From the December 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
Amid the global rise of the far right, geopolitical instability and economic shocks, historians and journalists increasingly compare the present with the 1930s. That partisan decade can seem to us like a time when art for its own sake had to be set aside, as artists turned urgently to ‘the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting’, as W.H. Auden wrote. Even before the decade ended, disillusionment had set in – and, during the Cold War, a host of repentant ex-Communists lined up to deliver the message that political commitment, especially ‘Marxist dogma’, leads inevitably to artistic failure.
However, Andy Friend’s illuminating book Comrades in Art reveals a rich seam of committed art that dispels clichés about the Red Decade. It also reopens pressing discussions about the functions of art in a time of political crisis, to which Cold War pieties provided a neat but unsatisfactory conclusion.
The Artists’ International Association (AIA), founded in London in 1933, aimed to promote and coordinate artistic responses to the rise of fascism in Europe. At its core were a group of Communist artists and architects whose posthumous reputations have not flourished: Pearl Binder, Misha Black, Felicia Browne, Clifford Rowe and the ‘three Jameses’ (Fitton, Boswell and Holland), best known for their illustrations in Left Review.
But, as Friend shows, a ‘clear majority of the country’s leading artists’ in this period were also involved directly or peripherally in the AIA, lending material support or taking part in its exhibitions. They included Vanessa Bell, Eric Gill, Duncan Grant, Barbara Hepworth, Paul Nash, Ben Nicholson and Henry Moore. The AIA brought non-aligned artists, social democrats and liberals together with Communists in the fight against fascism and, in that sense, it was an archetypal institution of the Popular Front period. While the group soldiered on until 1971, Comrades in Art follows its first decade of intense activity, ending in 1943 with a sense of dissipation as internationalist anti-fascism was increasingly drowned out by jingoism.
Friend assembles a striking visual archive to show that the AIA did not champion a single agreed aesthetic style. The Cold War ideology that aligned modernist abstraction with capitalism and socialist realism with communism was yet to harden. When the Nazis charged abstract artists and the curators who promoted them with ‘cultural Bolshevism’ and hounded them into exile, it seemed obvious that the primary task of any anti-fascist artistic organisation was to welcome these exiles. Many of them exhibited at the AIA’s 1935 exhibition ‘Artists Against Fascism and War’. Even more eclectic was ‘Unity of Artists for Peace, Democracy and Cultural Development’ at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1939, with sections devoted to abstract, figurative and Surrealist work.
At the same time, over the course of the 1930s, the Soviet Union – still a beacon of hope to many in the AIA – adopted an increasingly clear policy in favour of socialist realism, which also influenced the group. The ‘AIA core’ could be sceptical of avant-gardes – as when Percy Horton remarked, after the International Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936, that ‘it was damned cheek of André Breton and others to pose as Marxists’.
Surrealist art foregrounded suggestive and cryptic juxtapositions, but there was a significant impulse in the AIA to create visual works that delivered clear political messages. ‘We were all artists by training and intention, graphic designers by occupation, illustrators and cartoonists by conviction,’ remarked James Holland. Indeed, the group’s graphic work is arguably the most arresting: AIA pamphlets were not as flat as those Auden imagined. It’s Up to Us (1935), a Left Review special designed by James Fitton, gives the morbid absurdity of Dadaist montage a more direct political purpose. A skeleton in a suit holds a stethoscope to the bare chest of a living man, against a background of newsprint about the army’s recruitment crisis. The satire is undeniably crude but, like many images in Friend’s book, it was made for political communication rather than detached aesthetic appreciation.
There were also large murals in a broadly socialist realist style, including Jack Hastings’s The Worker of the Future Clearing Away the Chaos of Capitalism (1935) at the Marx Memorial Library in Clerkenwell, London. Hastings worked in fresco to produce a striking work, bold in its use of colour and reminiscent of the religious iconography associated with the medium. Friend finds it a ‘somewhat lumpen homage to [Diego] Rivera’ (with whom Hastings studied), but it is a remarkable piece; its amateurism cannot fully suppress the epic scale of its revolutionary ambition. Outsized figures of Marx, Engels and Lenin, joined by English radicals Robert Owen and William Morris, flank the idealised revolutionary worker of the future, who sweeps aside the rubble of the dying capitalist world.
Felicia Browne, who argued that the fine arts of painting and sculpture should be set aside at a time of acute crisis, downed tools when she left to fight in Spain. Yet before she was killed in 1936, she made outstanding sketches of Republican militia and supporters, not seemingly intended for publication or display. These are committed, partisan works, but they are not propaganda. Even when political crises threaten to reduce the visual arts to brute functionalism, they retain an intimate power as a means of reflecting on personal experience.
The left-wing art of the 1930s is often mischaracterised as being full of false certainties and dogmatic commitment. The picture Friend gives of the AIA is of a searching cultural movement, responding flexibly and creatively in real time to world events. Comrades in Art helps us to reimagine the politicisation of art that we associate with the decade – not as a cautionary tale, but as an unfinished project and a going concern.
Comrades in Art: Artists Against Fascism 1933–1943 by Andy Friend is published by Thames and Hudson.
From the December 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.