MATTHEW HAWKINS applauds a psychotherapist’s disection of William Blake
Anti-fascist class-conscious art
CHRISTINE LINDEY welcomes a fascinating survey of the work of the communist and socialist artists who founded the AIA in the 1930s
James Boswell, Two studies of a man with a chain through his head, c.1943, detail
[© The estate of James Boswell / Tate] 
New releases from Christina Alden and Alex Patterson, Odette Michell, Clementine Lovell
JOHN GREEN is fascinated by a very readable account of Britain’s involvement in South America
Strip cartoons used to be the bread and butter of newspapers and they have been around for centuries. MICHAL BONCZA asks our own Paul Tanner about which bees are in his bonnet
GORDON PARSONS acknowledges the authority with which Sarah Kane’s theatrical justification for suicide has resonance today
RON JACOBS welcomes a timely homage to one of the IWW and CPUSA’s most effective orators
The Artists International Association
Tate Britain, London
UNLIKE most working-class children, when Cliff Rowe left school in 1918 aged 14 he went to the local art school rather than going straight to work. Aged 19 he was earning a living as a commercial artist, but painting in his own time. He accepted the profession’s competitive, individualist values, until someone loaned him the Communist Manifesto. Convinced of its logic he became one of Britain’s most principled, lifelong communist artists.
In 1930 he travelled to the young USSR, then a beacon of hope to his generation ravaged by the Hungry Twenties, and where there was plentiful illustration work. Inspired by Soviet cultural policies and the USA’s John Reed Clubs, Rowe initiated the founding of the Artist International (AI) in 1933.
More from this author
CHRISTINE LINDEY guides us through the vivid expressionism of a significant but apolitical group of pre WWI artists in Germany
CHRISTINE LINDEY salutes an outstanding exhibition imbued with a sense of national guilt
CHRISTINE LINDEY surveys the cosmopolitan, enigmatic compositions of an idiosyncratic artist whose work speaks of mystery and exile
