Our colleague Harriet Atkinson’s new book Showing Resistance: Propaganda and Modernist exhibitions in Britain, 1933-53, which draws heavily on our collections, was published recently by Manchester University Press. We asked Harriet to introduce the book.
How did exhibitions become used for public communication in early twentieth century Britain? This is the question I set out to answer in my new book Showing Resistance, which reveals how exhibitions were taken up by activists and politicians from 1933 to 1953, becoming manifestos, weapons of war and a means of signalling political solidarities.
The subject of the book crystallised in response to my University of Brighton students’ interest in the visual responses to Trump’s election and the Brexit vote in 2016. Aside from pussyhats, vituperative anti-Brexit stickers and posters appearing across my local streets, I’d also started to notice makeshift exhibitions thrown up in public spaces expressing collective agony. I was moved by the power of an impromptu display created under London’s Westway to express the community’s anger at the 2017 Grenfell Tower tragedy, for example. This was both a memorial to those lost and provided evidence of official shortcomings, now widely acknowledged, but at the time little known.
Exhibitions, I was noticing in my archival research in F.H.K. Henrion’s collection at the University of Brighton’s Design Archives, were also used as communications from the interwar years in Britain. These were being mounted in a range of unexpected places: station ticket halls (Image 01) and factory workers’ canteens, the windows of high street shops, evacuated department stores and on newly bulldozered bombsites (Image 02). The themes of these earlier exhibitions were diverse and eclectic – from the very nature of freedom (Image 03) to the culinary possibilities of the potato. Sometimes they communicated urgent, persuasive messages and sometimes practical information intended to change people’s personal behaviours. Sometimes they signalled international alignments and solidarities (Image 04) or acted as fundraising vehicles for important causes (Image 05), inspiring social change. They were used by activist groups and trade and industry bodies, and the British government alike. Sometimes they set out to give voice to the voiceless: to empower working class people living in poor housing conditions, to invite support for people living in areas of high unemployment, to give a platform to recently arrived refugees, to champion women’s rights, becoming the mouthpiece of anti-colonial activists, or people exasperated by the British government’s inaction in the face of the rising fascist threat.
Image 01. Clear Smoke, Smoke Abetement, 1938, FHK Henrion Archive
Image 02. AIA For Liberty Exhibition (entrance), FHK Henrion Archive
Image 03. AIA For Liberty Exhibition poster, FHK Henrion Archive
Image 04. RHZ-1-1-13, Free German League of Culture (stamps), HA Rothholz Archive
Image 05. FHK-3-22, Artists Aid Russia Exhibition Poster, FHK Henrion Archive
F. H. K. Henrion had been closely involved with making exhibitions across many key contexts – designing for organisations like the National Smoke Abatement Society on their air pollution campaigns, publicity for the Artists International Association and for the Ministry of Information during World War Two. His collection at the Design Archives became central to my research. I also drew from the H. A. Rothholz collection as Rothholz had designed publicity around important exhibitions like the solidarity exhibition Allies Inside Germany, mounted in an empty shop on Regents Street in 1942 by a group of artists including photomontage artist John Heartfield.
We might perhaps think of exhibitions as a kind of envelope for showcasing interesting objects or images, but these were much more: a calculated means of communication for war and peacetime, a form used to preach the importance of conformity and appropriate behavioural patterns (Images 06, 07, 08) and an affective form intended to provoke emotional responses in their audiences – pride, sympathy, anger, hope (Image 09). I was glimpsing these kinds of exhibitions in the archive or seeing them referred to in tantalising tiny articles in the contemporary press or postage stamp sized grainy black and white photos. Some were well-documented, others not at all. But there was no book that seemed to draw links across these kinds of exhibitions, mounted in ordinary public places. So this is the book that I set out to write and which has become Showing Resistance.
Image 06. Poison Gas Exhibition poster, FHK Henrion Archive
Image 07. FHK-1-48 (Nazi slugs, Dig for Victory exhibition, MOI, ©Crown, No. D.11919), FHK Henrion Archive
Image 08. Off The Ration Exhibition poster,1941, FHK Henrion Archive
Image 09. Life Line Exhibition, 1941, FHK Henrion Archive
The material in the book is themed to show the different ways exhibitions were being thought about: as manifestos, as solidarities, as weapons of war, and so on. 1933 is the book’s starting date – as the year Hitler came to power in Germany, supported by a powerful cultural propaganda machinery, including a very adept use of a series of defamatory exhibitions or ‘exhibitions of shame’, as they have been dubbed. In this year both fascist and anti-fascist movements in Britain were gaining momentum. 1933 is also the moment of formation of several significant artists’ and architects’ groups which I trace, each embracing exhibitions as a key mouthpiece. 1953 is the other book-end – a moment when the British government’s frequent use of exhibitions to communicate ideas with home audiences was waning and when the political consensus that had been the social glue between these makers was disintegrating. Here’s a timeline showing all of the one hundred or so exhibitions I deal with in the book, set out chronologically to give a sense of the sheer number of examples that I set out to link:
Exhibitions formed the focus for an entangled group of makers, working across many contexts, from major official and industrial clients to activist political groups. Artists, architects, designers and photographers who appear in the book include Richard Levin, Misha Black, FHK Henrion, Oskar Kokoschka and Edith Tudor-Hart. Also central are Hans Schleger (who worked under the pseudonym Zero), Erno Goldfinger working with his wife Ursula Goldfinger, E. McKnight Kauffer, Laszlo Moholy Nagy, John Heartfield, Paul Nash, Robin Day, Peter Moro, Serge Chermayeff and Betty Rea. As is clear from this list of makers, from art, design and architecture, exhibition-making drew on diverse and hybrid professional practices and, as such, demanded collaboration. Many of these makers had arrived in Britain during the 1930s to escape the Nazi threat – from Berlin, Paris, Prague, Vienna and beyond – and exhibitions became a potent and significant meeting point, a vibrant and productive focus for collaborations, a way of making themselves and their views known. The book’s imagination is therefore international and internationalist: bridging solidarities from Britain with Spain, Russia, China and anti-imperialist struggles happening across Britain’s colonies. But the geographies of its making were often strikingly concentrated into hyper-local areas of London. These are all aspects that I discuss in detail in the book.
I was lucky enough to write Showing Resistance during a four-year Arts and Humanities Research Council Fellowship. The research in the book also underpinned my half-hour documentary film Art on the Streets (trailer here), which also draws heavily on material from the Design Archives as well as University of Brighton’s Screen Archives South East. These were pandemic projects and going back to researching in the Design Archives after many long months of home-working (and home-schooling) was particularly enjoyable, both in terms of the sheer sensory stimulation of handling textured albums and real objects again but also because of the generosity, skill and expertise of these colleagues.
Showing Resistance is available to buy from Manchester University Press here. It was published Open Access and is available to download as a pdf at Manchester Hive here.
