| Summary: | At the end of the Second World War, the Hungarian-Jewish painter Magda Cordell McHale fled to London, where she remained until 1961, when she moved to the United States to pursue a career in futurology with her husband, the artist John McHale (d. 1978). The decade or so she spent in London was the most prolific phase in her artistic career. It saw her involved in the foundation of the Independent Group (1952–55), and exhibiting at the Institute of Contemporary Arts and the Hanover Gallery. Although Cordell was widely recognized for her ambivalent portrayals of the female body as mythic archetype and techno-scientific testing ground, she has not received due acknowledgment in the recent literature on postwar Britain and the Independent Group. This article re-evaluates the legacy of her proto-feminist artworks, arguing for Cordell’s important contribution to postwar British art and culture.
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