In 1933, the artist James Boswell produced a series of lithographs, each smaller than a postcard, entitled The Fall of London. In these prints, recognisable landmarks such as the British Museum become the settings for street warfare and revolution. The images are eerie – buildings loom against a night sky, thrown into shadow by the white glare of bonfires, gunshots and moonlight. These dark, anarchic scenes do not evoke nightmarish fantasy or gothic drama so much as foreboding. They evoke the mood that lay behind the founding of the British Artists International Association (AIA) in the same year, as Andy Friend explains in his compelling history of the organisation’s first decade. 

Comrades in Art tells the story of people responding to fear not with despair but with activity. The initial meetings of the AIA were inauspicious. About a dozen men and women in their twenties who were failing to make a living from fine art gathered in candlelight because the host’s electricity had been cut off. In its early incarnations, the AIA suffered from an identity problem. As Boswell recalled, it was ‘a mixture of agit-prop body, Marxist discussion group, exhibitions and anti-war, anti-fascist outfit’. Yet under the pressure of the times and thanks to some energetic leadership, the AIA quickly became a remarkably tenacious advocate for artists and culture itself. 

Membership of the AIA did not necessarily reflect thirst for revolution, as is usually assumed in the brief mentions the organisation receives in histories of the period. Instead, over the 1930s – as the depression destroyed much of the traditional art market and democracies were snuffed out across Europe –