In 1954 artists Nigel Henderson and Eduardo Paolozzi formed a creative partnership under the company name of Hammer Prints Limited. Over the course of the next seven years, the two artists established a commercial venture, collaboratively designing patterns and working with industry specialists to produce wallpapers, fabrics, ceramic tiles, furniture and tableware using their designs.This new book is published by firstsite on the occasion of the exhibition Nigel Henderson & Eduardo Paolozzi: Hammer Prints Limited (8 December 2012 – 3 March 2013). Based on original research, the exhibition charts the history of Hammer Prints within the context of their broader artistic output and other collaborations such as the exhibitions, Parallel of Life and Art (Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 1953) and This is Tomorrow (Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 1956).The publication documents original exhibition research, features contributions from leading experts including firstsite curator Michelle Cotton, Eduardo Paolozzi's biographer Robin Spencer, design historian Lesley Jackson, and includes full colour reproductions of the Hammer designs and artwork alongside hitherto unseen working material.

Works of art were created in the England of the 50s and 60s which are of extraordniary topicality today. This applies particularly to the Independent Group which included artists, photographers as well as architects. Its members strove to achieve an authenticity close to the grass roots of life, to discover the essence of the everyday, to arouse a sensitivity to life in the raw as against a touched-up version of reality, to bring out both its hardships and its charm. The book is about architecture and art and photography. It seeks rather to show the unmediated impact and direct appeal of a refractory aesthetics.

How a group of artists and theorists turned to exhibition design as the only medium capable of synthesizing high and low in postwar culture. In 1950s London, a cadre of young artists, theorists, and popular culture aficionados known as the Independent Group (IG) came together for a series of pressing meetings. Their humble goal: to reimagine the structure of postwar culture by situating art in the midst of military-industrial technologies and pop pleasures. In this book, Kevin Lotery argues that the IG turned to the cross-disciplinary form of exhibition design as the only medium capable of getting the measure of these forces, the only technique that could integrate high and low, aesthetic and scientific, and redesign them in turn. At the heart of this story are the IG's most unruly members, including artists Richard Hamilton, Nigel Henderson, and Eduardo Paolozzi; architects Alison and Peter Smithson; and critics Lawrence Alloway and Reyner Banham. To these upstarts, art was no more privileged an activity than the streamlining of a helicopter blade or the screening of the latest cinema spectacle. In place of the old cultural hierarchies, they saw a continuum that Alloway termed “the long front of culture.” Only exhibition making could redirect this “long front” toward something genuinely, startlingly new. Lotery shows that the IG's exhibitions sought out temporary interfaces with technological invention and scientific research in a search for the form of the new itself. The IG exhibitions he examines drew on biological morphogenesis, anthropology and photography, human-machine prosthetics, American pop, abstraction, and theories of play. The IG is often described as the precursor to the pop art of the 1960s. Lotery shows that it was much more, as entangled with the histories of science, technology, and design as with the dialectics of modern art and mass culture

Reyner Banham was a pioneer in arguing that technology, human needs, and environmental concerns must be considered an integral part of architecture. No historian before him had so systematically explored the impact of environmental engineering on the design of buildings and on the minds of architects. In this revision of his classic work, Banham has added considerable new material on the use of energy, particularly solar energy, in human environments. Included in the new material are discussions of Indian pueblos and solar architecture, the Centre Pompidou and other high-tech buildings, and the environmental wisdom of many current architectural vernaculars.

While most famously associated with numerous mid-century architects, Brutalism was a style of visual art that was also adopted by painters, sculptors, printmakers, and photographers. Taking into account Brutalist work by eminent artists such as Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi, as well as lesser-known practitioners like Nigel Henderson and Magda Cordell, this volume focuses on a ten-year period between 1952 and 1962 when artists refused a programmatic set of aesthetics and began experimenting with images that had no set focal point, using non-traditional materials like bombsite debris in their work, and producing objects that were characterized by wit and energy along with anxiety, trauma, and melancholia. This original study offers insights into how Brutalism enabled British artists of the mid-20th century to respond ethically and aesthetically to the challenges posed by the rise of consumer culture and unbridled technological progress. Published in association with the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Lawrence Alloway (1926–90) was one of the most influential and widely respected art writers of the postwar years. A key interpreter of pop art, abstraction, and land art, he was also involved with the realist revival and the early feminist movement in art. Art and Pluralism provides close and critical readings of Alloway's writings and sets his work in the context of the London and New York art worlds from the 1950s to the early 1980s. Nigel Whiteley underlines the particular importance of pluralism and its relationship with the artistic value systems that bookended it—formalism and postmodernism—shedding new light on postwar visual culture as a whole.

The work of mid-twentieth century art theorist Anton Ehrenzweig is explored in this original and timely study. An analysis of the dynamic and invigorating intellectual influences, institutional framework and legacy of his work, Between Art Practice and Psychoanalysis reveals the context within which Ehrenzweig worked, how that influenced him and those artists with whom he worked closely. Beth Williamson looks to the writing of Melanie Klein, Marion Milner, Adrian Stokes and others to elaborate Ehrenzweig?s theory of art, a theory that extends beyond the visual arts to music. In this first full-length study on his work, including an inventory of his library, previously unexamined archival material and unseen artworks sit at the heart of a book that examines Ehrenzweig?s working relationships with important British artists such as Bridget Riley, Eduardo Paolozzi and other members of the Independent Group in London in the 1950s and 1960s. In Ehrenzweig?s second book The Hidden Order of Art (1967) his thinking on Jackson Pollock is important too. It was this book that inspired American artists Robert Smithson and Robert Morris when they deployed his concept of ?dedifferentiation?. Here Williamson offers new readings of process art c. 1970 showing how Ehrenzweig?s aesthetic retains relevance beyond the immediate post-war era.