^
Born on 25 June 1932: Peter
Blake, English painter, printmaker and sculptor.
— Born in Dartford, Kent. From 1946 to 1951 he studied at Gravesend
Technical College and School of Art, and from 1950 to 1956 at the Royal
College of Art, London. From 1951 to 1953 he served in the Royal Air Force.
He studied folk art in various European countries with a research award.
From 1959 he did collages with pin-up photos, star images, posters, LP covers
and trivial images. Between 1960 and 1962 he taught at St. Martin's School
of Art, London, and from 1962 to 1964 at the Walthamstow School of Art.
In 1961 he obtained First Prize in the John Moore Exhibition, Liverpool,
for Self-Portrait with Badges. In 1963 he married Jann Haworth
and travelled to Los Angeles to do drawings for The Sunday Times.
From 1974 to 1976 he taught at the Royal College of Art, London. In 1969
he was given his first retrospective by the City Art Gallery in Bristol.
He moved to Wellow, Avon, and continued to live there until 1974. In 1973
and 1974 he had retrospectives in Amsterdam, Hamburg, Brussels and Arnheim.
He was made A.R.A. in 1974 and R.A. in 1981. In 1975 he and his wife Jann
were founder members of the Brotherhood of Ruralists, who had their first
exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1976. He became separated from Jann in
1981 and returned to London. In 1983 he was given a large retrospective
exhibition at the Tate Gallery and at the Kestner-Gesellschaft, Hanover.
— Blake studied at Gravesend Technical College and School of Art from
1946 to 1951, and from 1953 at the Royal College of Art, London, where he
was awarded a First-Class Diploma in 1956. He then traveled through Europe
for a year on a Leverhulme Research Award to study the popular and folk
art that had already served him as a source of inspiration. While still
a student Blake began producing paintings that openly testified to his love
of popular entertainment and the ephemera of modern life, for example Children
Reading Comics (1954.), and which were phrased in a faux-naïf style
that owed something to the example of American realist painters such as
Ben Shahn. In these works Blake displayed his nostalgia for dying traditions
not only by his preference for circus imagery but also by artificially weathering
the irregular wooden panels on which he was then painting. His respect for
fairground art, barge painting, tattooing, commercial art, illustration
and other forms of image-making rooted in folkloric traditions led him to
produce some of the first works to which the term Pop art was later applied.
His attitude to his source material was consistently that of the fan, to
the extent that he literally wore his allegiances on his sleeve in Self-portrait
with Badges (1961).
Blake's virtuosity as a draftsman was largely
directed to naturalist and academic traditions, giving this side of his
work an old-fashioned air tempered by the contemporaneity of his subject-matter.
From the late 1950s, however, he also produced works far more radical in
conception by eliminating the personal touch. Fine Art Bit (1959),
Got a Girl (1961) and Toy Shop (1962) typify the collage
paintings and constructions composed only of patterns of bright colour and
of ready-made materials such as postcards, photographs, book illustrations,
toys and other objects, and brutally presented without mediation. The acts
of selection and retrieval in these works, generally made in alliance with
references to pop music and mass entertainment, including Hollywood films,
wrestling, pin-ups and strip-tease, are presented as equivalent to the painstaking
recording of observations.
Blake's devotion to illustration and to Victorian
art, clearly avowed in his watercolors for Lewis Carroll's Through the
Looking-glass (1971), which were also reproduced as screenprints, dominated
his work between 1975 and 1979. At that time he was living in Wellow, near
Bath, and painting with like-minded artists who styled themselves the Brotherhood
of Ruralists. Blake's work of this period, on such 19th-century themes as
fairy painting, was at its most effete and sentimental. A slow and painstaking
technician, Blake demonstrated little stylistic development after this ruralist
phase but continued to produce small-scale paintings and drawings of great
refinement and popular appeal. To the general public, however, he remains
best known as the designer of the record
cover for Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band by the
Beatles (1967), a fitting tribute to his genuine enthusiasm for the popular
icons of his time.
— LINKS
— Self-Portrait
with Badges (1961, 174x122cm; 1024x680pix, 43kb) _ Although
closely identified with Pop art, Blake has always regarded himself as a
realist painter in the realist tradition. Blake's capacity to bring traditional
elements into a specifically modern context is evident in this self-portrait.
In sixteenth and seventeenth century portraits, for example, it was customary
to depict the subject with attributes. These were objects which gave a clue
to the sitter's vocation, achievements or interests. Following this tradition,
Blake depicts himself in denim jacket, jeans and baseball boots, which were
ahead of fashion at the time. The array of badges and the fan magazine,
also express personal enthusiasms.
Peter Blake was as interested in folk art
as in pop, collecting "outsider" paintings, pub signs and ephemera when
he started making paintings of instantly recognisable popular subjects as
a student at the Royal College of Art in the 1950s. He anticipated the New
York pop artists Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg and Andy Warhol, but
London's Independent Group was already making intellectual pop art: Eduardo
Paolozzi started making collages of American consumer magazines in the 1940s.
But Blake was very different from Independent
Group artists such as Paolozzi and Richard Hamilton, with their science-fiction
aesthetic and theoretical examination of consumer culture. He simply wanted
to celebrate the new pop culture exploding in music and film and on TV.
His feel for pop culture was shared by a number of RCA students, from his
contemporaries Richard Smith and Joe Tilson to the younger David Hockney,
who became stars of 1960s London.
This is a portrait of the artist as a provincial.
It is a strangely weak and faltering image of self as flimsy and needing
external confirmation. There is something comically vulnerable about Blake's
need to wear quite so many badges, ally himself with quite so many causes
and icons, and so fervently pledge his cultural allegiance to the United
States. Almost everything he wears is distinctively of the US: baseball
boots, jeans and denim jackets were only just starting to be disseminated
worldwide.
The badges also seem to tell a story about
losers. A small union flag is dwarfed by a big stars and stripes. Then there's
a campaign badge for the unsuccessful Democratic presidential candidate
Adlai Stevenson, a badge promoting Pepsi (second most celebrated US soft
drink) and a huge badge of Elvis Presley, at this time seen as on the wane
yet still celebrated romantically by artists such as Ray Johnson and Andy
Warhol.
The flatness of the badges, sewn-on patches
and the magazine is a joke about flatness in art, thinness in life. The
images pinned to Blake's jacket exist on the same plane as the painting
as if they belong here, in the painting, more than he does — an effect
heightened by their bold colors, red, white and blue — in contrast
to the dingy and broken British garden fence behind him, the fuzzy green
trees, the drab ground he stands on. His own physical presence is dumpy
and disproportionate, his head a bit big, his assumed cool unconvincing.
Blake plays on the contrast between the modern
US and his loyalty to a British tradition of homely portraiture and landscape.
British pop art came first, and yet the pop culture that fascinated it was
of the US. The painting is acutely nostalgic as a portrait of the moment
when American pop exploded in British imaginations. At the same time it
could be a portrait of the dedicated follower of fashion in any time and
place, seeking to assert identity through a slightly desperate display of
insignia. Blake is a Chelsea pensioner of the pop revolution, chest laden
with medals.
The power of this portrait comes from its
sense of art history, lightly worn. Blake's self-portrait shares the fancy
display of some of the
self-portraits of Rembrandt,
in which the artist tries on Turkish costumes and floppy hats. However,
its full-frontal presentation of the artist's passively returned gaze especially
recalls one of the greatest and strangest of all figurative paintings, the
Gilles
(1719, 185x150cm) of Jean-Antoine
Watteau: a wan portrait of a player in costume, looking at us sadly
in his clownish attire.
— Record
cover for Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
by the Beatles (1967; 632x637pix, 74kb — ZOOM
to 1251x1261pix, 151kb)
— But
it isn't old!" Tweedledum cried, in a greater fury than ever. "It's new,
I tell you - I bought it yesterday - my nice NEW RATTLE!" and his voice
rose to a perfect scream (1970; 722x534pix, 26kb)
— On
the Balcony (1957, 121x91cm) _ Blake made this painting while a student
at the Royal College of Art. It introduces his interest in bringing together
fine art and popular culture. Blake took his inspiration from a painting
by the social realist artist Honoré Sharrer which shows poor workers holding
great works of art. Here, the boy on the left holds Edouard Manet''s famous
The Balcony, but there are twenty-six variations on this theme of ''coming
out into the open'' elsewhere in the painting. It works as a painted collage,
showing magazines, badges and famous photographs, as a way of introducing
the characters in the scene.
— The
Fine Art Bit (1959, 91x61cm) _ The central theme of this painting is
the marriage of popular and fine art, an idea which Blake began to explore
in On the Balcony. The horizontal stripes refer to everyday images,
such as flags, street signs and commercial packaging. At the same time these
stripes also allude to ‘hard edge’ painting, which was emerging in America
at the time Blake was making this work. The heraldic nature of the stripes
is contrasted with traditional ‘Fine Art’ through the postcards of paintings
and sculpture by Old Masters, and of Indian Art, which Blake has collaged
across the top of the painting.
— Tuesday
(1961, 48x27cm) _ This painting is named after Tuesday Weld, a young screen
actress who began her career in the early 1960s and became one of the sex
symbols of the day. Blake selected her as the subject of this painting because
of her unusual first name. Two photographs of her are included at the top
of the painting. The three bands of colour in the lower section of the work
can be seen as alluding to the contemporary hard edge abstract painting
of such artists as Albers, Kelly and Noland.
— The
First Real Target (1961, 54x49cm) _ The foundations of Pop Art in America
were laid during the 1950s by Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. Like
Blake, both these artists incorporated images taken from popular culture
into a fine art context, and Blake has acknowledged their example. This
work refers to Johns's work in particular. Whereas Johns had taken a familiar
object - a target - and executed this motif on the canvas in a painterly
style, Blake took this further by using a real archery target purchased
from a sports shop. The work of art is consequently less like a painting
and is even closer to the real world. Blake thus questions: is this 'the
first real target'?
— The
Toy Shop (1962, 157x194x34cm relief) _ In the mid-1950s Blake incorporated
images from popular culture into his art by painting them with meticulous
realism, as in On the Balcony. Later, in works such as Tuesday,
he extended this sense of realism by collaging in actual photographs, postcards
or printed ephemera. It was therefore a natural progression for him to use
three-dimensional objects to stress the reality of the work even further.
The Toy Shop was originally conceived both as a work of art and
as a way of storing Blake's collection of toys, a selection which reflects
Blake's interests and enthusiasms. The door and window were obtained from
a demolition site
— Beach
Boys (1964, 53x31cm)
— The
Masked Zebra Kid (1965, 55x27cm) _ Blake was one of the leaders of British
Pop Art, a movement which celebrated contemporary popular culture. This
is one of a series of collages he made during the 1960s with pin-up photos,
posters and other ephemeral images. Blake has long been a fan of wrestling
and had been to watch an American wrestler called the Masked Zebra Kid fight
several times. The autograph of the wrestler in the center of the painting
is surrounded by photographs taken from a fan magazine.
— J.A.
(1969)
— Well,
this is grand!" said Alice. "I never expected I should be a Queen so soon."
(1970) |
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