Like his friend W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender had spent the Thirties, as WFB

puts it, "dancing along the precipice, attempting at once literary integrity and Communist fellow traveling." And like Auden, he recovered from that infatuation with totalitarianism--in Mr. Spender's case, in time to be the first editor of the urbanely anti-Communist Encounter (whose funding by the CIA had later been disclosed). No fireworks on this show, but illuminating discussion of the connections between art and politics. SS: "Henry Moore was a very strong anti-fascist during the Thirties. At the time, he was doing nothing but abstract sculpture, and it worried him quite a lot that he wasn't doing sort of heroic anti-fascist sculpture. But then he decided that this would be completely false to his own sort of vision ... One might, from a left-wing point of view, find it very difficult to see this. However, the totalitarians see it very well, because they discover nothing more dangerous than abstract sculpture."