The Independent Group:
Fathers [and mothers] of Pop (1990)
A review of the exhibition The Independent Group: Post-War Britain and the Aesthetics of Plenty, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, Feb-April 1990.
artdesigncafé | café library | Published 03 January 2010
This review was first published in the design magazine Blueprint, no. 64, Feb 1990, pp. 24-26.
Britain in the early 1950s was still suffering from the adverse effects of the Second World War and adjusting to the loss of empire. Atomic bombs and the Korean War added to the gloom which national celebrations like the Festival of Britain and the Coronation could only temporarily alleviate. The affluent consumer society with its pop and teenage cultures that flowered in the late 1950s and 1960s was still at an embryonic stage. While some Britishers looked enviously across the Atlantic to the United States, where, according to the movies and adverts, there was a paradise of material comfort, others resented the impact of “admass” upon the nation. It was at this historical juncture that various younger members of the ICA, Dover Street, London, organised an informal discussion group first named the “Young Group” and then the “Independent Group” (IG). It met intermittently between 1952 and 1955. At the time, the participants had no inkling that their small gatherings would later become famous or that they would be dubbed “Fathers of Pop”.
Think-tank extraordinaire
The word “independent” signified a degree of autonomy from the mother institution and in particular marked a break with the aesthetic preferences of members of the old guard such as Herbert Read and Roland Penrose, founders of the ICA, whose tastes had been formed in the 1930s. Surrealism was crucial to Penrose, while Read was receptive to most varieties of modern art. Both believed the arts formed the apex of a pyramid, at the bottom of which was the mass media; both considered artistic values to be eternal and absolute. The Independent Group also opposed, or were indifferent to, the several strands of British art of the time, namely, “Moore-ish yokelry”, neo-romanticism and kitchen sink realism. They preferred the Dadaists and Futurists, Francis Bacon, Jackson Pollock and European neo-Brutalism.
Participants in Independent Group meetings and projects included Lawrence Alloway, Reyner Banham, Magda and Frank Cordell, Theo Crosby, Toni del Renzio, Richard Hamilton, Terry Hamilton, Nigel Henderson, Geoffrey Holroyd, John McHale, Eduardo Paolozzi, Colin St John Wilson, Alison and Peter Smithson, James Stirling, William Turnbull and John Voelcker. Thus the Independent Group encompassed art and design critics, architects, artists and people working in popular culture (Frank Cordell in pop music and del Renzio in women’s fashion magazines). As the list of names reveals, the Independent Group was very much a male-dominated institution and the contributions of its female participants have yet to be properly evaluated.
Independent Group at the ICA, London: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5
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