Showing resistance : Propaganda and Modernist exhibitions in Britain, 1933-53

Abstract

Showing resistance explores how exhibitions were used as propaganda during the two decades from 1933. Mounted in public places – from stations to workers’ canteens, empty shops and bombsites – exhibitions were identified as a key medium for mass public communication by activists and government bodies alike. Over eight chapters, it charts the work of a fascinating range of exhibition makers, from the interwar period to the early Cold War. A leading exponent was designer Misha Black, who described such exhibitions as ‘the materialisation of persuasion’. The form was also shaped by refugees living in Britain from the 1930s including artist László Moholy-Nagy, graphic designer F. H. K. Henrion, Dada artist Kurt Schwitters, photomontage artist John Heartfield, painter Oskar Kokoschka, photographer Edith Tudor-Hart and architects Ernö Goldfinger and Peter Moro. They drew on a range of architectural forms and materials from graphic design, photomontages, pictograms and models to give urgent warnings against the rise of fascism and to demonstrate international political alignments and solidarities, beliefs and affiliations. During the Second World War, the British Ministry of Information used exhibitions as a key tool of propaganda and, in the war’s aftermath, as a way of showing the benefits of the embryonic welfare state. Richly illustrated, this is the first book-length analysis of the meaning and significance of such exhibitions in Britain. It draws on material from numerous archive collections, addressing themes of acute contemporary relevance, such as the role of propaganda in a democracy and the cultural contribution of refugees.