Second Session (1954)
The Group did not meet during late 1953 or early 1954, as they were concentrating on delivering a public programme of lectures at the ICA, Aesthetic Problems of Contemporary Art. New members joined the Independent Group for its second full session, including the architects Alison and Peter Smithson. The Smithsons along with Paolozzi, Henderson, Ronald Jenkins, Toni del Renzio, Banham and others staged the highly significant exhibition, Parallel of Life and Art at the ICA in the Autumn of 1953. Reyner Banham stood down as chair of the Independent Group, as he was busy with his PhD thesis at the Courtauld Institute of Art, and in late 1954 Dorothy Morland asked the art critic Lawrence Alloway and fine artist John McHale to reconvene the Independent Group for its second session. The painter Magda Cordell and her husband, music producer Frank Cordell joined the Independent Group at this point.
The second session focused on American mass culture such as Western movies, science fiction, billboards, car design and popular music. In the course of such discussions, they drew upon Futurist, Surrealist, the Bauhaus, and Dada concepts. John McHale and Lawrence Alloway curated a Collages and Objects exhibition at the ICA in 1954, where McHale exhibited his formative Pop Art collages. Richard Hamilton organised an exhibition, Man, Machine and Motion in late 1955 at the Hatton Gallery, Newcastle and the ICA, which focussed on some Independent Group concerns.
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