Just as there was no single incarnation of fascist politics between the World Wars, anti-fascism emerged under various guises, ranging from underground resistance to activism-in-exile to expressions of international solidarity to targeted propaganda. These five books trace some of these different histories.
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Antifascism in American Art
During the 1930s, anti-fascist activity unfurled under an ever-widening tent of the American art scene, comprising not just the interventions of Communists and other radical leftists but also regionalist painters who aimed patriotic figurations against the chauvinist dictatorships ascendant in Europe. This incisive overview by art historian Cécile Whiting (published in 1989) examines such integral matters as the influence of Francisco de Goya on American artists responding to the Spanish Civil War and the ideological ties forged—and contested—between abstract painting and democratic ideals. Whiting carefully addresses more than simple agitational propaganda by mulling nuanced questions of what modes and styles of American art could be taken to epitomize an anti-fascist ethos.
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Comrades in Art: Artists Against Fascism1933-1943
Image Credit: Thames & Hudson
Highlighting the wide-ranging activities of the London-based Artists International Association, this 2025 study by Andy Friend sets into relief a network of artists and critics united—despite dissimilar styles, agendas, and aesthetic allegiances—in the fight against fascism’s early rise. The years in question coincide with the establishment of the Popular Front in Europe, when coalitions of left-wing and centrist parties in different countries dropped their respective antipathies to unite in attempting to block the ascent of fascism. Something similar happened in the art world, and Friend charts the efforts of internationally renowned individuals like Picasso and Diego Rivera in parallel with work by Paul Nash, David Bomberg, Barbara Hepworth, and others in linking networks of anti-fascist resistance, whether with New Deal America or other groups in Europe.
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Acts of Resistance: The Power of Art to Create a Better World
Though not centered exclusively on the fight against specific iterations of fascism, the chief concern of this eclectic 2023 survey—the intersection of artistic practice with political resistance—speaks to the impetus of all anti-fascist efforts in aesthetics. Author Amber Massie-Blomfield surveys case studies—in chapters with conceptual titles like the March, the Village, the Concentration Camp—that examine sociological, historical, and topographical circumstances in which art was made as a matter of rage and rejoinder, survival and defiance. One chapter addresses the use of music in Auschwitz, not only as accompaniment to forced labor but also as creative coded resistance. As this book shows, anti-fascist legacies inform a range of practices, whether expressly or unwittingly. The AIDS activist posters that art collective Gran Fury designed in the 1980s recall nothing if not John Heartfield’s anti-Nazi photomontages.
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Surrealism and Anti-Fascism: Anthology
This 2025 anthology (to which I contributed modestly as a coeditor) documents Surrealism’s extensive role in anti-fascist struggles across Europe. Select tracts and manifestos—most of them translated into English for the first time—reveal individual and collective efforts that were striking in their range: from anti-colonialist activism by the original French Surrealist group to covert creations by Jindřich Heisler and others in Nazi-occupied Prague; from international responses to the Spanish Civil War to Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore’s improvised activism on the Nazi-occupied Channel Islands.
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Antifascism and the Avant-Garde: Radical Documentary in the 1960s
Does anti-fascism evince an intrinsic aesthetic? In its ideological challenges to fascism, might a genre as ostensibly empirical and realist as documentary film effectively exploit whimsy and play, fiction and surrealism? Julia Alekseyeva asks such questions of interrelated postwar cinematic practices in Japan and France. Various directors from these nations made of avant-garde documentary a laboratory of anti-fascist ethos from the 1960s, critiquing everything from ethnonationalism to neo-imperialism and gender politics. Taking as its touchstone early 20th-century Soviet experiments, this 2025 book examines the evolving (and loosening) rapport between explicitly anti-fascist film and an engaged, critical cinema that challenges the passive habits of spectatorship.
