"Artists, being curious people, like to think about the future. Sometimes, as with the legendary 1956 This Is Tomorrow exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, they can build a whole movement out of it. Mid 20th-century Pop art types were at it more than most, recycling mass-production images into collages that proclaimed the streamlined, plastic future that many thought was hurtling towards them. It might be instructive therefore to pop along to The Future Was Then at the Cartoon Museum,"
"Consider, for example, the million-year potted history told in a single page of Brick Bradford, dating from 1941: nuclear war, planetary disaster, the eradication of all disease (though it predicted humans would reach the moon in the 50th century... only about 3,000 years out). Judge Dredd's blood-soaked quasi-fascism now looks a whole lot more likely, suggesting that by the late 1970s, when Dredd first showed up in 2000AD comic, idealistic notions of the future direction of society had been well and truly phased out."
Artists imagine futures through varied visual languages, with mid-20th-century Pop art recycling mass-produced imagery to project streamlined, plastic visions of what lay ahead. The Cartoon Museum exhibition The Future Was Then assembles comic-book visions ranging from Buck Rogers, Dan Dare and Brick Bradford to Tank Girl and Judge Dredd. Early strips imagined vast technological and social change, while later work, exemplified by Judge Dredd, presents brutal, quasi-fascist futures that signal a loss of optimistic faith in societal progress. The exhibition runs at the Cartoon Museum in London until 21 March 2026.
Read at The Art Newspaper - International art news and events
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