As trends toward authoritarianism play out around us, a compelling new book illuminates the criminally overlooked founding of the Artists International Association — a radical coalition of 1930s creatives for whom the collision of art and politics was a necessary weapon against fascism, war, and oppression.
On a not yet significant day in October 1933, against the flickering glow of candlelight, a small group of young, determined artists gathered in the London studio of 22 year old designer-architect Misha Black. The dimness was purely practical — the electricity had already been disconnected ahead of Black’s move to his new premises the following day — yet it cast a fittingly foretelling light over this first meeting of what was to become the Artists International Association (AIA). Shoulder-to-shoulder, in the shadow of austerity in Britain and a profound evil progressing through Central Europe, marked by Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor of Germany nine months before, around a dozen underemployed commercial artists in their twenties set about mobilising a united front against war, fascism and the suppression of culture.
That the AIA is often but a footnote in the biographies of its members is an oversight that author Andy Friend first encountered when writing his 2017 tome on the life and art of Eric Ravilious. Ever since, he’s set about piecing together a jigsaw of diary entries, meeting minutes and article clippings to reveal the largely untold story of how British artists united to confront a world in turmoil. Comrades in Art: Artists Against Fascism 1933-43, published by Thames & Hudson, is the result of this labour; a book that details the embryonic activity of an organisation that blueprints how artists can be a formidable tool in gaining perspective in increasingly troubled times.
Britain was in a sorry state come 1933. The Wall Street Crash of 1929 had set off a cataclysmic chain of events that had sunk the country into an economic depression; demand for European exports collapsed, unemployment soared to 25%, and poverty became widespread. In an effort to curb the rising cost of unemployment benefits, the government introduced the controversial Means Test in 1931, which denied support to many of society’s most vulnerable. Benefits were cut further to divert funds toward increasing armaments, and throughout hard-hit industrial regions there was still no sign of sustained economic recovery.
Invergordon, pen and ink, 1932
“It’s a litany of depressing economic developments, not entirely unrecognisable from the present-day equivalent,” Andy Friend tells Elephant. “International hopes for peace and stability following the trauma of the First World War were crumbling under the strain of the depression, rising nationalism in Europe, and rearmament.”
For a group overwhelmingly composed of working-class individuals, these struggles were deeply felt. No one had been to Oxbridge or was in revolt against their adolescence, none were members of aristocratic families or elite modernist movements and few had savings that could see them through the month, let alone a ‘Devil’s decade’ of austerity.
“Although these were artists in the metropolis, they were very attuned to what was going on elsewhere in the country and even internationally,” says Friend. “Unlike the lauded avant-garde of groups like Unit One (conceived by Paul Nash)— whose increasingly rarefied artistic experiments and belief in separating art from politics distanced them from the industrial majority — the AIA saw art as a social responsibility and actively used it to support progressive causes, insisting that in a world in crisis artists must engage rather than withdraw.”
It’s little wonder then that the left-leaning persuasions of the AIAs members found resonance in Soviet communism’s commitment to valuing artists as agents of social change. At that first October meeting, writer-lithographer Pearl Binder and artist-illustrator Cliff Rowe delivered rousing reports of their own visits to the Soviet Union, where thousands of artists were organised, employed and invigorated under trade unions and the Red Army.
Cliff Rowe’s monumental oil painting The Struggle Between the Unemployed and the Police Forces (1932–33) grew directly out of his 18-month stay in Moscow — a trip originally intended to last only a week but was extended after he received a string of commissions designing book jackets and communist posters for the Foreign Workers’ Publishing House. In 1932, Rowe was invited to contribute work to a Red Army exhibition marking its 15th anniversary and celebrating artists engaged with the international proletarian experience. In response, he produced a moody, seething depiction of hunger marchers met with police brutality while storming Trafalgar Square in November 1932 The painting was a powerful synthesis of constructivist propaganda and figurative social realism. Rowe even inserts himself into the fray — a self-portrait as a combatant — positioning the artist not as a distant observer, but as an active participant in the struggle for social transformation.
Few, including Rowe and the primary Communist card-carrying members of the AIA James Boswell and James Lucas, grasped the grim machinery of Stalin’s terror. Instead, what fired their imaginations was the belief that the AIA’s own collective creative labour could similarly be mobilised in the service of social revolution.
Back home, in support of the Hunger Marches of 1934, the AIA produced Why We Are Marching! — a satirical booklet of eighteen cartoons. In it, Roy Laurier’s It is a Fascist Scheme! (1934) targets the British political leadership of the early 1930s. Ramsay MacDonald, a former Labour prime minister who broke with his party to lead the crisis-era National Government, sits alongside Stanley Baldwin, his Conservative successor-in-waiting. Baldwin is shown pulling the strings of a civil servant, who forces local authorities to cut unemployment benefits as the savings are lobbed into an armament bin below. Looming portraits of Hitler, Mussolini, and leader of the British Union of Fascists, Oswald Mosley ‘awaiting enlargement’ reinforce the danger. Laurier’s cartoon reflects a pattern in which political leaders, rather than defending workers’ rights and confronting authoritarian movements directly, choose instead to accommodate them to consolidate power. This dynamic is echoed today in Western governments’ shift to the right to satisfy the electorate and their passivity to Israel’s brutal occupation of Palestine.
It was at the request of the International Bureau of Revolutionary Artists (IBRA)—a Comintern-linked body established to coordinate revolutionary artists and channel sympathetic work to the Soviet Union—that the AIA’s first exhibition was organised at 64 Charlotte Street, London in 1934. Titled ‘The Social Scene’, the artwork on display included Peggy Angus’ oil paintings of cement works set in the Sussex countryside, political documentary photographs by the Austrian-born Edith Tudor-Hart (née Suschitzky), and sharp caricatures of bourgeois life and bleak urban views by the ‘three Jameses’: Boswell, Fitton, and Holland. The exhibition proved an immediate success, attracting 800 visitors in its first four days.
Some 14 months later, a more ambitious exhibition exemplified to just what extent the AIA had, by its second year, pulled into its orbit a broad alliance of artists of notoriety, including Henry Moore, Paul Nash, Barbara Hepworth, Duncan Grant, Eric Gill, Lucien Pissarro, Cedric Morris and Laura Knight. Staged in November 1935 in Soho Square, ‘Artists Against Fascism and War’ made explicit the AIA’s commitment to the Popular Front struggle. “The central importance of the 1935 exhibition marked the realisation of the notion that the AIA needed to reach upwards generationally and outwards politically,” says Friend. “It epitomised this encouragement of artists to set aside their aesthetic differences and come together in a cause committed to peace and cultural development.” The exhibition, which was visited by six thousand people in two weeks, featured some 179 artists of varying artistic persuasions, going some of the way to addressing abiding internal debates between those advocating for socialist realism and proponents of abstract modernism and surrealism. More importantly however it stressed international solidarity through rooms dedicated to emigree French, Dutch, Polish and Soviet artists.
Since 1919, authoritarian regimes had taken hold in Hungary, Italy, Turkey, Poland, Portugal, and Germany. With the outbreak of civil war in Spain, the threat to artistic and political freedom became impossible to ignore. For many visual artists within the AIA, their struggle was not a distant crisis but a warning: that should the Republican’s plight for creative and political freedom fail, it will certainly become theirs tomorrow. As is so often the case, artists and intellectuals sensed the dangers earlier than most.
Meanwhile, in 1937, while the British government’s prevailing attitude toward Hitler was one of cautious optimism and a willingness to negotiate, the Nazis staged the infamous ‘Entartete Kunst’ (“Degenerate Art”) exhibition in Munich. Designed to mock and condemn modernist works, it was both a cultural attack and a chilling signal of the regime’s determination to silence artistic independence. In response, the AIA helped organise the ‘Exhibition of Twentieth Century German Art’ in London in the summer of 1938, bringing together around 300 works, many smuggled out of Germany or borrowed from private collections, by artists banned by the regime—including Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Max Beckmann, Emil Nolde, and others associated with German Expressionism and the Bauhaus. “What was great was that Hitler actually denounced the show in advance, giving the AIA a propaganda coup,” says Friend. They quickly distributed handbills across London reading, “Hitler attacks our exhibition—come and see it!” The exhibition not only stood as an act of solidarity with persecuted artists but also rather incredibly, introduced London audiences to German Expressionism on a scale never seen before.
Remaining true to their working-class roots, after 1937, the AIA consciously developed initiatives to expand the accessibility of art in Britain and organise itself into a proto-union for artists. News of a newly formed American Artists’ Congress inspired the AIA, prompting practical proposals on art education, municipal gallery responsibilities, fair pay for artists, and public exhibitions—ideas that laid the groundwork for the First British Artists’ Congress at Conway Hall in 1937. There, over 500 artists, critics, and designers debated the social purpose of art, state patronage, working conditions, and cultural participation, while an accompanying exhibition displayed more than a thousand works. “Many of these early recommendations stand out as practical forerunners of initiatives that would eventually take their place as part of post-war British art policy and the formation of the Arts Council in 1944,” says Friend.
The AIA championed a vision of society in which art worked closely with education and industry, promoting widespread access to creative culture. Initiatives such as the Everyman Prints, launched in 1940 to provide low-cost reproductions by respected artists, and traveling exhibitions sent to bomb shelters, schools, factories, and British restaurants, brought art directly into everyday public spaces.
“The AIA’s work during wartime, to send art to canteens, working men’s clubs, schools and hospitals very much prefigures the notion that artists should be involved in the business of creating the public realm,” says Friend. “In the last years of the war that effort is concentrated into proposals of how artists can be involved in reconstruction.”
The AIAs vein of solidarity and concern for artist welfare continued throughout the Second World War with a series of discrete initiatives shaped by both domestic and internationalist impetus. It was, however, the latter that continued to stir its members the most. As Friend notes, “the AIA took a leading role in forming the Artist Refugee Committee, which became a kind of Kindertransport for artists after the Munich Agreement.” With entry to Britain dependent on sponsorship—someone to cover expenses and promise employment—the AIA used its exhibitions and newly formed congress to secure prominent backers. “They went out and got heavyweight, well-known sponsors,” Friend explains, citing figures such as Sir Muirhead Bone, trustee of the Tate and official war artist, David Low, the most popular cartoonist of the day, and the Chancellor of Leeds University, whose support helped artists flee occupied territories.
The story of the AIA that Friend tells in his book is both one of collision — of art and politics, of aesthetics, of warring parties, and of unity. Despite the archival thinness left by their deliberate destruction of records after Dunkirk, Friend captures the striking prescience of the group’s early work some 90 years on.
Today, Trump’s funding cuts and executive orders targeting cultural institutions, Putin’s suppression of dissent, and the British government’s demonisation of groups like Palestine Action echo pressures the AIA once faced. Cold War politics, aesthetic conservatism, and institutional bias have long obscured the AIA in art history, yet their mission lives on in contemporary protest. As Friend notes, “Being a tired old Leftie, one hopes that people of a certain generation still move in favour of collective action.”
Musicians such as Kneecap, Brian Eno, and Fontaines DC, alongside visual artists, actors, and creators from other disciplines, are collaborating on a broader scale to confront urgent social and political issues — from climate justice to anti-racism, pro-democracy activism, and global struggles like Palestine and Ukraine. Initiatives such as Artists for Palestine and the responses of artists like Boris Mikhailov and Wolfgang Tillmans to the war in Ukraine demonstrate how art can engage directly with conflict, solidarity, and public awareness. People still feel the urgency to act, even in a world that can feel overwhelmingly paralysing. As one reflection goes: you’ll never save the world with art, but it will help you survive. The AIA’s rich yet undervalued legacy reinforces that collective artistic action, cross-disciplinary collaboration, and political engagement have and will continue to be the pillars of defending culture as a public right and confronting the crises of our time.
Written by Millen Brown Ewens
