Comrades in Art exhibition at the Towner Gallery

I had spotted this exhibition during a semi-regular check of the Towner exhibitions page and thought it might be interesting if I was in the area. I hadn’t really thought of making it a feature visit until a friend mentioned that her husband had been really impressed by it. I found myself with a free Friday and thought I could make it part of an Explorer style day in Eastbourne. This isn’t quite how the day turned out!

The exhibition is large. Not in terms of space but in terms of pieces - 300+. And, as a contrast to the Tracey Emin: A second life exhibition I went to earlier in the year, the information panels by the side of the art were packed with context which made sense of the art, the artist and how they came to be involved with the AIA in the first place. They even provided a link to the full set of information panels. A wide variety of styles. Some pieces which may have been unremarkable had the context not being present. Several artists linking back to both the Hepworth in Colour exhibition at the Courtauld and the British Landscapes: A Sense of Place at Pallant House Gallery visited in the past couple of months. Rarely do I see so many exhibitions in a short space of time so rarely do I get to make such connections.

Some of the pieces that stood out for me mainly did so because of the stories.

The half-size reproduction of Cliff Rowe’s The Struggle Between the Unemployed and the Police Forces. After Rowe had painted this and returned to England from Moscow he didn’t see the painting again. He described it in an interview in the early 1980s which enabled its identification in Lviv in the interval between the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. I wonder what the story attached to the artwork was from the Lviv National Art Gallery perspective. Did they know whose work it was? Was it on display?

Clive Branson’s paintings from 1940. Firstly of Noreen and Rosa (his wife and daughter) which he painted after his release from being a prisoner of war based on how he imagined they were while he was in Spain, and then of wartime scenes in London.

War artists have become a recurring thread this year — from wondering what a camouflage artist even was in Chichester, to Ravilious’s own sad end, to Clive Branson’s paintings here. It seems to be a subject that keeps finding me.

And on a more playful note, the photos of “Girls in the wind” that either Betty Rea or Nan Youngman took while taking the sculpture for a tour of the East Anglian coast. Having done this myself with various objects, I delighted in seeing that it wasn’t just me!

A good, big, tiring exhibition that engaged me so much that I didn’t have time for any further exploration. Well worth a visit.