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BOOKS

nuclear imagery in the various displays of the destructive’ works to the Pop appropriations British Art in the Nuclear Age. Edited by 1951 Festival of Britain. of Derek Boshier and Richard Hamilton, Catherine Jolivette. 306 pp. incl. 16 col. + Other authors approach the nuclear context alongside parallel imagery by American peers 51 b. & w. ills. (Ashgate, Farnham, 2014), more obliquely. Carol Jacobi considers the Andy Warhol and James Rosenquist. Few £70. ISBN 978–1–4724–1276–8. atomic threat to be an implicit aspect of what artists, British or otherwise, represented the characterised as ‘a kind of actions and aftermath of atomic war itself, Reviewed by LEE HALLMAN cold war feeling about art’ in the immediate however. Martin explores the notable excep- post-War years, exemplified in the spread of tion of Colin Self, whose Fall-out shelter series WRITING IN THE immediate aftermath of the Existentialism from France to Britain. Robert and works produced in response to the Cuban Second World War and its devastating con- Burstow explores the extent to which nuclear missile crisis depicted the real and imagined clusion with the bombings of Hiroshima and concerns had an impact on a range of post-War victims of nuclear destruction (Fig.61). Nagasaki, Kenneth Clark prophesied in the British sculpture, from Peter (Laszlo) Peri’s Although centred on British culture, the final chapter of his celebrated book Landscape overtly social-realist protest piece Aldermaston volume’s attention to transcontinental into Art that the ‘excitement and awe which marchers (1960) to the more ‘coded’ sculptural exchange and émigré artists underscores the this terrible new universe arouses in us will language of , , omnipresent experience of the nuclear age. In find expression in some way’.1 Identifying and and others whose spiky, one of the most absorbing essays, Kate interpreting a range of these expressions is the anthropomorphic forms prompted Herbert Aspinall recounts an instance in which science overarching aim of British Art in the Nuclear Read’s famous phrase ‘Geometry of Fear’ – an cast its gaze onto art. In an episode of his 1973 Age, a compilation of academic essays whose epithet whose own evolving connotations BBC television series The Ascent of Man, publication represents the latest in a recent Burstow skilfully unearths. Drawing upon the Polish-born scientist Jacob Bronowski scholarly wave to examine British art and its theories of family dynamics from contempo- suggested that the synthesis of subjective judg- discourses during the three decades following rary psychoanalysis, Gregory Salter argues that ment and fallibility embodied in the dynamic, the War’s end in 1945.2 The present volume, nuclear anxieties permeate the bunker-like overlaid process of the painter Feliks Topolski edited by Catherine Jolivette, frames the Cold domestic spaces depicted by John Bratby, one (a fellow Polish-born emigrant) might be War era as a ‘nuclear age’ in which the over- of the best known of the ‘Kitchen Sink’ painters. understood as a visual analogy to the fraught shadowing presence of atomic power inflected Some of the strongest essays locate visual ethics of scientific authority. Topolski’s paint- cultural production well into the later decades reflections of the nuclear age’s widespread ings, too, transcend Bronowski’s metaphorical of the twentieth century. doubts in artists’ deliberately fluctuating context. But as a cross-disciplinary case study, Many British artists publicly opposed the forms. Catherine Spencer provides a well- the essay is a testament to the way one field development of nuclear power: Barbara researched context for the ‘indeterminate’, can shed light upon another, perhaps most Hepworth, Patrick Heron, , semi-abstract shapes in Prunella Clough’s importantly by helping it to frame critical Ben Nicholson and Richard Hamilton were ‘urbscape’ paintings, stimulated in part by questions – in this case, the urgent questions among those who signed the British Campaign military cartography and the aerial photo - about civilisation’s hopes and fears that per- for Nuclear Disarmament in February 1958, graphy of industrial landscapes. Meanwhile, as meated the nuclear age and that this book, and several artists participated in the first Burstow reiterates, Henry Moore’s Atom piece generally speaking, does not shy from. march from Trafalgar Square to the Atomic (1964–67), commissioned to commemorate Weapons Research Establishment at Alder- the first nuclear chain reaction, invokes both 1 K. Clark: Landscape into Art, London 1952 (first edition maston. The relationship between an artist’s the mushroom cloud and a human skull. 1949), p.142. activism and the art he or she creates, however, Other artists found inspiration in the 2 These include M. Garlake: New art, new world: British is inevitably more complex than a campaign ‘micro-iconography’ of atomic science: British art in postwar society, New Haven and London 1998; J. advances in crystallography provided a formal Hyman: The battle for realism: Figurative art in Britain during signature might suggest. For one thing, as the Cold War, 1945–60, London 2001; see also L. Tickner contributor Simon Martin points out, unlike catalyst for the Constructivist explorations of and D. Peters Corbett, eds.: British art in the cultural field, the twentieth century’s First and Second Naum Gabo and , for 1939–69, Chichester 2012, which also includes an essay by World Wars, the Cold War was a ‘war of example. It is one thing to identify sources of Catherine Jolivette about art in the nuclear age. ideologies’ whose contexts and consequences formal motivation, however, and another to 3 S. Martin and M. Livingstone: exh. cat. Colin Self: were constantly present but not readily assume that any singular context determines a Art in the Nuclear Age, Chichester (Pallant House comprehended, let alone represented.3 More- work’s meaning. Fiona Gaskin extends the Gallery) 2008, pp.19–20, cited here by Jolivette, p.14. over, as Jolivette notes in her introduction, discourse of Read’s ‘Geometry of Fear’ to the the connotations of nuclear science shifted metamorphic post-War landscape paintings of substantially from the 1940s to the 1960s Graham Sutherland, Peter Lanyon and Alan alongside an evolving understanding of a Reynolds, but her assertion that their paintings technology that could be harnessed alternately can be read as ‘metaphors of the nuclear threat’ Lynn Chadwick. By Michael Bird. 192 pp. as an agent of energy production and a (p.127) is overstated and largely unsupported. incl. 120 col. + 40 b. & w. ills. (Lund weapon of mass destruction. Simon Martin considers British responses Humphries, London, 2014), £45. ISBN The book bills itself as ‘rooted in the study to the bomb, from Gustav Metzger’s ‘auto- 978–1–84822–135–2. of objects’, a claim the nine essays interpret and substantiate with notable breadth, explor- Reviewed by JUDY COLLINS ing how the nuclear age shaped, and in some cases was shaped by, a spectrum of visual cul- MICHAEL BIRD’S MONOGRAPH on the sculptor ture from painting and sculpture (encompassing Lynn Chadwick (1914–2003) begins with an social realism, abstraction, , and illuminating introductory section called Pop), to applied design, exhibition display ‘Blowtorch poetry’, which gives the reader a and photojournalism. A number of essays good feel for Chadwick’s workshop empiri- scrutinise the documentation of atomic science cism, and a greater understanding of the variety in popular forums and the mass media: of sculptures discussed in the subsequent seven Christopher Laucht investigates how images chapters. The book is well arranged and visual- of the bombings of Japan and post-War ly attractive, with some unusual personal nuclear testing grounds were communicated 61. Waiting woman with nuclear bomber, by Colin Self. photographs, especially one by Lee Miller of a to British audiences in the magazine Picture 1963. Gouache, pencil and crayon on paper, 34.5 by naked Chadwick sharpening kitchen knives at Post, while Jolivette surveys representations of 57 cm. (Richard Saltoun Gallery, London). the home of Miller and Roland Penrose.

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