Born: 24 June, 1921, in Hungary. Died: 21 February, 2008, in Buffalo, US, aged 86.
MAGDA Cordell McHale was an artist who was one of the founding members of the Independent Group in London in the early 1950s and later became a renowned sociologist
and writer in the field of futurism.
Along with her first husband, Frank Cordell, later a prominent musician and composer, and the artist John McHale, who would become her second husband, McHale helped convene the London-based group that started British Pop Art. Other members of the Independent Group included the artists Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi; the architects Alison and Peter Smithson; and the critic Lawrence Alloway, who is often credited with inventing the term "Pop Art".
In 1956, McHale participated with the group in producing "This Is Tomorrow", a famously innovative exhibition at Whitechapel Art Gallery in London, which mixed fine art and many different sorts of commercial products.
A painter herself, McHale created expressionistic images of women in a style similar to Jean Dubuffet's. In the mid-1950s she exhibited her work at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London and at the Hanover Gallery.
In 1961, having divorced and remarried, she moved with Mr McHale to the United States, where together they embarked on careers in futurism, an interdisciplinary field that studies global prospects for human development.
In 1968, the couple moved to Binghamton, New York, where they created a Centre for Integrative Studies at the State University of New York (now Binghamton University). Over the next decade, the couple became internationally known for their studies of long-range thinking about social, cultural and ecological change. Alvin Toffler, the author of Future Shock, was one of their better-known collaborators.
In 1977, the couple moved again, to the University of Houston, to create a new version of their Centre for Integrative Studies, but Mr McHale died the next year. In 1980, Magda moved to Buffalo, where she recreated the Centre for Integrative Studies at the University at Buffalo. After her retirement, in 1999, she was named professor emerita in the department of urban and regional planning in the School of Architecture and Planning at the University at Buffalo.
Despite her record of academic achievement and the publication of numerous books and articles on futurist topics jointly with her husband and in her own name, McHale had no advanced formal education.
Born Magda Lustigova in Hungary in 1921, she went to Palestine as a refugee during the Second World War and found work as a translator for British intelligence. There she met Cordell, who was also working for British intelligence.
Magda McHale is survived by her three stepsons.
The full article contains 453 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
