ART REVIEW: Nigel Henderson - Parallel of Life and Art

WHAT a difference a few decades make. Nigel Henderson (1917-1985), rightly described by his contemporary Richard Hamilton as "a great conduit of ideas and information", is today described by the National Galleries of Scotland as "one of the most influential figures of post-war British art".

But Henderson has been neglected, something this travelling exhibition and an associated book are going a long way to putting right. He does deserve serious credit for being aware of the bigger picture, as Hamilton indicated in his quotation, and for conveying that awareness to the forward-thinking Independent Group he formed in 1952-3 along with the likes of Eduardo Paolozzi and the architects Peter and Alison Smithson.

He was fortunate enough to have had the means to develop celebrated contacts and obtain a cosmopolitan perspective unusual in early 1950s Britain. Brought up in the privileged world of the Bloomsbury liberal intelligentsia, he met influential figures such as Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst and Peggy Guggenheim through his mother, Wyn Henderson.

But because someone was an energetic catalyst and a good friend of some celebrated figures in 20th-century cultural life, and even occasionally collaborated with them, does not necessarily mean they were massively influential.

It has to be said that Henderson was never really a ground-breaking innovator. Virtually every idea he toys with is something someone else had already done, usually more effectively. Taking photographs of deprived-but-sparky East Enders in the 1950s? Bert Hardy did it with a far more diagnostic eye. Photograms - photographic pictures made without using a camera? Moholy-Nagy was doing those before Henderson was even at school. Collages using everyday "found" materials? Braque and Picasso had set that ball rolling four decades earlier. Surrealist photographs? The under-appreciated London-based photographers Peter Rose Pulham and Winifred Casson had made those with greater originality in the 1930s.

In fact, for all its historical interest, there is something slightly dismal about this show. It inadvertently provides an lesson in how much the loss of life and energy in the war had affected British cultural life for the worse. The early 1950s must have seemed like an endless Sunday afternoon, and, although Henderson sought to change all that, you do see numerous examples of him grasping at the coat-tails of greater international figures.

The aesthetic limitations of his work are partially masked by his use of detached processes - collages made from Victorian engravings, scientific manuals and newspaper cut-outs; photographs distorted with some slightly amateurish and rather obvious tweaks in the darkroom.

But he did contribute significantly to a key event in post-war British art, along with Paolozzi and the Smithsons - the ground-breaking installation Parallel of Life and Art at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1953, a version of which has been recreated for this show. With images taken from such diverse sources as anthropological treatises, microbiological textbooks and aerial photography, it was a brilliant metaphor of a desire to break out of trammelled modes of seeing. Occasionally Henderson did create exceptional work, such as his collage of manipulated photographs Head of a Man - a potent summation of the disillusionment and angst of the post-war world.

Until 7 April