Artist International Association ‘For Liberty Exhibition’, poster by FHK Henrion, FHK Henrion Archive, University of Brighton Design Archives

Photographs from the Design Archives’ FHK Henrion archive feature in a new exhibition at Tate Britain’s archive gallery, ‘Artists International Association: the first decade’.

The Artists International Association (AIA) was a London-based anti-fascist membership organisation whose activities included exhibitions on political and social themes.  The new Tate display, explores the AIA’s early history, from its establishment in 1933 to the middle of the Second World War.  Henrion designed one of the AIA’s most celebrated exhibitions, For Liberty (1943) which was held in the basement of the bombed-out John Lewis site on Oxford Street in London.  Alongside work by AIA members and associates, the exhibition celebrated the Four Freedoms outlined by the United Nations, which Henrion represented as four doves.  Henrion was himself a refugee from Nazi Germany, who had arrived in London in 1936 and established himself as a poster and exhibition designer, practices which really took off in propaganda work in wartime, for the Ministry of Information as well as for other bodies such as AIA.

Seven photographs of ‘For Liberty’ from Henrion’s archive feature in the exhibition, showing the extraordinary use of these devastated spaces, both outside and inside.  Some of these images, and other material from the Henrion archive, also feature in Art on the Streets, an award-winning film by our Centre for Design History colleague Dr Harriet Atkinson, which is also on show in the Tate exhibition, and was made as part of Harriet’s AHRC Leadership Fellowship.

The exhibition is in the Marie-Louise von Motesiczky Archive Gallery at Tate Britain and runs until 15 July 2025.