British Art in the Nuclear Age

Rooted in the study of objects, British Art in the Nuclear Age addresses the role of art and visual culture in discourses surrounding nuclear science and technology, 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 design, 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 Self, Graham Sutherland, Feliks Topolski and John Tunnard. Also under discussion is new archival material from Picture Post magazine, and the Festival of Britain. Far from insular in its concerns, this volume draws upon cross-cultural dialogues between British and European artists and the relationship between Britain and America to engage with an interdisciplinary art history that will also prove useful to students and researchers in a variety of fields including modern European history, political science, the history of design, anthropology, and media studies.

Contents: Introduction, Catherine Jolivette; ‘A kind of cold 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 Cold War Britain, Robert Burstow; ‘An imagined cataclysm becomes fact’: British photojournalism and real and imagined nuclear war in Picture Post, Christoph Laucht; Representations of atomic power at the Festival of Britain, Catherine Jolivette; The genius loci of Cold War Britain: the metamorphic landscapes of Graham Sutherland, Peter Lanyon and Alan Reynolds, Fiona Gaskin; Cold War at home: John Bratby, the self 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 end: British artists and the nuclear apocalypse, 1945-1970, Simon Martin; Select bibliography; Index.

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