Peter Blake
Peter Blake
b. 1932
A painter, sculptor, draughtsman and printmaker, Sir Peter Blake is widely regarded as the godfather of British Pop Art. After graduating from the Royal College of Art, Blake travelled around continental Europe where he encountered the local folk art, circuses and funfairs, which, alongside figures from popular culture, would become some of his greatest subjects. These subjects emerge as collage‐like
elements in his carefully painted compositions. Often incorporating personal elements into his work, Blake marries modernity and nostalgia into single artworks, creating an oeuvre that is cleverly accessible to both intellectuals and the everyday viewer.
Sir Peter Blake is widely regarded as the godfather of British Pop Art. A skilled painter, sculptor, draughtsman and printmaker, Blake’s inspired career as a multitalented artist began as a teenager. Born in 1932 in Dartford, Kent, in 1949 Blake began his art training at Gravesend Technical College. His decision to go to art school was born not out of a particular interest in art or in becoming an artist but rather a mixture of desire to flee from the war and frustration with the English exam system. Blake’s traditional studies at Gravesend ended with his graduation in 1951 and was followed by a stint in the Royal Airforce before he attended the Royal College of Art in London, graduating in 1956.
Following Blake’s graduation, he received the Leverhulme Research Award which allowed him to travel around the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Italy and Spain. This was a crucial period of development for the artist as throughout his travels he learned the current artistic practices in these countries as well as studied the local folk art, funfairs and circuses. The presence of such subjects in his work is perhaps most widely recognised in his iconic album cover design for The Beatles’ ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ (1967), a collage composition full of pop icons, circus costumes and arresting colour.
Among Blake’s greatest subjects are figures from popular culture, film stars and musicians, circus, wrestling, athletes and striptease dancers, which accompany event posters, magazines, comics, album covers and postcards. His works positively exude enthusiasm for pop culture, particularly his famous painting ‘Self‐Portrait with Badges’ (1961), which resides in the Tate. The work depicts Blake wearing jeans, a denim jacket covered in various badges and baseball boots as he holds a magazine dedicated to Elvis Presley.
It was also following Blake’s time in continental Europe that he began to engage with the language of collage, a relatively new style and method of artmaking. Though he did indeed produce collages, Blake largely engaged with collage without employing its technique but instead imitating its visual language in painting. He painted magazine covers, documentary photographs and souvenirs in a manner that maintains the illusion of photographic poses of those being depicted as well as imitates reproduction errors. In doing so, Blake’s works highlight notions of mass production as well as an interest in the average consumer.
Though Blake’s works may appear direct, they are the result of a very careful and sophisticated visual language in which images and motifs are drawn from varying sources. Such sources include his personal life as his work often contains autobiographical elements which infuse a sense of nostalgia into his artistic output. Blake nonetheless maintains an eloquent balance between modernity and nostalgia, even looking back to artists like William Blake for inspiration.
In the 1970s Blake left London for Somerset where he founded the Ruralists, a group of artists who focused on producing oil paintings based on literary and rural subjects. After the group disbanded a few years later, Blake returned to London, and in 1997 declared the end of his career as a painter and the beginning of his late period. Blake’s work has continued to inspire solo exhibitions and collectors internationally as his form of Pop Art cleverly balances accessibility to intellectuals and the everyday viewer.
LONDON SUITE
Peter Blake
In his 2012 ‘London Suite’ series of silkscreens, Sir Peter Blake wondrously reimagined some of the most iconic parts of London. Employing his characteristic collage technique across 10 prints, Blake’s characters infuse the often stressful and chaotic London streets with an energetic, unified and dreamlike sensibility.
Each artwork in Blake’s ‘London Suite’ is titled after its London location, followed by the overarching theme that unifies the image. This includes ‘London – Picadilly Circus – The Convention of Comic Book Characters’, a scene in which the likes of Superman and Wonderwoman valiantly fly over the iconic West Side landmark occupied by a dense crowd of collaged characters.
While this scene is quite fantastic, others are more plausible reinventions of urban space. ‘London – River Thames – Regatta’ portrays the river inundated with vessels of various types, some glorious ships with high masts, others more modest paddle boats. One is reminded of the famous British regattas, delighting viewers with the notion of the competition being brought into central London before the great British landmarks. Yet, with the vessels pasted in various directions and sizes before the towering Houses of Parliament, and indeed derived from different moments in history, they are unified in that they are all black and white images.
Across the ‘London Suite’ Blake makes no attempt at disguising his collage technique, mixing black and white images with coloured ones, but nonetheless managing to create familiar compositions as dancers align into formation, animals scale Westminster Abbey like King-Kong and spectators assemble to watch a spectacle unfold. Blake produces undeniably joyful scenes with a ‘Where’s Wally?’ aesthetic that provokes viewer interaction. Viewers are made to fixate on identifying the characters that densely pack the compositions, endlessly discovering new elements at each fresh glance.
VENICE SUITE
Peter Blake
Inspired by his trip in 2007 to the Venice Biennale, in 2009 Sir Peter Blake produced his ‘Venice Suite’ of fantastical silkscreens. Produced using his signature collage technique, across the 20 prints Blake envisions surrealist scenes across the canal city.
Blake’s material for his ‘Venice Suite’ incorporates a number of postcards, photos and second-hand books which he has acquired over the years, allowing him to meld the whimsical illustrations of vintage children’s books with the precisely rendered images of Venice, recollective of the Old Masters. The series is dominated by dreamy blues, greys, greens, pinks and yellows, which draw parallels to storybook tales. Indeed, this aura is reflected in the history of the city itself, which has become the subject over the years of numerous myths and stories. This tendency is mirrored in the figures Blake collages into his scenes, including an image of Jesus on horseback in front of St. Mark’s cathedral in ‘Christ’s Entry into Venice’.
The anachronistic absurdity of Jesus’ presence in Venice is but one of countless instances in which objects and people are placed in locations and situations they normally do not belong. A fighter jet practically touches the top of the Rialto Bridge, penguins march alongside a canal and dancers flexibly kick back their legs while flying below an enormous moon. These collaged elements are rendered in incredible colour or in black and white and their technically impressive arrangements are brilliantly considered. Despite using readymade, flattened images, Blake maintains a skilful sense of depth across the series through his clever practice of layering. In doing so, he reimagines new stories for the viewers, provoking them to consider otherwise absurd scenes unfolding in the inspiring city of Venice.
SOURCES OF POP ART
Peter Blake
Starting in 2000, Sir Peter Blake, the godfather of British Pop Art, began paying homage to the great art movement in his ‘Sources of Pop Art’ series of silkscreens. Each print from the series is produced on square paper, which is outlined by at least two bands of different colours. Inside these bands are numerous perfect squares which are often arranged in four squares across and down, or five following the same pattern.
Each square houses recognisable images easily associated with ’50s popular culture as well as the inspiration behind and the legacy of Pop Art. These include images of Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, James Dean, Mickey Mouse and pinup women. Such images are arranged beside details from famous works of Pop Art including the comic book-like works of Roy Lichtenstein, the bold blocks of colour by Ellsworth Kelly and the Coca–Cola bottles of Andy Warhol. Given the series title and Blake’s oeuvre of motifs and characters, it can be inferred that ‘Sources of Pop Art’ stiches together the sources he himself has turned to in the manufacturing of his own Pop aesthetic.
Whilst ‘Sources of Pop Art’ includes images taken from other artists, illustrators and photographers, and indeed the diamond dust silkscreening technique comes after Warhol’s own successful efforts, at the heart of the series is Blake’s signature technique of collage. Here, his source material for his artistic practice in general also becomes his more immediate and literal source material for these collages turned prints. Invoking celebratory colours and Blake’s signature careful organisation of materials, the resulting works of ‘Sources of Pop Art’ are actively engaging prints which narrate the ground-breaking efforts of the early Pop artists and the foundations they laid for monumental artists like Blake to come.
JOSEPH CORNELL
Peter Blake
Sir Peter Blake in his entry into collage was digesting the monumental efforts of artists that came before him, including Joseph Cornell. The great maker of shadow boxes full of inspired arrangements of found objects, Cornell is often considered to be America’s first Surrealist. His influence on Blake is undeniable, seen in his appropriation of objects which he arranges into compositions that are often also read as having a Surrealist aesthetic. Indebted to the great efforts of Cornell, Blake has since dedicated a number of works to him, including ‘Homage to Joseph Cornell’ (1996) and his most recent ‘Joseph Cornell’s Holiday’ series of silkscreens, begun in 2015.
In ‘Joseph Cornell’s Holiday’, Blake reimagines Cornell’s life as having been full of adventure. Having famously lived a solitary life in New York without international travel, in ‘Joseph Cornell’s Holiday’ the artist takes Cornell around Europe and places him in locations he never would have visited. The locations and activities the artist places Cornell into are often denoted in the silkscreen titles, including ‘Joseph Cornell’s Holiday – Brussels: “tea with some surrealists”’ (2018) and ‘Joseph Cornell’s Holiday – “Joseph presents the box about him, to Ludwig II of Bavaria”’ (2018).
Present is the likeness and spirit of Cornell but rendered and reimagined in a matter that places at the forefront Blake’s unique visual language. On his travels, Cornell is surrounded by activity, be it a massive group of people in fancy dress in Blackpool, butterflies fluttering across Kensington Gardens or boats gliding through Capri’s Blue Grotto. In taking Cornell as a subject to make his own, Blake’s ‘Joseph Cornell’s Holiday’ recalls the efforts he made in other series such as ‘Sources of Pop Art’ as he pays homage to the artist while unabashedly exhibiting the skilful visual language he developed out of Cornell’s profound influence.
