The talk by Professor Lynda Nead will be held as part of the Mellon Lecture Series British Blonde: Women, Desire and the Image in Post-War Britain at the Gorvy Lecture Theatre, V&A Museum, from 6:30 – 7:30 pm on 8 November 2023.
The Paul Mellon Centre website has the following information on the series: “These lectures look at post-war Britain through changing styles of femininity that expressed many of the key concerns of the nation in the twenty-five years that followed the end of the Second World War. In the 1950s, American glamour was exported to a war-torn Britain, part of a larger passage of commodities that crossed the Atlantic in this period. In the process, however, something important happened, blonde became British, Marilyn Monroe became Diana Dors. The lectures capture this process as it evolved through the 1950s and 1960s and was subjected to the changing definitions of class, social aspiration and desire that shaped the post-war nation.
Drawing on a wide range of visual media and forms including painting, film, photography, advertising and fashion the lectures offer a new history of the art and culture of post-war Britain.
In the 1960s a new kind of blonde femininity emerged. Part of a new regional and class configuration and a changing moral and sexual environment, Sixties Blonde was described as natural, energetic, impulsive and self-sufficient; an urban figure who embodied modernity and was a staple of fashion photography and sixties cinema. The work of British pop artist, Pauline Boty, expresses many of the tensions for young women in the 1960s, the possibilities and constraints, liberation and collusion. This lecture considers Boty’s work and her image in the context of shifts in morality and sexuality in the period and the broader culture of film and photography in these years.
The Paul Mellon lectures, which are named in honour of the philanthropist and collector of British art, Paul Mellon (1907-1999), were inaugurated in 1994 when Professor Francis Haskell delivered the first series at the Gallery in London. The model for the series was the Andrew W. Mellon lectures, established in 1949 in honour of Paul Mellon’s father, the founder of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. The lectures are biennial, given by a distinguished historian of British art.
About the speaker
Lynda Nead is Pevsner Professor of History of Art at Birkbeck, University of London. She has published widely on a range of art historical subjects and particularly on the history of British visual culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her most recent book is The Tiger in the Smoke: Art and Culture in Post-War Britain (Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art by Yale University Press). She has a number of advisory roles in national art museums and galleries and is a Trustee of the Holburne Museum and of Campaign for the Arts. She is currently writing a book called British Blonde: Women, Desire and the Image in Post-War Britain.”
Details
Ticket price: £5 per lecture
Location: Gorvy Lecture Theatre, V&A Museum, Victoria & Albert Museum,, Cromwell Road, London SW7 2RL
Date: 8 November 2023
Time: 6:30 – 7:30 pm
Tickets can be booked via eventbrite here [link]
Image credit: Pauline Boty by Michael Seymour, 1962.
Pauline Boty 