Are the British too polite to be any good at surrealism?

The Paris World’s Fair of 1937 was more than a testing ground for artistic innovation; it was a battleground for political ideologies. The Imperial eagle spread its wings over the German Pavilion; the Soviet hammer swung above the Russian Pavilion; and the Spanish Pavilion unveiled Picasso’s shocking monument to the civilian dead of the bombed city of Guernica, raising the clenched fist of the Spanish Republic in the capital of non-interventionist France.

Not everyone was convinced by ‘Guernica’ as art. Anthony Blunt in The Spectator commended Picasso’s political gesture but dismissed the painting as ‘the expression of a private brainstorm’. Piqued on the artist’s behalf, the British surrealist Roland Penrose, who had seen the work in progress, arranged to have it exhibited in London at the New Burlington Galleries and the Whitechapel Art Gallery, where it attracted 15,000 visitors and £250 in donations for a food ship for Spain. In Paris the Spanish finance minister had compared the picture’s propaganda value to ‘a military victory on the front’: in London it furnished heavy artillery to the British avant-garde’s campaign against traditional realist art.