John McHale (artist)

John McHale (August 19, 1922 – November 2, 1978) was a British artist, art theorist, sociologist and specialist of future studies. He was a founder member of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, and a founder of the Independent Group, a British movement that originated Pop Art which grew out of a fascination with American mass culture and post-World War II technologies.

He was born in Maryhill, Glasgow, Scotland. He was educated in the United Kingdom and the United States of America, with a PhD in Sociology. After spending a year at Yale University in 1955–1956, he definitely moved to the USA in 1962 to work with the architect Richard Buckminster Fuller on ecological issues and environmental sustainability. He and his wife, the artist Magda Cordell, then founded their own future studies organization, the Center for Integrative Studies (CIS), to deal with the long-term consequences of scientific and technological "progress" on mankind future.

According to McHale's son, the term Pop Art was first coined by his father in 1954 in conversation with Frank Cordell, although other sources credit its origin to the British critic Lawrence Alloway. Both versions agree that the term was in use in Independent Group discussions by mid-1950s.

The critic Reyner Banham called John McHale the "scholar-artist, this 'Father of Pop'". Alloway in his Artforum article on "Pop art Since 1949" notes that "with reference to pop art that could be demonstrated […] John McHale made collages in 1955 out of the then-fresh postwar color printed American magazines." McHale's works included fine arts, graphics, exhibition design, television, film and general consultancy to organisations in the US and Europe. He exhibited widely in Europe from 1950. He started as a Constructivist artist and then transitioned into his Pop art and proto Op art. With fellow members of the Independent Group, Richard Hamilton, Reyner Banham and Lawrence Alloway he organised the Growth and Form exhibition in 1951, inspired by the work of the scientist D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson. Although it received no financial support from the government or the Festival Office it had an agenda which was close to the official exhibitions of the Festival of Britain. McHale with Alloway curated a Collages and Objects exhibit at the ICA in 1954, where McHale first exhibited his formative Pop Art collages including the Transistor series, and his interactive gaming collage book Why I Took To The Washers In Luxury Flats.

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