Harriet Atkinson, "Showing Resistance: Propaganda and Modernist Exhibitions in Britain, 1933-53" (Manchester UP, 2024)
37:45 Share

You don't wake up dreaming of McDonald's fries. You wake up dreaming of McDonald's hash browns. McDonald's breakfast comes first. Ba-da-ba-ba-ba.

I was never really a runner. The way I see running is a gift, especially when you have stage four cancer. I'm Anne. I'm running the Boston Marathon presented by Bank of America. I run for Dana-Farber Cancer Institute to give people like me a chance to thrive in life, even with cancer.

Join Bank of America in helping Anne's cause. Give if you can at bfa.com slash support Anne. What would you like the power to do? References to charitable organizations is not an endorsement by Bank of America Corporation. Copyright 2025. Are your ulcerative colitis symptoms proving difficult to manage?

Tremphia, Gacelcomab, can help you manage the cycle of UC symptoms. At one year, many patients taking Tremphia achieved clinical remission, and some patients also achieved endoscopic remission. Individual results may vary. Tremphia is a prescription medicine used to treat adults with moderately to severely active ulcerative colitis. Serious allergic reactions and increased risk of infections may occur.

Before treatment, your doctor should check you for infections and TB. Tell your doctor if you have an infection, flu-like symptoms, or if you need a vaccine. Ask your doctor if Tramfaya can help you manage the cycle of UC symptoms. Call 1-800-526-7736 to learn more or visit tramfayaradio.com. Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of New Books Network. This is your host, Morteza Hajizadeh from Critical Theory Channel.

Today I'm here with a very special guest to talk about a fascinating book called Showing Resistance, Propaganda and Modernist Exhibitions in Britain, 1933 to 1953, which was published by Manchester University Press in 2024. Dr. Harriet Atkinson is a senior lecturer in history of art and design at the University of Brighton in England. Harriet, welcome to New Books Network. Thank you so much.

I'm really delighted to be here. Thank you. Before we start talking about the book, can you please very briefly introduce yourself to our audience? Tell us about your field of expertise and more importantly, why you decided to write a book about modernist exhibitions and propaganda?

Sure. So I'm based in the Centre for Design History at University of Brighton, and I lead a strand of research on design activism. I'm particularly interested in my work in histories of design and democracy, the way that governments engage with design, the way that design is used for propaganda and indeed for protest, etc.

So that's the kind of area that I am thinking about in my research. And this book came about really in response, I guess, to some of my students' very kind of strong interest in the visual culture of protest and of activism. I started to think about it in...

The year that the Brexit vote happened in Britain in 2016, the year that Trump was elected 2016. And there was such a kind of outburst, a kind of a kind of visual response on the streets around me, around us.

to these events that it started to become a kind of focus for a lot of student conversations that I was having. And so really my sort of making sense of the kind of longer legacies, the histories of this kind of visual manifestation of political power

The kind of agony, the emotion that comes into those kinds of manifestations was the starting point for my thinking around this book. Quite fascinating when you mentioned protest and how your students were interested in this. I think in the

modern history, whenever there was a lot of propaganda, let's say posters, sometimes photography, even when you go back in history, paintings in the Middle Ages, paintings which were about, for example, the peasant revolutions, um,

Well, I'm not sure if there was a level of propaganda in Canada, but that's a very powerful way of showing that idea of affect, the idea of pain, sometimes even pleasure, you know, after victory, after protest. This is a very powerful medium, let's say, to communicate the ideas of protest and protest and civil movements, I guess.

I'm also interested to know about the time period you have chosen for the book. You're very specific, 1933, 1953. So I'm interested to know why you have chosen this period 10 years before and like eight years after the Second World War. What was so special about that time? Well, I think, yeah, the timings are very...

specific for a reason. I guess that the rationale for the starting point of 1933 is, of course, that was the moment that Hitler came to power in Germany, that actually this kind of

A particular kind of mode of exhibitionary kind of argument was being developed within the context of that authoritarian regime. In Britain, there was also a kind of corresponding, I guess, rise of extreme left and extreme right political groupings.

In 1932, the British Union of Fascists had formed, for example. So 1933 was a kind of

an important kind of political moment but it was also in Britain the year that several important artists groups formed which I which I discuss in the in in the book the Artists International Association the Modern Architectural Research Group and Unit One these were all

politically engaged artist groups that all formed in that moment. And then I show this short-lived form as really kind of only existing for these two decades until 1953. And by then, the kind of political consensus had changed around some of the kind of

political agreements that had kind of fired groups in the interwar period. And I show how 1953 becomes this kind of moment of fragmentation, really. And kind of a well-known sort of part of the story, I guess, is the fact that actually in terms of the communicative form of exhibitions, which is kind of an important part of this,

there is a kind of change in people's perception of that with the eve of television. So television is adopted as a kind of mass form in Britain from the early 1950s. Really, the kind of 1953, the coronation of Elizabeth II is the kind of well-known and well-documented moment when a lot of British people

people got television. So in a sense, that also is part of my thinking. It's about the kind of the form of exhibitions and the way in which they played into this kind of mass communication environment. And maybe my next question might be a little bit generic.

kind of too general but i'm interested to know how and why art these modernist exhibitions specifically were used as a propaganda tool in from 1933 and the role of government in in this what purpose did they have in using exhibitions for propaganda purposes

Well, as I say, within the kind of context of the authoritarian states developing in Europe, Italy, Germany, Spain,

exhibitions were being used as very powerful tools for projection of political ideology. And in Britain, what I show is that there was a kind of response to that and a kind of engagement with that, both from political activists...

anti-fascist activists, anti-imperialist activists, activist groupings, but also from within the government. And so the government in Britain started to use exhibitions in order to project national identity, to project its kind of trade ambitions, and also on a kind of much more

almost banal and modest scale to start to show people the kinds of policies that they were developing. Policies, for example, around the highway code or around areas of deprivation in Britain that they were investing in. So they started to mount these kind of

small sometimes, but very visually interesting documentary exhibitions that were just in ordinary places around, you know, in village halls or in station ticket halls, in workers canteens, in order to start to kind of engage with people where they were around cities.

And I remember a few years ago, I was reading a book that even in that time period, especially before the war and also during the war, even literature was used, Shakespeare's plays were used for propaganda purposes to build a sense of identity and nationality, especially during the time of wars. And when we mention propaganda, people usually think of negative ideas or false ideas, but it could be anything. Because in the book, you discuss how some people

social policies or issues things like housing or air pollution exhibition were used to manufacture consent around those issues can you talk about some of these specific policies or issues that for which exhibitions were used to to create consent social consent yes so this is um one of the things that i find really striking is is the way in which um

In a sense, there are kind of such parallels between the kinds of things that the government was...

communicating around and and some of the things that we still um engage with um uh as as as kind of policy issues today uh but um poor poor um air quality was one of the um uh focuses of of um

an exhibition actually that was mounted as a way of raising this concern to government by an organisation that was called the Smoke Abatement Trust. That actually was in dialogue with the government but wasn't mounted by the government. So

There was a whole series of exhibitions, again, which was also focused towards policymakers around housing and around housing improvements. So a series called New Homes for Old, mounted across a number of different venues using documentary means, but to show how...

slum dwellings were impacting on people's lives and showing alternative housing. And this was, these exhibitions were really powerful ways of kind of connecting

and manufacturing consent because they were visually engaging. They were able to kind of make visible issues and places and ideas that were otherwise invisible or kind of out of mind.

They used storytelling techniques. They used humour. They were, to a certain extent, immersive in creating kind of environments in which people could kind of

and kind of be surrounded by images. And so they became almost like kind of popular illustrated magazines, but in three-dimensional form, with photographs very central to that, almost like kind of picture stories within popular magazines. And they also were very...

that the government

The officials who were commissioning these exhibitions were very clever at appointing well-placed writers to work with artists and designers in order to really kind of animate the ideas through dialogue and through first-person speech and so on. So it was a kind of...

It was a very interesting collaboration, I guess, across kind of visual and textual forms in order to make them as kind of urgent and relevant and effective as possible. And I guess these techniques are still used to promote social issues. When I sometimes go to museums, I do see the same techniques used for different purposes, not necessarily propaganda.

purposes, but for different purposes, because as you mentioned, it's quite emotionally powerful and effective. Can you also, in the book, you discuss how these exhibitions were used to promote modernist manifestos in Britain and

what was its impact in developing these manifestos and would be great if you could give us some examples as well. Yeah, so I talk about in the book about exhibitions as multiple manifestos in their own right. So as I have already mentioned, there were various artists groupings that were forming in the early 30s and

These groups identified exhibitions as being a really powerful form of manifesto in a sense for kind of staging their own identities, for promoting themselves as forms of self-proclamation. Exhibitions became the kind of peg on which you could, you know, if you held an exhibition, you could also have performances and talks there.

and you could issue pamphlets and publications. So they became this very kind of rich environment in which to show a whole kind of programme of ideas, of artistic, architectural design ideas. And I talk about a few examples of this. One was the International Surrealist Exhibition of 1936, which...

which was the first time that Britain had held a kind of major exhibition about the Surrealists project, with André Breton as a kind of presiding presence at the opening, this kind of carnivalesque,

event at which Salvador Dali famously appeared in a diving suit and so on. So this caused a kind of big response and a very kind of gratifying response

kind of lively response from the press in Britain when this happened in central London in 1936. The other exhibition that I talk about, which was a kind of really major manifesto exhibition, was of the group, Modern Architectural Research Group. They were really focused on showing the benefits

of the modern architectural programme that they had outlined. And so they used this exhibition, which was three years in the making. They spent three years planning how they might use this exhibition that was held at the New Burlington Galleries in central London, just behind the Royal Academy, to really kind of

set out this kind of major programme that they saw for the future of, of kind of, of housing and of, um, schools and of, of, um,

all of the kind of public, the public realm of Britain. And so these were rich, well-received manifestations of their work. And these groups were very clever at engaging with the press and making sure that they got

Lots of kind of coverage and their kind of efforts, both of those two groups managed to get a lot of coverage for these proclamations that they were making through these exhibitions.

Thank you.

They're called Monday.com, and it was love at first onboarding. They're beautiful dashboards. They're customizable workflows that is floating on a digital cloud nine. So no hard feelings, but we're moving on. Monday.com, the first work platform you'll love to use.

Your data is like gold to hackers. They're selling your passwords, bank details, and private messages. McAfee helps stop them. SecureVPN keeps your online activity private. AI-powered text scam detector spots phishing attempts instantly. And with award-winning antivirus, you get top-tier hacker protection. Plus, you'll get up to $2 million in identity theft coverage, all for just $39.99 for your first year. Visit McAfee.com. Cancel any time. Terms apply.

And you mentioned, you know, at the beginning of the interview and now, you mentioned some of these groups that were from artists' international associations, Pacific Cambridge Anti-War Council, and some of these groups had used exhibitions for political purposes and tried to mobilize their public. I'm interested to know about the maybe backlash or the counterpoint. For example, some of these groups were anti-imperialist, but

Were their ideas challenged by maybe conservatives or conservative politicians? So were their ideas challenged? Yes. I mean, I think one of the things that I...

write about in the book is about the way in which exhibitions became two part, you know, that exhibitions formed could form two sides of a debate in a sense. And one of the exhibitions that I focus on is the 1938 Glasgow Empire exhibition and the way in which that

That was a very elaborate and very kind of well-resourced statement about...

Britain kind of at the end of empire, but with this great series of very well-established supporters from industry, the royal family and so on. This very kind of spectacular site in Glasgow that was, you know, showing that Britain's dominions and its colonial links were

And then across the city, a

exhibition was formed by the Independent Labour Party, this quite left, this left Labour grouping in Scotland, which was a counter exhibition to that. And in a sense, which was, and the name of that exhibition was the Workers' Empire Exhibition. And in a sense that used exhibition two in order to

um to kind of counter and to produce a set of of counter arguments that that kind of went into lots of detail was very well researched in a sense took apart the um the claims of the other exhibition that was happening across the city and so i guess um

exhibitions were being used as as counter arguments um this was not an idea that had developed in britain this was something that was being experimented with by the surrealists in paris for example in 1931 where there had been a a major colonial exhibition in paris and the surrealists also mounted a kind of a counter argument in exhibitionary form um

I guess the way in which these anti-imperialist activists, artists were challenging the concept of exhibition was in showing that exhibitions were not only about kind of displaying hegemonic power and the kind of power of the nation and the power of the empire and so on, but actually could be used very articulately to show

to create a different argument, to mount a response. And again, the Workers' Empire exhibition in Glasgow and its touring iteration, which went to London and to some other sites,

became a really good site for a lot of kind of new, you know, the newly independent empire states or those people who would go on to lead the independent parties.

states would were we use that as a kind of platform from which to make their anti-British empire statements. How did the role of exhibitions change during or not necessarily change let's say how did exhibitions try to

promote a sense of patriotism and nationalism during the Second World War in Britain? Yeah, there were two very distinct ways in which exhibitions were used in the British Second World War context. One was to evoke kind of pride and patriotism, and the other was...

to share practical information. So the practical information was in the form of things like growing your own food, mending your clothes so that you didn't have to buy new and things that now seem...

well, kind of funny, but also were sort of deadly serious in their intention, like showing people in quotes, 198 ways to eat potatoes, which was one of the kind of major exhibitions held in central London in the early wartime. But in terms of pride and patriotism, I

the, um, the, the, the, the government developed a really, um, extensive touring exhibition program. So they would create, um, a set of, of, um, photographic boards or, um, or kind of photographic, um, uh,

sort of displays that they, they, they showed people how to kind of mountain then to kind of take down. And they sent those around the country, lots of different subjects, um, to, to, to, um, to villages, to town halls, to, to bomb sites, to, to other places. Um,

And then there were these spectacular exhibitions that were held on major sites. One of the most popular sites was in central London on what is...

really the kind of most popular shopping street in London, Oxford Street. And there was a bomb had flattened a department store, the John Lewis department store, and leaving this very large space, which was taken over as this spectacular site of a series of exhibitions. And they were all trying to kind of...

enable people to really kind of see what the war effort, you know, the kinds of things that were happening at a distance from people. So, you know,

in the sea or by land, but somewhere else in the world, were brought to this site so that you could look very closely at the technologies that were being used. You could look at the kind of supply chains. You could think about the way in which the army worked

the army was operating and think about the conditions that they were working with. So it was to try and bring things close, I guess, to members of the public and so that you could develop a kind of sense of empathy with the efforts that were being made on your behalf but at a distance from you. And obviously, of course, after the war, again, exhibitions were used to help efforts for post-war recovery. Am I right?

Yes, absolutely. So the Ministry of Information, which had been the kind of wartime propaganda body of government, gave way to the Central Office of Information, which had developed a kind of post-war programme of information sharing for the government and the central office itself.

continue to make exhibitions that could be focused on showing the way that Britain was continuing to kind of operate in Germany, in Japan and so on. With the again, these quite spectacular works.

exhibitions about military strategy, using some kind of new immersive techniques, changing the temperature, using sound, using tactile means to connect with people through them. But also there were

a spate of exhibitions that were focused on the new National Health Service. So really making an argument for why that was important and showing that to people. There were exhibitions about new jobs that were available in the coal industry because Britain's industries were

were just recovering in that moment. And so there were kind of, in a way, recruitment drives through these big exhibitions that brought together a whole series of kind of sculptural opportunities

objects and also photographs to kind of show all of the detail of kind of what people would be doing if they were recruited into those jobs. And then there were a number of exhibitions about economic recovery and the way that the British government was looking to kind of to bring back affluence and to kind of work

work against austerity. So, and all of these exhibitions were fascinating in the artists and designers who worked on them. They are a number of artists who

and designers who we now know really well in other contexts. People like Robin Day, who became a very, very well-known furniture designer, was working on these exhibitions. Peter Morrow, who went on to be a celebrated architect. So as a last question, I'm interested to know, you've researched this history of exhibitions or the use as propaganda tools.

How do you see a major difference or even similarity between how art and exhibitions are used these days, given the current political challenges people have all over the world? That's such an interesting and complex question. In a way, I think that we...

we have a good understanding that exhibitions and that museums and arts organisations, that they are not neutral, that they are not somehow, you know, just purveyors of objects or of things without there being a kind of inflection to that. But I think that the way in which...

Things have changed since the period that I'm writing about is that exhibitions aren't really a dominant form of communication anymore in the sense that they were in these kind of documentary exhibitions that I'm writing about. So they're not used as...

um as as a way of kind of connecting and communicating um as a kind of channel in the same way um in the same way now um by by government at least um although um

One of the things that I think has been very interesting in the last few years is the way in which people's collective agony in response to sort of major disasters and so on has often been expressed in exhibition reform. One vivid example of where

An exhibition recently became the kind of manifestation of a collective agony was in 2017 when there was a...

a tower block, um, caught fire in London. Um, the, um, many people were, were killed and it became clear very quickly that the reason for the, the fire and the very, um, botched response, um, to the, uh, the, this kind of tragedy, um, all came from, um, a very poor, um,

social investment programme from the government, from central and local government.

And in response to this tragedy, this very affecting and personal collective exhibition was mounted underneath in the kind of eve of the, in the, sorry, in the shadow of the tower under London's Westway. And that became a really kind of vivid and, and, and,

and important space for the communication of the ideas from that tragedy. So I think it's interesting how exhibitions, these kind of informal exhibitions,

uh groupings collections of material that might even not really be called exhibitions by the people who are contributing to them are still being used but i think that um artists um have have this kind of power to to actually um to communicate ideas um

through exhibitions that allow us still to kind of come together, to have hope when it feels like the political situation is somehow hopeless and also to kind of draw people together around certain kind of histories and to kind of

I guess to develop a consensus in some way. And I guess we shouldn't take it for granted that we have freedom to express ourselves in those ways that exhibitions express.

can express those kind of democratic ideals we might think of them. Dr. Harriet Atkinson, thank you very much for speaking with us on New Books Network. I'd just do like to emphasize to our listeners that this is a highly accessible book. There are lots of beautiful books

pictures and illustrations in the book, which I guess makes, again, the arguments more relevant as well. So I highly recommend that they pick up the book and read it. As I said, it's accessible, filled with a lot of information about history, about arts and

A beautiful book that has been recently published by Manchester University Press showing resistance, propaganda and modernist exhibitions in Britain, 1935 to 1953. Dr. Harriet Atkinson, thank you very much for your time. Thank you so much for having me.