Do we, today, possess even half the energy these artists had to fight?
This comprehensive and painfully relevant survey of British political art made just before and during the Second World War begins with the establishment of the radical leftist, antifascist, widely pacifist Artists International Association (AIA) in 1933. In the first survey of this grouping in 40 years, the work of 11 key players is briskly highlighted through art, documentation and period ephemera. There’s a striking monochrome photograph of stylishly bobbed writer/artist Pearl Binder, along with a shot of painters Margaret and James Fitton, a steely-eyed couple burning with ideological intensity. You might be reminded, not without melancholy, of Warren Beatty’s 1981 film Reds and its chorus of Occidental ancients, determinedly positivistic leftists, old Bolshevists: those who saw Russia through Western eyes before public knowledge of Stalin’s purges and the devastating Ukrainian famine of 1932–33.
Preceding the recognition of these disasters in the historical timeline, we see Cliff Rowe’s The Struggle Between the Unemployed and the Police Forces (1933), a half-size reproduction of a huge, hallucinatory canvas now held in Lviv. Conceived in Moscow but set in London, this depicts a pitched battle between angry marchers against hunger and the Metropolitan Police. Rowe plays a cameo, up for a ruck with the fuzz in a noisy Trafalgar Square overseen by onlookers atop a double-decker bus; later, in The Fried Fish Shop (1936), he weirdly imagines Stalin scarfing chips in North London. An iconoclast’s iconoclast, Rowe mocked the Silver Jubilee of 1935 by making a poster of George V seen as a crowned skull, jaw dripping blood, with the legend: 25 YEARS OF WAR HUNGER UNEMPLOYMENT. (And you thought the Sex Pistols were daring?) Pearl Binder also visited Moscow: her brilliantly evocative set of lithographs, also from 1935, see her cavorting with Soviet sailors before heading home to hang out with Bloomsbury types who ‘stood around at studio parties’. Some things never change.
By 1936, the imperative to fight fascism was heightened by Franco’s rise in Spain. Felicia Browne was one of the volunteers before the bells tolled for her; she was gunned down near Zaragoza. Pages from her recovered sketchbook show pithily lined drawings of fellow combatants anticipating the triumphs and tragedies of the Republic. If one might think, here, of George Orwell’s memoir Homage to Catalonia (1938), there are more echoes of the author elsewhere, with the ghastly aerial-bombardment premonitions of George Bowling in Coming Up for Air (1939) prefigured in James Boswell’s 1933 sequence of daring, nightmarish drawings, The Fall of London. We see a man hanging from a gibbet, derailed trains, crowds storming barricades around St. Paul’s; while Boswell’s other caricatures of posh toffs mark him as a politer English sibling to George Grosz.
It’s not all doom and gloom. There are some delicate oils by Margaret Fitton: softly textured domestic scenes from a then bosky Dulwich, peacefully nostalgic kitchen cookery as with the mid-1930s Rhubarb Pie; you can almost smell a cloying reek. Elsewhere a government poster on rationing urges: ‘A clear plate means a clear conscience’. But the overwhelmingly serious message from this darkly sobering time-capsule of a show is that the twentieth-century battle against fascism demanded an iron will and indomitable persistence, slog and sacrifice. As resurgent fascism threatens, we might ask if we possess even half the energy these artists had to fight, the means and the will, that helped them win after 12 long years.
Comrades in Art: Artists Against Fascism at Towner, Eastbourne, 7 May – 18 October
From the October 2026 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.
