Nadine Boughton

In this series, I focus on gender polarities as depicted in popular magazines of the 1950s and early 1960s. Fortune magazine showed (and still shows) men’s world of wealth, industry, and big ideas. Its advertisements were awash with imagery of invention and the glamour of executives. Women’s magazines of that time centered on the home, a place of dreamy interiority, shapely bras, hidden faces, and flowing fabrics.

My collages deconstruct these images of mid-century advertising, creating ambiguous narratives with humor and a dark edge, and revealing some of the different relationships men and women have to power, beauty, and longing. They playfully imagine the convergence of exterior and interior experiences, the domain of abstract ideas and the mystery of the female form.

This series is also an homage both to the handsome men in Fortune who look like all the fathers I watched as a girl in their suits and briefcases, carpooling to a foreign land, and an homage to the community of mothers who served egg salad sandwiches on the green lawns of suburbia.