Artists' Actions Against Fascism a Past Century
Artists International Association: A Bell on the Fire Engine of Cultural Resistance
In the tumultuous early 1930s, a group of British artists came together, inspired by socialist ideologies and propagandistic goals, to form the Artists International Association (AIA). This group, originally known as Artists International, later rebranded as Artists International Association in 1935 to attract wider, more ideologically diverse support.
The founding members included politically radical artists such as Pearl Binder, James and Margaret Fitton, Percy Horton, and Cliff Rowe. Some of these founders, like Binder and Rowe, had lived in the USSR and were exposed to workers' cooperatives, which influenced their ideas about organizing labor. Others, like Misha Black, James Boswell, James Holland, Edward Ardizzone, Peter Laszlo Peri, and Edith Simon, had working-class backgrounds and were affected by the Great Depression.
The AIA served as an agit-prop body, Marxist discussion group, exhibitions organizer, and anti-war, anti-fascist outfit. They used the slogan 'Conservative in art and radical in politics' and held an early 1940s exhibition titled 'The Face of Britain'. Despite the damage and dangers, four AIA members managed to hang the exhibition during the Blitz, a bombing campaign in London.
The desire for normalcy was strong among the AIA members, especially during unusual times. This is evident in their decision to proceed with the exhibition amidst bombing campaigns. These efforts represent the positive side of the desire for normalcy and a future worth the struggle.
During the war years, Britons expressed gratitude for the persistence of cultural life through art, despite dire conditions. The early 1940s saw a surprise strengthening of popular interest in art in both London and the rest of the country. AIA's various initiatives included organizing artists, making art affordable through prints and lithographs, and staging an exhibition inside a London Underground station.
The AIA's predominantly social realist aesthetic is visible throughout Friend's generously illustrated book, Comrades in Art. This book is a true group biography, with a wide range of characters and an emphasis on historical forces buffeting the characters.
The American Artists Congress, a US Communist arts organization founded in 1936, made a similar decision to prioritize coalition-building over generating a distinctively proletarian culture. Friend attributes this interest to a confluence of 'material factors' and an 'existential' factor: life being lived with a new intensity amid personal danger.
However, AIA is hardly a household name, with limited museum treatments and historical neglect attributed to its apolitical bias in a cultural era where art is an asset class. AIA's efforts to resist fascism valued social and political ends over formal and aesthetic innovations, complicating the narrative that Western art advanced until it culminated in abstraction.
Despite this, the AIA can be seen as 'the bell on the fire engine' during its first decade, sounding political alarms and committing to art as an activity humans enjoy and to bettering the conditions facilitating that activity. This commitment to art as a means of resistance and a tool for social change continues to resonate today.
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