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The Artists' International Association set out to address the social and political issues of the 1930s. The acutely observed satires of James Boswell, one of its founding members, epitomise the movement's concerns
The first meeting of the Artists' International Association, in 1933, took place in Misha Black's bedsitting room in Seven Dials, long before his OBE and designs for the Victoria Line. They met by candlelight, because Black's electricity had been cut off, and sat on fruit boxes stolen from Covent Garden market. The gathering was inspired by a chance encounter on the boat back from the USSR between Clifford Rowe, a painter struggling to reconcile his socialist convictions with his artistic practice, and Pearl Binder, the artist daughter of Russian-Jewish immigrants. Binder had been in Moscow to show her images of London working-class life at the Museum for Modern Western Art - an honour for a woman - while Rowe had gone to see something of the place American Communist friends had told him about. On the last day of his intended week-long visit he saw his own posters for the Communist book shop in London on display in the Foreign Workers' Publishing House. They gave him a job and he stayed for 18 months.
Rowe had gone looking for something - and he believed he had found it; not only a political system but a model of future practice for artists. He left only because 'they did not really need me. The class struggle was really going on back in England.' He envisioned a unified organisation of artists in London, like New York's John Reed Club, which would work to counter the despondency that had set in after the 1931 election, not least among artists themselves. The national government was pursuing extreme economic policies: deflation and unpopular cuts to unemployment pay. Factories stood empty. Oswald Mosley's party had just announced themselves as the British Union of Fascists.
Anxiety over the seemingly entwined plights of society and art was expressed in the pages of magazines like The Listener, where Kenneth Clark and Herbert Read argued over the merits of Cubism, Superrealism (Surrealism), and academy painting, but for younger artists and art students the concerns were personal and pressing: a sense of responsibility to...