Post-war Britain saw a significant shift in societal attitudes and cultural norms, particularly in relation to gender roles and expectations. Artists like Henry Moore and Magda Cordell have critically engaged with these changes through their artistic interpretations and representations of the female body and femininity. Their works serve as a direct reflection of and gives commentary on the complex dynamics of a society in transition, grappling with its past while anticipatively looking towards the future.
After scarcely emerging victorious in 1945 from the Second World War, Britain found herself in a post-war period stained with palpable uncertainty and instability as the nation grappled with rebuilding after the devastations. With a mixture of hope and apprehension, society collectively looked back with yearning at what had been accomplished before while facing their present reality- where everything they had held on to, once known and familiar, had been abruptly ripped apart and made opened for reconsideration. Marked by drastic and significant changes, particularly vulnerable (and to a certain extent, still are) to being scrutinised and redefined, in this period, were the roles and expectations that were of women and femininity. Offering some perspective into this transformative era, where women were limitedly allowed to occupy and exist in marginal spaces, art and visual imagery became a platform for commentary and critique as artists were directly engaging with and challenging the status quo via their artistic practices. Prominent artists like Henry Moore and Magda Cordell, in their works, such as Reclining Figure (Festival) and Figure (Woman), respectively, approached these themes; critically reflecting and, in some sense, subverting the prevailing yet shifting attitudes towards the female body and womanhood.
In a climate of politics and societal pressures, coupled with the underlying anxieties of a post-war Britain, a responsive and considerable effort was made to encourage and retain a patriarchal way of life, in which notions and ideals surrounding the feminine and heterosexuality were consciously, and at the same time- subliminally, prescribed and set in place. Conversely, women, in this time, were also assumed to take on a central position in the state and government’s endeavours towards recovery and regeneration. Not only was support granted to advance industries and further development, but focus was also placed upon the (seemingly more personal) familial sphere. Following the cataclysmic war, questions and confrontations were gravely presented to pre-war conceptions of the nation as steadfast and enduring; certainty was broken apart, and the aftershocks of disaster continued to ring- however, there was still a lingering of hope for the possibility of tomorrow. This paradoxical and incongruous situation became the fervent grounds upon which artists found themselves producing in and from. As society, at large, attempted to come to terms with the push and pull that formed between ‘a nostalgia for the past and an anticipation for the future’,¹ the works of art created would effectively illustrate and serve as representations of an epoch underlined with contradictions.
With the establishment of the Welfare State by the incoming Labour party, a strong and secure national identity needed to be re-established and cemented by this governmental undertaking to protect and nurture the economic and social well-being of the nation. Conceived as a celebratory patriotic fair aimed at invoking and promoting feelings of successful recovery, the 1951 Festival of Britain was a display of might and fortitude on a national scale- showcasing the best of Britain manufacturing and design.² Held six years after the end of the Second World War and falling exactly on the one hundredth year anniversary of the famous Great Exhibition of 1851, the festival was described by the planning committee as ‘a great symbol of national regeneration’,³ and by its directors, Gerald Barry, as ‘a tonic for the nation’.⁴ Carried into the rhetoric of the fair was a traditional notion, according to Catherine Jolivette, of landscape as ‘a focus of the articulation of views on national identity and a metaphor for national character itself’.⁵ In this sense, the Festival of Britain has taken on the close historical relationship that landscape has established with an understanding of “Englishness” and reinstated it into the context of post-war Britain. This correlation offers some grasp on stability as the nation was in the midst of recuperation and repair after sustaining substantial wreckage to its homeland and the consequential diminishing of territorial holdings after the dissolution of its Empire.
Sculptural commissions that were on display, as a part of the Festival of Britain display, at the Southbank Exhibition, such as Henry Moore’s Reclining Figure (Festival) ‘gave visual form to gendered notions of Britain as an ample and nurturing ‘motherland’’;⁶ Catherine Jolivette asserts. Henry Moore (1989–1986) was an English sculpture, who by the mid-1950s,⁷ having already presented at the 1948 Venice Biennale for Britain, was regarded as one of the nation’s representative artists. Working closely in line with the aims of the Welfare State, Moore had a reputation for being a ‘civic sculptor’,⁸ widely known for his commitments to creating public works that reflected the interests of the community it served. Therefore, it is possible to consider his bronze sculpture, which was commissioned by the newly founded Arts Council in 1951, Reclining Figure (Festival) to be somewhat contemplative of the anxieties and biases that were underlining much of society’s attitudes towards gender and sexuality in the post-war period. Situated prominently on festival grounds, at the Land of Britain pavilion, a direct correlation can be drawn between the sculpture and themes being explored at the national event.
Another critical aspect in the connection between landscape and nation is the inherent notion of gender embedded within a binary relationship; one where the earth is feminine, and as Catherine Jolivette describes, is ‘represented as passive, awaiting plunder by the ‘practical men’ who extracted ‘the nourishment and profit that lies beneath’’.⁹ The sculpture evokes the yielding forms of nature, one that can be found in the common landscape of pastoral England, through its lithe ’tubular forms over which a dense network of lines created by string delineates and decorates the contours of the body’.¹⁰ The complex system of thin lines outlines the form and curves of the figure, embedded into the sculpture, gives the sculpture a sense of three-dimensionality and, convincingly, calls to mind a visual element reminiscent of topographical maps. Since Moore has productively presented a visual metaphor which links the female body to the natural landscape, Reclining Figure (Festival), therefore- accordingly, represents a dual subject matter. Within this analogy, women, like nature, are similarly conceived to be feminine, in essence, and are assigned the qualities of being submissive and maternal; as well as, regarded as sources of nourishment and subjects for objectification.
Made of a material and medium that invokes the earth’s resources, Moore’s series of Reclining Figure(s) elicit and relies upon traditional ideologies, which in turn- reaffirms his position and status as a well-established artist. Appearing in Moore’s body of work, even before the war, the recumbent pose of the female figure is an imagery that is firmly fixed in the Western art historical canon. Traditionally, this portrayal presents the feminine as an object of desire, available for conquest and male consumption;¹¹ notably, it is a trope that the artist frequently revisits. Moreover, Catherine Jolivette has also made the observation that ’in the context of the Festival, the revisiting of such imagery could be interpreted as an exercise in nostalgia, yet, emerging from a post-war austerity, Moore’s figure appeared more skeletal than its pre-war predecessors’.¹² Suggesting a statement being made about the state and conditions of the body in post-war Britain, Henry Moore has decidedly altered the appearance of his familiar subject matter. The reduced substance and material, the smaller form, has visibly suffered and is clearly depleted- this, in effect, highlights the devastations and hardships endured by the landscape and, by extension, the people of Britain.
Furthermore, the curving figurative form of Reclining Figure (Festival) strikingly contrasted against the modernist urban setting of the Southbank Exhibition- as the event sought to present and elicit a sense of progression and promise towards the future, as a whole. The juxtaposition in visual language and tone advertently negotiates between the past and future- and through his commissioned sculpture, Henry Moore has subtly expressed a plethora of symbolism that spoke of the preoccupying tensions and changes occurring within society and culture during this period of immense upheaval and uncertainty. Following the establishment of the Welfare State, Elizabeth Wilson has stated, ‘Woman is above all Mother, and with this vocation go all the virtues of femininity; submission, nurturance and passivity’.¹³ Constructs around the motherland and regeneration are being re-examined in Reclining Figure (Festival) with the return of a familiar and traditional subject matter; which not only expresses a sense of nostalgia, but also presents the past as stable point of reference that people and society can look back to for guidance and security.
Madga Cordell (1921–2008) was a Hungarian artist who fled to England in her young adulthood to escape Nazi persecution. She subsequently spent the next 10 years living and working in London as an active artist, primarily producing abstracted figurative paintings. This arguably defining decade hence makes up the most prolific phase of Cordell’s artistic career, and by the 1950s, the artist had managed to establish herself as a successful exhibiting painter, with shows exhibiting at the Institute of Contemporary Arts and the Hanover Gallery, and was involved, alongside other leading artists and critics of the time, in the founding of the Independent Group (IG). The IG was a radical group of young people who congregated at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London during the 1960s,¹⁴ and ’challenged the dominant modernist (and as they saw it elitist) culture dominant at that time, in order to make it more inclusive of popular culture’. Growing out of a fascination with American mass culture and post-war technologies, the group was responsible for the formulation, discussion, and dissemination of ’many of the basic ideas of British pop art and much of the other new British art’. As such, Magda Cordell played an integral role in post-war British arts and culture, contributing significantly (in an especially male-dominated space) as the odd non-British female artist.
Widely recognised for her arresting large-scale paintings depicting female forms, Cordell’s works effectively presents, at first glance, an abstracted and modern re-interpretation of the archetypal female figure that inhabited post-war concerns. However, upon closer inspection, as David Mellor has pointed out, the artist’s paintings ‘act as signs for an internal and -crucially- maternal body, unrepresented in British art of this moment’, as he strikingly makes the critical interpretation of, ‘a new fear -a new hysteria- is present here: the painting radiate another sickness in their read in their red womb/X-ray connotations’.¹⁵ Accordingly, Cordell’s figures appear to combine an engagement with postwar trauma, fear of the nuclear treat, and the proliferation of contemporary mass culture to pose questions and doubt onto the changing role and image of women in the increasingly shifting period of 1950s. As the artist recounted once, ‘I was filled with pain and I hoped for a better world’;¹⁶ this sentiment poignantly appears to be carried through Cordell‘s depictions and seem to not only induce feelings of anxiety and fear, but also suggest a series of meanings around fertility, regeneration, and femininity.
Figure (Woman), 1956–7, in Giulia Smith words, is a ‘signature example of her [Magda Cordell’s] treatment of the female body as a ballooned aggregate of pictorial lumps’¹⁷ and exemplifies what the artist explores in her monumental paintings. The highly textured surface, made with mixed synthetic materials, stands at over 2m in height- the artwork is a ’larger-than-life’ representation of a flattened female form on a canvas that is visually and physically visceral in effect. Far from being anatomically accurate, the figure is a composite of red and orange assemblages pieced together loosely to suggest a female form, with a ’sack-like body’, against a bright-blue background. Emphasis is strongly placed on specific areas, which are enlarged to look almost swollen, such as the thighs, breast, and navel- deliberately chosen, these are the body parts inherently associated with the feminine and fertility. Moreover, from the title of the artwork, Figure (Woman) it can be confirmed that the subject matter of the painting is a female body- the visual imagery is therefore, distinctly figurative. However, the composition can also be read abstractly, in another way; the large central form, made up of a haphazard mixture of earth-tones, is surrounded by a flat cool blue colour- a depiction remarkably evocative of a landscape depiction of an island surround by water.
This possibly draws back on the traditionalist analogy found in Henry Moore’s Reclining Figure (Festival) and, additionally, connects the historical tendency to associate the female body with natural landscape, alongside notions of passivity and sustenance. In the manner that Cordell has portrayed the subject matter in her painting, Figure (Woman), comparisons can also be made to an archetypal female form. Some inspiration can be observed and traced back to the impetuously type-casted (by scholars in the early 20th century) prehistoric statuettes of fertility idols, known as ‘Venuses’, exemplified in the example of the infamous Venus of Willendorf. Similarities can be found in how both forms are characteristically rotund and bloated in shape, with roughly the same areas being visually intensified and exaggerated. Magda Cordell has managed to ground her distinctively abstract and modern departure from a female form, once long-held in conventions surrounding femininity, to express the complications apparent in the experiences of post-war Britain; yet again, here- a nuanced interplay between the past and the future is being explored.
Additionally, with the ever-present catastrophic nuclear threat plaguing the psyche of a young population of men and women who were trying to make sense of life after suffering and enduring a tough period of austerity, during and soon after the Second World War. As industries were rapidly developing, the plasticity evident in the materials Cordell was using to create her works during this period evidently looked to be materially marking a transition. With science and warfare technology advancements culminating in the construction and utilisation of nuclear weapons, precarity around the long-term and environmental impacts of these unprecedented innovations and developments was also growing. As such, the artist’s arresting figure in Figure (Woman) appear to be situated in a reconciliation between finding a sense of grounding in the past while still holding a sensible amount of hesitance in what is to come. Palpable tensions arose between these two visions of Britain, one grounded in the past and the other as a country faces the realities of an inevitably industrial and atomic post-war situation. It seemed that the nation could no longer situate itself within its native artistic traditions nor could landscape (one of great glory and power) offer the escapist promises of a known Britain.
Accompanying the instatement of the Welfare State, a considerable amount of attention was placed onto the notions and ideals of a ‘nuclear family’ and the importance of maternal nurturing, as Elizabeth Wilson has noted, the ‘the ‘period since the Second World War is marked off from what went before by an intensification of state interest in family life and the child’.¹⁹ This shift unequivocally introduced and maintained attitudes towards the female gender and femininity which focused densely on the socially inculcated ’reproductive ambition’ of women and the weight of maternal ‘duty’. Women were expected to actively participate and play their ‘traditional roles’ in the nation’s plan for rebuilding and regeneration through the service of reproduction and homemaking. Projected as the natural state of being for females to ensure the longevity of labour through generations, the realities of what women had to confront in terms of their gender and sexuality were crucially manifesting in the intensifying preoccupations with the contradictive vulnerabilities and resilience of the female body. This unsettling juxtaposition brings to light questions around the roles that women were expected to carry in Britain’s post-war recovery.
In her article, Giulia Smith suggests that ‘Cordell was the first to pit self-expression against stereotype’, which forwards an argument for the female artist being critically concerned with ‘the rhetoric of biological destiny at the heart of the postwar reconsolidation of the nuclear family’.¹⁹ Through these inferences to the archaic and established past, in her brutal -almost violent- treatment of the female body in Figure (Woman), the artist is clearly attempting to probe at traditionalist notions of the primitively erotic maternal body as a source of nourishment and regeneration. This photographic portrait of Cordell standing in front of Figure (Woman) published in 1958,²⁰ showcases the artist with her artwork, almost entirely enveloped by the immense scale of the canvas itself. Front and centre, standing directly in front of the figure’s swollen navel, a parallel relation between the ’natural’ and ’living’ woman and the representational ’womb’ painted in synthetic materials is unsettlingly stated. Intentionally destructive and destabilising, Cordell is not only overly dismantling associations of the female body with notions of fertility, sustenance, and the landscape with Figure (Woman), but also covertly drawing attention to women, the essential gender, and the idea of ’Woman’, as a construct.
The aftermath of war is never stable and the period shortly following its conclusion is always in conversation with what was and what is to come. Thrown amidst a push-and-pull between the past and future, both artists’ works present the tensions between past traditions and future uncertainties in post-war Britian and a long-lasting nationalistic tendency to conflate the female body with notions of the landscape. As society and culture were undergoing massive upheavals and experiencing uncertainties, so did the attitudes and anxieties around the female body and identity changed and shift to fit the needs of the nation’s recovery and regeneration. Moore’s sculpture, Reclining Figure (Festival), commissioned for the 1951 Festival of Britain embodied gendered notions of Britian as a nurturing motherland; whereas Cordell’s painting, Figure (Woman), presented an abstracted re-interpretation of the female form, reflecting anxieties around post-war industries and changing attitudes towards women. These artworks played with and transcended the boundaries of traditional and modern in representation of femininity, highlighting the complexities and contradictions of women’s realities and experience in a post-war society grappling with change.
¹Postwar Modern: New Art in Britain 1945 -1965, (2022), Barbican Art Gallery, Barbican Centre, https://www.barbican.org.uk/our-story/press-room/postwar-modern-new-art-in-britain-1945-1965
²The Festival of Britain, Victoria and Albert Museum, https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/the-festival-of-britain
³Bernard Donoughue, and G. W. Jones, Herbert Morrison: Portrait of a Politician, (1973), pp 492–95
⁴ FM Leventhal, “A Tonic to the Nation”: The Festival of Britain, 1951, in Albion, Vol. 27, №3, (1995) pp, 447
⁵Catherine Jolivette, Landscape, Art and Identity in 1950 Britain, (Abington: Routledge, 2009), pp, 01
⁶Catherine Jolivette, pp, 3
⁷Henry Moore OM CH FBA, Henry Moore Foundation, https://henry-moore.org/
⁸Andrew Stephenson, Fashioning a Post-War Reputation: Henry Moore as a Civic Sculptor c. 1943–58, in Henry Moore: Sculptural Process and Public Identity, Tate Research Publication, (2015), https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/henry-moore/andrew-stephenson-fashioning-a-post-war-reputation-henry-moore-as-a-civic-sculptor-c1943-r1151305
⁹Catherine Jolivette, ‘The Gendered Landscape’, pp, 35
¹⁰Alice Correia, ‘Reclining Figure 1951 by Henry Moore OM, CH’, catalogue entry, January 2014, in Henry Moore: Sculptural Process and Public Identity, Tate Research Publication, (2015),
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/henry-moore/henry-moore-om-ch-reclining-figure-r1172012
¹¹Lydia Figes and Andrew Shore, The art of lying: reclining figures through history, ArtUK (2019), https://artuk.org/discover/stories/the-art-of-lying-reclining-figures-through-history
¹²Catherine Jolivette, ‘The Gendered Landscape’, pp, 46
¹³Elizabeth Wilson, Women and the Welfare State, (Routledge, 1977), pp, 7
¹⁴The Independent Group, Tate, Art Terms, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/i/independent-group
¹⁵David Mellow, ‘A ”Glorious Techniculture” in Nineteen-Fifties Britain: The Many Cultural Contexts of the Independent Group’, in Robbins, pp, 235
¹⁶Magda Cordell 1921–2008, Tate, Artists, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/magda-cordell-2392
¹⁷Figure (Woman), Tate, Artworks, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/cordell-figure-woman-t07087
¹⁸Elizabeth Wilson, pp, 35
¹⁹Giulia Smith, pp, 24–28
²⁰Uppercase, Issue 1, (Whitefriars, London: 1958), by Paolozzi Eduardo, Cordell McHale Magda, Mc Hale John, https://biblio.co.uk/book/uppercase-1-paolozzi-eduardo-cordell-mchale/d/456879984
