William coldstream

One day, according to a venerable anecdote, an earl pushed his way into Hans Holbein’s London workshop demanding that his portrait be painted straight away. Understandably annoyed, Holbein hit him. This nobleman then asked Henry VIII to punish the painter, but apparently the monarch replied: ‘I can make seven earls (if it pleased me) from seven peasants – but I could not make one Hans Holbeen [sic], or so excellent an artist, out of seven earls.’ Holbein’s pictures must have seemed miraculous when they appeared in Tudor England. In fact they still do. Seeing them is like opening a window into the past and finding it populated by people like

What is art for? How can it, should it, relate to the political framework of its time? How far can it shade into ‘propaganda of the imagination’? These are some of the questions threading through Andy Friend’s compelling account of the first decade of the Artists International Association, or AIA, a vital but under-explored British movement welding art and politics against the growing threat of international fascism.  The story opens in 1933 in the candlelit rooms of Misha Black above Seven Dials, Covent Garden, where a dozen impecunious jobbing artists met to discuss a sensational report from the Soviet Union. This was that thousands of Russian artists were regularly employed