Peter Blake

Peter Blake (b. 1932) is a typical representative of the 1950s and ’60s’ pioneering generation in British Pop Art. He distinguished himself early on with unique collages, the motifs of which came from divergent sources. As a youth he was inspired by everything from folk art to pub signs, cartoon figures and Hollywood stars.

Throughout his career Blake has constantly returned to some of the same motifs: Elvis, Tarzan and Robin Hood are three icons of American and British entertainment industry, and they appear repeatedly in Blake’s works. The painting Tarzan, Jane, Boy and Cheetah (1966-75) refers to the fictional hero’s family. This is not a conventional collage but a painting with several collage-like elements. For instance, the Mickey Mouse plate on the shelf could just as easily have been pasted into the picture, and the same could be said for what looks like a black-and-white photo of Johnny Weissmuller, Hollywood’s legendary Tarzan. But everything here is painted, so all the figures are equally fabulated and the scene becomes a jumble of artifice. The middle-class setting may seem strange for this unconventional family. The figures look stiff, as though they are posing before a camera or immersed in reflection over their own bodily presence. There is something disconcerting about their lack of interaction; they seem to be in different mental states. The variation in painting methods –strict photo-realism juxtaposed with more diffuse, broad brushstrokes – makes it seem like the picture is telling several stories.

Blake belongs to the same generation of artists as the somewhat younger David Hockney, Patrick Caulfield and Richard Hamilton. The latter’s work Just What Is It that Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing? (1956), created for the exhibition 'This Is Tomorrow', is usually thought to be the first instance of Pop Art. Parallel to Hamilton making his famous work, Blake developed his own unique form of collage. He mixed elements from 'high' and 'low' culture and took recourse in contemporary American artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. Several of these artists’ paintings have inspired Blake’s collages. In contrast to Andy Warhol, who introduced techniques of mass production into his art, Blake has been largely faithful to collage and painting as forms of expression. Some critics claim his pictures are in a different class than American Pop art, given their irony and because the meaning in them plays out on several levels.

But while this debate can rage on indefinitely, Blake has clearly always been interested in music and wants to create pictures that are as popular as contemporary pop music. The connection between pop music and Blake’s art exists on different levels as well, and in some contexts he is primarily known for having created the album cover for the Beatles’ ‘Stg. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ (1967). He has also created album covers for several other bands, but in recent years has concentrated on painting in large formats.

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