Painting that Grows Back: Futures Past and the Ur-feminist Art of Magda Cordell McHale, 1955–1961

• Main Author: Giulia Smith
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Yale University 2015-11-01
• Series: British Art Studies
• Subjects: Abstract Expressionism; Amédée Ozenfant; anthropology; atom bomb; Betty Friedan; Cold War; British Art; Edward Jean Steichen; evolutionism; feminism; Hanover Gallery; humanism; Independent Group; Institute of Contemporary Arts; John Bowlby; John McHale; Lawrence Alloway; Magda Cordell McHale; Margaret Mead; science fiction; Second World War
• Online Access: http://britishartstudies.ac.uk/issues/issue-index/issue-1/magda-cordell-hchale

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.