![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Comrades-in-Art-9780500027417.jpg\")
<\/p>\n\n\tIn 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)\u2014Pearl Binder, Clifford Rowe, Misha Black, James Fitton, James Boswell, James Holland, Edward Ardizzone, Peter Laszlo Peri, and Edith Simon\u2014had 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\u2019 cooperatives that helped them imagine alternative ways to organize labor. As one artist (Holland) put it, British artists at this time were \u201cfaced with a choice of a cut-throat competition for what crumbs of patronage remained [\u2026] or using their abilities to discredit a system that makes art and culture dependent on the caprices of money markets.\u201d<\/p>\n
\t\tRelated Articles<\/p>\n
\n\tThis 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\u20131943. The group originally called itself Artists International and, in the words of founding member James Boswell, served as \u201ca mixture of agit-prop body, Marxist discussion group, exhibitions [organizer] and anti-war, anti-fascist outfit.\u201d 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 \u201celevat[e] coalition-building above [the] generation of a distinctively proletarian culture,\u201d opting for anti-fascism more than overt Communism. Dissenting members of both organizations felt this big tent approach risked watering down their core values.<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
\n\tThese 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\u2019t about how to exercise individual or collective agency in the face of vast political forces; it\u2019s about how strong the desire for normalcy can be, especially during unusual times.<\/p>\n
\n\tNo episode in the book highlights this desire more than AIA\u2019s 1940 annual members exhibition, themed \u201cThe Face of Britain.\u201d 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 \u201ccrashed through the gallery roof, setting its parquet floor alight, damaging some paintings and forcing a week\u2019s delay.\u201d Despite the damage, four AIA members \u201cworking through dangers\u2026 nevertheless managed to hang the show.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/COM-p-95_Cliff-Rowe.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tROBIN FRIEND<\/p>\n
\n\tThroughout 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\u2019s 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 \u201cstrengthening of popular interest in art.\u201d Friend attributes this interest not only to a confluence of \u201cmaterial factors\u201d\u2014shops with bare shelves, fewer restaurants, no professional sports\u2014but also an \u201cexistential\u201d factor: \u201clife had never been so uncertain, so potentially ephemeral and, amid personal danger, was being lived with a hitherto unknown intensity.\u201d Now that\u2019s something art can help with.<\/p>\n
\n\tFriend describes AIA as curiously overlooked, despite evidence that \u201ca clear majority of the country\u2019s leading artists [participated] in its collective endeavors.\u201d Prominent international artists\u2014Pablo Picasso, Stuart Davis, Diego Rivera\u2014make cameos in his book. But unlike many art history books, Friend tells a story with no main characters. Some of AIA\u2019s Marxist co-founders\u2014Misha Black, Pearl Binder, Clifford Rowe\u2014appear throughout the narrative. But fundamentally\u2014and fittingly, given its subject\u2014Comrades in Art is a true group biography: as Friend recounts AIA\u2019s 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\u2019s U.S.A. trilogy, the emphasis is on the historical forces buffeting the characters.<\/p>\n
\n\tThis 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\u2019s book, \u201cArtists International: The First Decade,\u201d but the group\u2019s most extensive previous museum treatment was back in 1983: \u201cThe Story of the AiA, Artists International Association, 1933\u20131953,\u201d at what was then called The Museum of Modern Art, Oxford. Friend attributes the group\u2019s historical neglect in part to the \u201capolitical bias that colours so much monographic writing in a cultural era where art is an asset class and competitive individualism\u2014and the banal pursuit of celebrity\u2014thrives largely unquestioned.\u201d<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/COM-p-57_Roy-Laurier.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\n\tYet 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s own slogan was even, \u201cConservative in art and radical in politics.\u201d The group\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\n\tDuring its first decade, as the world approached and then entered war, AIA did indeed serve, in the words of co-founder James Fitton, as \u201cthe bell on the fire engine.\u201d 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\u2019s 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\u2014for a future worth the struggle.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the early 1930s, frustrated with bank closures, steep pay cuts, and hunger marches, a group of British…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":74346,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[267],"tags":[365,362,363,364,366,18,117,19,17,2029],"class_list":{"0":"post-74345","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-artsdesign","12":"tag-design","13":"tag-eire","14":"tag-entertainment","15":"tag-ie","16":"tag-ireland","17":"tag-reframed"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74345","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74345"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74345\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/74346"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74345"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74345"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74345"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}