British Art in the Nuclear Age book cover

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British Art in the Nuclear Age book cover

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1st Edition

British Fine art in the Nuclear Historic period

Copyright Year 2014

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Book Description

Rooted in the study of objects, British Fine art in the Nuclear Age addresses the office of art and visual culture in discourses surrounding nuclear science and applied science, atomic power, and nuclear warfare in Cold War Britain. Examining both the fears and hopes for the future that attended the advances of the nuclear age, nine original essays explore the contributions of British-born and émigré artists in the areas of sculpture, textile and applied pattern, painting, drawing, photo-journalism, and exhibition display. Artists discussed include: Francis Bacon, John Bratby, Lynn Chadwick, Prunella Clough, Naum Gabo, Barbara Hepworth, Peter Lanyon, Henry Moore, Eduardo Paolozzi, Peter Laszlo Peri, Isabel Rawsthorne, Alan Reynolds, Colin Cocky, Graham Sutherland, Feliks Topolski and John Tunnard. Also under give-and-take is new archival material from Picture Post mag, and the Festival of Britain. Far from insular in its concerns, this book draws upon cantankerous-cultural dialogues between British and European artists and the relationship between Britain and America to engage with an interdisciplinary art history that volition as well evidence useful to students and researchers in a variety of fields including modernistic European history, political science, the history of design, anthropology, and media studies.

Table of Contents

Contents: Introduction, Catherine Jolivette; 'A kind of cold state of war feeling' in British art, 1945-1952, Carol Jacobi; Geometries of hope and fear: the iconography of atomic science and nuclear anxiety in the modern sculpture of World War and Common cold War United kingdom, Robert Burstow; 'An imagined cataclysm becomes fact': British photojournalism and real and imagined nuclear war in Picture show Mail, Christoph Laucht; Representations of atomic power at the Festival of Uk, Catherine Jolivette; The genius loci of Common cold War Great britain: the metamorphic landscapes of Graham Sutherland, Peter Lanyon and Alan Reynolds, Fiona Gaskin; Common cold War at home: John Bratby, the cocky and the nuclear threat, Gregory Salter; Covert resistance: Prunella Clough's Cold War 'urbscapes', Catherine Spencer; The aesthetics of scientific authority in a nuclear age: Jacob Bronowski and Feliks Topolski, Kate Aspinall; Painting the terminate: British artists and the nuclear apocalypse, 1945-1970, Simon Martin; Select bibliography; Alphabetize.

Editor(s)

Biography

Catherine Jolivette is Associate Professor of Art & Pattern, Missouri State University, Usa, and author of Landscape, Art and Identity in 1950s Britain.

Reviews

Winner, The Historians of British Art Book Award

'A wonderfully diverse and wide-ranging book that significantly increases our understanding of the complex role of art, artists, imagery and popular culture in the nuclear historic period.' - Jonathan Hogg, University of Liverpool, UK

'I was deeply impressed by this book which opens upwardly vivid and sometimes unsuspected contextual avenues of assay for British postal service war fine art and culture. Where it is truly novel is in the real grasp on the materialities of the warfare state in their formative impact on pictorial and sculptural developments.' - David Alan Mellor, University of Sussex, Britain

'As a cross-disciplinary case written report, the essay is a testament to the way one field can shed low-cal upon another, peradventure most importantly past helping it to frame critical questions - in this case, the urgent questions about culture's hopes and fears that permeated the nuclear age and that this book, by and large speaking, does not shy from.' - Burlington Magazine

'Jolivette has succeeded in creating a new subsection of 'nuclear art history', collecting in nine chapters voices and narratives unheard and uncomfortable. These are of import discussions also today, and the volume reminds united states of what artists can bring to conversations and decisions well-nigh science.' - Camilla Mork Rostvik, Academy of Manchester, The British Journal for the History of Science

'The close relationship between scientific advances and cultural expression in the postal service-war period is a particularly strong focus throughout the essays in British Art in the Nuclear Age, and is nowhere more than effectively demonstrated than in Catherine Jolivette's essay on the ways in which representations of atomic ability at the Festival of United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland helped to forge an image of scientifi c advocacy every bit a constituent part of what was being proffered by the Festival organizers every bit Britain's "national image".' - Fine art History