group rebranded in 1935 to Artists International
Association, in an effort to garner wider, more ideologically
heterogeneous support. Friend explains how the American Artists
Congress, a US Communist arts organization founded in 1936, made a
similar decision to “elevat coalition-building above generation of a
distinctively proletarian culture,” opting for anti-fascism more
than overt Communism. Dissenting members of both organizations felt
this big tent approach risked watering down their core values.

 
These contentious decisions about organizational mission rhyme with
early 21st-century debates about the extent to which leftist movements
should make concessions to mainstream liberal politics. Yet here and
elsewhere, Friend wisely avoids drawing any parallels to the present,
preferring instead to tell an all-trees-no-forest story about AIA and
its times. This approach may disappoint readers in search of pat
takeaways about how artists today might resist reactionary power. But
the biggest lesson isn’t about how to exercise individual or
collective agency in the face of vast political forces; it’s about
how strong the desire for normalcy can be, especially during unusual
times.

No episode in the book highlights this desire more than AIA’s 1940
annual members exhibition, themed “The Face of Britain.” The
London exhibition was planned to open on September 13, but on
September 7, Germany began a bombing campaign of the city; The Blitz
lasted for several months. Friend describes how, soon after the
campaign commenced, two bombs “crashed through the gallery roof,
setting its parquet floor alight, damaging some paintings and forcing
a week’s delay.” Despite the damage, four AIA members “working
through dangers… nevertheless managed to hang the show.” Following
through on the install under such circumstances feels less like
bravery and more like a delayed shock response after a serious
accident, as when a bloodied driver calmly tries to exchange car
insurance information while wondering why witnesses are imploring him
to seek medical treatment.

 
Throughout _Comrades in Art,_ AIA spends enough time planning and
hanging exhibitions that a cynical reader might wonder if their
anti-fascist activities amounted to much else. But during the book’s
war years, Friend quotes Britons expressing gratitude that, despite
dire conditions, cultural life persists through art, albeit in
curtailed forms. In both London and the rest of the country, the early
1940s saw a surprise “strengthening of popular interest in art.”
Friend attributes this interest not only to a confluence of
“material factors”—shops with bare shelves, fewer restaurants,
no professional sports—but also an “existential” factor: “life
had never been so uncertain, so potentially ephemeral and, amid
personal danger, was being lived with a hitherto unknown intensity.”
Now that’s something art can help with.

Friend describes AIA as curiously overlooked, despite evidence that
“a clear majority of the country’s leading artists in its
collective endeavors.” Prominent international artists—Pablo
Picasso, Stuart Davis, Diego Rivera—make cameos in his book. But
unlike many art history books, Friend tells a story with no main
characters. Some of AIA’s Marxist co-founders—Misha Black, Pearl
Binder, Clifford Rowe—appear throughout the narrative. But
fundamentally—and fittingly, given its subject—_Comrades in Art_
is a true group biography: as Friend recounts AIA’s eventful first
decade, the cast of characters ranges so widely that few if any
individuals stand out from the rest. Instead, as in works of literary
naturalism such as John Dos Passos’s _U.S.A._ trilogy, the emphasis
is on the historical forces buffeting the characters.

This emphasis provides a counterweight to the popular tendency to
mythologize individual artistic genius, making _Comrades in Art_ an
exemplary case study in the importance of social scenes to art
history. AIA is hardly a household name. The Tate Britain is currently
showing a single-room exhibition connected to Friend’s book,
“Artists International: The First Decade,” but the group’s most
extensive previous museum treatment was back in 1983: “The Story of
the AiA, Artists International Association, 1933–1953,” at what
was then called The Museum of Modern Art, Oxford. Friend attributes
the group’s historical neglect in part to the “apolitical bias
that colours so much monographic writing in a cultural era where art
is an asset class and competitive individualism—and the banal
pursuit of celebrity—thrives largely unquestioned.”

 
Yet even as star power drives the contemporary art market, substantial
critical and curatorial interest in the relationship between art and
politics persists. The more robust explanation for AIA’s neglect is
not simply that the art industry favors individualism over
collectivism, nor that wealthy patrons and the institutions they
influence prefer apolitical subject matter, but also that AIA’s
efforts to resist fascism valued social and political ends over the
kinds of formal and aesthetic innovations that define the 20th-century
Western canon, offering no -ism to build on Constructivism, Futurism,
or Cubism. For a time, AIA’s own slogan was even, “Conservative in
art and radical in politics.” The group’s predominantly social
realist aesthetic, visible throughout this generously illustrated
book, complicates the narrative that Western art advanced until it
culminated in abstraction, a simplified narrative that has the effect
of making their style feel retrograde.

During its first decade, as the world approached and then entered war,
AIA did indeed serve, in the words of co-founder James Fitton, as
“the bell on the fire engine.” But beyond the political alarms it
sounded, the group stands out for its commitment to art as an activity
that humans just plain enjoy, as well as its commitment to bettering
the conditions facilitating that activity. AIA’s various initiatives
involved organizing artists, making art affordable through prints and
lithographs, and even staging an exhibition inside a London
Underground station so it would be more accessible to the public:
these were efforts, within their scope of influence, to improve how
things were typically done. Such efforts represent the positive side
of the desire for normalcy—for a future worth the struggle.

 

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