This review originally appeared in the July 2026 issue of The Critic.

Political grandstanding has consumed parts of the contemporary art world in recent years. In some quarters, abstract activist concerns, often phrased as anti-fascism, have overshadowed aesthetic production. This feels both like a consequence of the culture wars, but also a phenomenon novel in intensity and focus.

As is often the case, art history holds a precedent. The campaigning activities of Artists’ International Association (AIA), founded in 1933 in London, far outstripped even the best-coordinated actions of today’s art world. Constituted by the designer Misha Black and a small group of artists including Pearl Binder and Clifford Rowe, AIA’s membership quickly reached over a thousand and included many luminaries of British art. 

The Association’s activities involved large exhibitions, extensive community organising, and prolific propagandistic publishing. Yet the group’s work is all but forgotten today. Comrades in Art, an ambitious survey at Towner in Eastbourne accompanied by a new book by curator Andy Friend, reanimates AIA’s intense activism. It puts into question the very link between art and grand politics, which AIA’s work helped to define.

AIA started out as a radical Left grouping. The book illustrator Binder had visited Russia in the early 1930s, as did Rowe, whose work with the London Communist Party landed him a job in Moscow. Both were inspired by the social status the Soviets reserved for artists in the advocacy for workers’ empowerment and international revolutionary solidarity. That depression Britain had few employment opportunities for its creative workforce only amplified the sentiment. Friend’s project doesn’t dwell in shallow parallels between those conditions and ours, but the correspondence is inescapable.

Comrades in Art continues at Towner, Eastbourne, until 18 October. The book of the same title is published by Thames and Hudson (£40). Main image: Cliff Rowe, The Fried Fish Shop, 1936. © Cliff Rowe Estate, courtesy Leicester Museums and Galleries.