Richard Hamilton: The True King of Pop?

Michael Jackson proudly wore the crown as the “King of Pop” until his death in 2009. In the visual arts, at least for Americans, Andy Warhol’s ruled as the “King of Pop,” reigning as the prime example of Pop Art for the uninitiated as well as for connoisseurs. Most British (and more than a few American) art lovers, however, see Richard Hamilton as the true “King of Pop” and Warhol as just an upstart usurper to the throne. The Tate Modern’s new exhibition Richard Hamilton, which runs through May 26, 2014, provides not only a
survey of Hamilton’s greatest pop hits, but also a career-long survey that shows how he engaged with popular culture beyond just Warhol-esque celebrity and marketing gestures and got at the heart of what Pop Art should  and could be. Is Richard Hamilton the true “King of Pop”? Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Richard Hamilton: The True King of Pop?"

Pop Divas

When you think of Pop Art, the art movement that dominated the late 1950s and early 1960s in America, you almost automatically cast up the wigged head of Andy Warhol. A few other names might rise up from memory— Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, or even the British artist Peter Blake—but even those names have in common one thing—they’re all men. Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists 1958-1968 at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia wants you to learn the names of the “pop divas,” the women who worked in the same culture-driven, irony-laced language as Warhol and others but were never heard, until now. Please venture over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Pop Divas."

[Image: John Wayne by Marisol, 1963, mixed media, 104 x 96 x 15 inches. Colorado Springs Fine Art Center, Art © Marisol Escobar/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.]

[Many thanks to the University of the Arts in Philadelphia for providing me with the image above from Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists 1958-1968, which runs from January 22 through March 15, 2010.]

Oh, Behave

Mike Myers’ Austin Powers character spoofs the days of “Swinging London,” when outrageous behavior was the norm, but his outrageousness isn’t far from the real deal. In the middle of that swinging time was one of the most intriguing and fun artists of the twentieth century—Peter Blake. Born June 25, 1935, Blake was born just in time to soak up the teen-targeted popular culture of post-World War II Britain. Combining such “low brow” pop with “high brow” fine art technique and history, Blake created such works as Got a Girl (above, from 1960-1961). The faces of teen idols such as Elvis Presley and Ricky Nelson appear in a band across the top above a series of red, white, and blue chevrons that recall the work of Blake’s American contemporary Kenneth Noland. Just as America imported to England young hunks through movies and music, it imported the latest trends in abstract art, such as Noland’s pieces. Blake binds the two imports together and creates a pastiche of cultures clashing. By putting Elvis et al. at the top and Noland on the bottom, Blake flips the idea of “high” versus “low” on its head. Blake would take this pastiche style to its greatest extreme in his design for for the Beatles' album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which mixes history, literature, art, and music together in a dazzling, ground-breaking display.

In addition to celebrating stars who “got the girl” in Got the Girl, Blake “got” his own girl in Tuesday (above, from 1961). Two photos of the actress and early 1960s teen sex symbol Tuesday Weld appear above the simple banner of “TUESDAY.” Blake plays off of the instant, one-name name recognition of pop culture and modern media in broadcasting the actress’ first name. Tuesday in many ways is the companion piece to the male stars of Got a Girl. To Blake’s male perspective, the young male stars blend together in their similar hairstyles and chiseled features. In contrast, Tuesday Weld strikes the male viewer as unique and special. If Blake had been a woman, the two compositions might have been reversed. Blake again places a Noland-esque abstract arrangement of color beneath the pop culture reference, but I wonder if Blake also alludes here to the celebrity-celebrating boxes of Joseph Cornell. Cornell, also a omnivorous consumer of all strata of culture, created semi-shrines to Lauren Bacall and other starlets of the 1940s. The boxlike arrangement of Blake’s Tuesday leads me to believe that he’s having a little fun in “borrowing” Cornell’s style while modifying it to his own taste and time.

Blake has become a revered figure in British art, but that doesn’t mean that the old lion’s been tamed. In The Meeting, or Have a Nice Day, Mr. Hockney (above, from 1981-1983), Blake plays off of Gustave Courbet’s 1854 The Meeting, or Bonjour Monsieur Courbet. Blake recasts artist David Hockney as Courbet and himself and Howard Hodgkin as the fawning patrons. Blake and Hodgkin seem out of place in their heavy clothes, but Hockney, the transplanted British artist in his new California habitat, wears informal, seasonal clothing. Behind the artists, Blake places all the stereotypical accessories of California living—palm trees, garish advertising, and beautiful blondes on roller skates. Blake is one of my favorite artists of the twentieth century for his incorrigible yen for mixing up the history of art with the pop culture of the time with equal respect for both worlds yet a sense of overall irreverence. You have to respect a man who grew up never growing up.

Feed the World

You don’t need to be Bono or Bob Geldof to feed the world anymore. I remember buying Band Aid’s single Do They Know It's Christmas? in 1984 (cover by artist Peter Blake, above) and feeling pretty good for really not doing too much and getting great music in the bargain. Now, thanks to Poverty.com, you can feed the world from your own keyboard and learn about art and other subjects at the same time. At Free Rice, you choose one of several subjects (art history, English vocabulary, chemistry, geography, languages, and math) and for every correct answer sponsors will donate twenty grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Program. Twenty grains of rice doesn’t sound like much, but with each correct answer you quickly build up a meal for a starving child somewhere in the world. Any questions you get wrong appear again shortly after, giving you the opportunity to get it right and learn from your mistakes. As the Free Rice site says, “Whether you are CEO of a large corporation or a street child in a poor country, improving your education can improve your life. It is a great investment in yourself. Perhaps even greater is the investment your donated rice makes in hungry human beings, enabling them to function and be productive. Somewhere in the world, a person is eating rice that you helped provide. Thank you.” It’s the very definition of a win-win situation.

I tried my hand at the English vocabulary and art history catagories. The English vocabulary seemed tough, but fun. The art history category consists of a series of paintings presented with a choice of four possible painters. Some of the works are familiar, but others test you a bit on how well you can spot a particular style in an unfamiliar work. I actually got a little better on the Asian artists, whom I know more as names and greatest hits than purely by distinctive styles. Now I know my Hiroshige from my Hokusai. And so should you. Go to Free Rice now and do something for yourself and someone else. You have nothing to lose but your ignorance and a whole world of empowerment to gain.

Behind Closed Doors

The PMA will host next summer a special exhibit centering around Marcel Duchamp’s Etant donnés: 1. La chute d’eau, 2. Le gaz d’éclairage (in English, Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas) (above, from 1946-1966). Dedicated to the memory of Anne d'Harnoncourt, this exhibition hopes to shed light on Duchamp’s final masterpiece, built over the last twenty years of his life, when he claimed to have given up art to play chess. I remember the first time I visited the PMA without my parents and wandered through their amazing Duchamp collection, which is perhaps the finest in the world. I walked over to the two wooden doors, looked through the peep hole, and came away red-faced after seeing the nude female manikin spread-eagled inside. Born July 28, 1887, Duchamp still leaves critics embarrassed by his ability to shock and provoke with works now nearly a century old. Whether placing a urinal on a pedestal (1917’s Fountain) or creating a cross-dressing persona (Rrose Selavy), Duchamp always seemed one chess move ahead of the times, leaving other artists to imitate palely, if they dared.

Duchamp always seems to be playing a joke. I remember sitting with an art history book years ago and asking my very gullible, younger brother if he’d like to see Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (above, from 1912). “Where is she?” he asked, as so many others had before him. Duchamp made Cubism move in a way that Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque never imagined. After revolutionizing that “ism,” Duchamp quickly moved on to Dada and Surrealism, redefining those “isms” as well before moving on again, always wary of being pinned down. Duchamp remains beyond categorization, which makes him the most frustrating of all modern artists, and perhaps the most influential. Peter Blake went so far as to paint an imaginary “world tour” series featuring Duchamp. I would estimate that more academics tangle with the meaning of Duchamp and his work than any other single artist. After reading so many of these usually dense, baroque examinations of the artist, I always find it refreshing to go back to the art itself. It makes me think, of course. More importantly, it makes me laugh.

I remember the professor teaching the one art history class I took in college going on and on about “reading” the characters involved in Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (aka, The Large Glass; above, from 1915-1923). I strained with my fellow students to pick out the bride from the bachelors to no avail. My favorite part of The Large Glass, and the one that caught my eye right away, remains the fine network of cracks in the glass, a spider’s web of shards spun when handlers dropped the work years ago. Duchamp embraced the accident, saying it actually improved the work. Despite years of exile from his native France thanks to two world wars, Duchamp always maintained a zen-like optimism when viewing the world. Despite his dour visage and late “just let me play my chess” persona, Duchamp never failed in the role of merry prankster. The jester still stands next to the door, pointing to the peephole and daring you to take a look. You know you want to.

To Make the Horrible Beautiful

Remembering paintings he had seen as a child of “redcoated English soldiers massacring foreigners,” Stanley Donwood writes in Dead Children Playing: A Picture Book featuring the art of Radiohead, he later came to realize that “that’s what [he] wanted to paint; jewels strewn in snow. Somehow I want to MAKE THE HORRIBLE BEAUTIFUL.” Since 1994, Donwood and Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke (co-author of Dead Children Playing as his alter ego, Dr. Tchock) have collaborated to create album art for Radiohead albums The Bends, OK Computer, Kid A, Amnesiac, Hail to the Thief, and In Rainbows and Yorke’s solo album The Eraser. This collected body of work represents the greatest assemblage of album art since the iconic album covers of The Beatles in the 1960s.

Donwood created a series of nightmare landscapes that indeed made the horrible beautiful for the album Kid A, including Residential Nemesis (above, from 1999). In such apocalyptic landscapes snow becomes not a blanket that hides but rather a document of the “evidence” of cruelty, a record of the footprints of the oppressor over the oppressed. Later, the repetition of a symbol for a lost child, similar to what you’d see in a shopping mall, turns sinister when set in a whitened landscape of urban highways careening about. Donwood’s art captures the sense of dread and angst at the center of Radiohead’s art. One of the earliest pieces in Dead Children Playing parodies the instructions for an asthma inhaler, replacing the real instructions with steps such as “Scrabble around on the floor trying to find it” and “Realise with terror that it isn’t working.” Donwood’s art conveys this sense of asphyxiation beneath the pressure of modern life. “Since I started drawing little weeping minotaurs, I’ve been trying to find the maze,” Donwood later writes after transforming London in his imagination into a labyrinth of twisted facts and fictions. Like the labyrinth of classical myth, you feel not only little hope of escape but the constant dread of being pursued when looking at these images.

The series of paintings I found most striking were those done for the album Hail to the Thief. Donwood recounts a visit to Los Angeles and his sense of being oppressed by the “very big, and very brash” omnipresent advertising and its relentless repetition of the same basic seven colors. Inspired, Donwood began to paint maps consisting entirely of those same seven colors, beginning with the Pacific Coast (above, from 2003), later moving on to Hollywood, and even later moving on to war-torn cities such as Grozny, Kabul, and Bagdad. In those brash seven colors, Donwood inserts words and phrases onto the landscape, spurring the viewer to make whatever connections he wishes. When the words “Pointless,” “2 + 2 = 5,” “Someone’s Son,” and “Someone’s Daughter” appear over a map of Bagdad, the message of an unjust war based on false arguments waged by the powerful at the expense of the innocent seems quite clear. The power of American hegemony, garishly visible by the trail of media and advertising our culture leaves in its wake, literally rewrites the maps in these paintings. These paintings made me think of William Kentridge’s tapestries currently on exhibition at the PMA. (My review of that catalogue here.) Kentridge uses maps as the backdrop of his tapestries to reject the idea that any landscape, including that of his native South Africa, could somehow be innocent. The imprint of injustice remains no matter what cosmetic treatment is applied. Similarly, Donwood’s repainted maps illustrate the cost of imperialism and the permanent mark it makes not only on the landscape but on the collective psyche of a people.

“Don’t get any big ideas,” one cartoon says near the end of Dead Children Playing. “They’re not going to happen.” The art of Donwood and Radiohead makes the big ideas visible without dogma, allowing the viewer to experience and absorb the concepts for himself. The Beatles had the luxury of the long-playing album sleeve to create their packages, but Donwood and Radiohead exist in the era of the compact disc jewel case. Would Peter Blake’s crowded cover for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band be as memorable if those famous faces were too small to pour over with the music in the background? Fortunately, Donwood’s art exists and, strangely, thrives in those close confines—a physical manifestation of the claustrophobic feelings they often depict. Dead Children Playing, with its beautiful reproductions and astoundingly affordable price, should help spread those big ideas around and, perhaps, make them happen.


[Many thanks to Verso Books for providing me with a review copy of Dead Children Playing: A Picture Book.]

Visionary Company

When his friend John Linnell introduced Samuel Palmer to William Blake in 1824, Palmer’s life and art were never the same. Born January 27, 1805, Palmer joined the visionary company surrounding the eccentric poet-painter Blake that later became known as The Ancients. Works such as The Magic Apple Tree (above, from 1830) stem from Blake’s influence, abounding with wild color and florid detail. A child prodigy, Palmer began exhibiting at the Royal Academy at fourteen years of age works patterned on the art of J.M.W. Turner. Turner turned Palmer on to the possibilities of the visionary landscape, but Blake opened up a cosmos of possibility for the young artist. Even Palmer himself grew wary of the powerful influence of Blake, showing his mind-blowing works to a select few initiates who shared his love of the master. While living in the Shoreham region of England in a dilapidated old cottage, Palmer painted the surrounding countryside in various stages of light and dark, often beneath romantic moonlight, as in A Cornfield by Moonlight with the Evening Star (above, from 1830). This watercolor shows Blake’s influence quite clearly, resembling some of the illustrations Blake created to accompany his poetry. Although Linnell introduced Palmer to Blake, he had doubts about Palmer’s prospects in his following of Blake’s example, especially after Palmer wed Linnell’s daughter. Palmer always struggled to make ends meet through his art and withered beneath the disapproval of his friend turned father-in-law. Teaching jobs helped with Palmer’s finances, but took valuable time away from his own painting.



In later years, Palmer developed as an engraver, gaining some commercial success while illustrating the poems of John Milton, one of Blake’s favorite poetic predecessors. The Lonely Tower (above, from 1869) conveys the dark romantic mood of much late romantic poetry and early Victorian verse. I’ve always thought that it might have made for a good illustration to Robert Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.” Just as Blake himself languished in obscurity until rescued by the Pre-Raphaelites, Palmer’s reputation laid dormant until the twentieth century, when his wild colors made him seem less like a madman and more like a Fauvist. Like Blake and so many other artists ill-suited to their time, Palmer found his home in the twentieth century. Sadly, Palmer’s son destroyed many of the artist’s early work after his death in 1881, too embarrassed to have anyone see his father’s “failures.” Fortunately, enough of Palmer’s work survived to give us a glimpse of his greatness.

Fantasy Island

Peter Blake, Self-Portrait with Badges, 1961; © Peter Blake 2007. All rights reserved, DACS

“Our aims are to paint about love, beauty, joy, sentiment and magic,” Peter Blake wrote in his Brotherhood of Ruralists manifesto of the 1970s, defending his paintings of fairies and fantasy against the opposition of “serious” art and art critics. In the companion catalogue to the exhibit Peter Blake: A Retrospective at the Tate Liverpool through September 23rd, we witness Blake creating his own island of fantasy within the waters of often-cynical postmodernism and contemporary art. Blake still wears his love of popular culture proudly and confortably, as he did in his 1961 Self-Portrait with Badges (above), offering an oasis of positive thought and free playfulness that counters the negativity of many of his contemporaries.

Breaking down Blake decade by decade, Simon Faulkner begins by asking if the 1950s Blake truly is “Painting Like a Fan?” Faulkner proposes that the apparent straightforwardness and directness of Blake’s paintings belie his “sophisticated pictorial practices” of creating “the re-presentation of a subject to create something new and separate from the original.” “Blake makes pictures of innocence and fandom,” Faulkner writes, “rather than directly embodying these things in his work.” Blake doesn’t just reproduce cultural images, he examines the human element—the nostalgia, the longing, the basic pleasure of looking—that makes cultural images so powerful. Harking back to the wrestling matches of his childhood, for example, Blake invents new villains and heroes, with names such as the nefarious Baron Adolf Kaiser, to examine the nationalistic and historical aspects of the personas and performances of that brand of theater, as well as how the audience itself contributes. Blake transforms tattooed ladies and other circus performers, cheesecake pin-ups, and glossy magazine subjects by using his unique frame of reference to present the innocent nostalgia of his vision rather than the erotic or seedier aspects of the subjects themselves. Faulker sees Blake’s framing technique as partially a response to the post-war upheaval of England and its new, modern saturation with visual imagery.

Although many label Blake as “the godfather of Pop Art,” Marco Livingston raises the question of whether Blake is truly “The First Real Pop Artist?” in his essay on Blake in the Swinging London of the 1960s. In the 1960s, Livingston argues, “Blake set out a case for an art that transcends its period and that privileges private intimate experience, even when celebrating the creativity and energy within mass culture.” As public as Blake’s images of The Beatles, The Beach Boys, and other pop music stars are, the real subject of these images is the individual creative energy those figures have tapped into. Whereas Faulkner sees Blake’s work in the 1950s being less than a straightforward appreciation of the tense, post-war 1950s, Livingston sees Blake’s 1960s work as “a straightforward and affectionate way of alluding to the beauty he found in his surroundings.” When Blake continues to paint wrestlers and moves from pin-ups to strippers, Livingston senses that he paints them in the “fullness of their humanity” and “with the greatest delicacy of touch that the artist could muster, and on a small, intimate scale that emphasizes that behind their costumes they are just human beings.” This full humanity extends to the pop stars as well, whose “spirit, personality and achievements” Blake celebrates. By 1969, as Livingston shows, Blake “had transformed himself into one of the chief chroniclers and architects of that optimistic and celebratory period, without once sacrificing the essential humanity and intense intimacy of his vision.”

Peter Blake, 'Well, this is grand!' said Alice from Illustrations to Through the Looking-Glass, 1970; © Peter Blake 2007. All rights reserved, DACS. Screen-print on paper.

Of course, the 1960s ended with a thud for all its true believers. The funeral depicted on Blake’s famous cover for The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band could double for the burial of the 1960s themselves. In 1969, disillusioned with the excesses of the 1960s and their downfall, Blake moved from London to rural England near Avon. With a group of like-minded artists, Blake founded the Brotherhood of the Ruralists in an attempt to recapture a simpler time. As Christoph Grunenberg writes in his essay, the Ruralists “grew as much out of a shared interest in figurative painting and certain forgotten or discredited traditions as out of an opposition to the ruling minimalist and conceptual practices of the avant-garde.” From this self-imposed exile, Blake and his fellow Ruralists take “a positive stand against the emptiness and conformity of so much contemporary thought and art.” Amidst this back-to-nature, dreamy aspect of Blake’s Ruralist period, fairies became real and works of literary imagination such as Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream provided the framework upon which he could build a new world to believe in. 'Well, this is grand!' said Alice from Illustrations to Through the Looking-Glass (above) shows how Blake was able to take these old Victorian children’s tales and repurpose them for his 1970s adult world. Grunenberg sees the fairy paintings as permitting Blake to paint an “unashamed display of exaggerated human emotions, almost completely absent in the art of the time.” Out of the ruins of the collapse of 1960s idealism, Blake found a fairyland release for all his pent-up emotions.

Peter Blake, The Meeting or Have a Nice Day, Mr Hockney, 1981-3; © Peter Blake 2007. All rights reserved, DACS

In 1979, Blake moved back to London, leaving his life in rural England behind. Late that same year, he traded in his English fantasyland for a new American one—California. Along with fellow British artists Howard Hodgkin and David Hockney (subject of Blake’s The Meeting or Have a Nice Day, Mr Hockney [above]), Blake reveled in the light and colors of Venice, California. His works turned unusually atmospheric in this new environment so different from England. Blake, however, still painted famous pop stars, transplanting his interests to American soil to paint figures such as Madonna in this new light. Rollerskaters and sunbathers become the new fairies and nymphs for Blake in his sunny paradise.

Peter Blake, Marcel Duchamp's World Tour: Playing Chess with Tracey 2003-05, Courtesy Waddington Galleries, London; © Peter Blake 2007. All rights reserved, DACS

Laurence Sillars titles his essay on Blake in the 1980s and beyond, “Déjà Vu,” alluding to the title of a Blake retrospective in Tokyo in 1988 as well as the general return of Blake to his Pop Art roots, but with a difference. Although Blake worked with the pop music stars of the 1980s (most notably on the cover of the Band Aid single and posters for Live Aid, the “pop” stars populating Blake’s imagination most often in this period belong to art history. After a 1983 retrospective at the Tate, in which Blake himself worked with curators to design the show’s presentation, Blake becomes much more self-conscious of his place in art history, indulging in “conceptual play” as he borrows freely from art history in his compositions, all part of “an homage to those he admires and from whom he has learnt.” In a series of paintings titled Marcel Duchamp’s World Tour, Blake “thank[s] Duchamp for his ground-breaking gesture with a urinal [i.e., Fountain] that henceforth gave artists the freedom to define what could become art—a philosophy that has informed all branches of Blake’s practice.” (Playing Chess with Tracey, from the World Tour, appears above.) In one image from the World Tour, Blake introduces the Spice Girls and Elvis (above) to Duchamp, humorously and affectionately bringing together the two worlds of his art—pop culture and serious art history.

By the early 1990s, Sillars remarks, “Blake was to become something of a grandfather to the ‘Young British Artists,’ going out of his way to support them.” Blake also continued to design album covers for the latest generation of musicians. In one painting, titled I may not be a Ruralist anymore but I saw a fairy in my garden in Chiswick, Blake encapsulates his new post-Ruralist attitude in which he re-engages with popular culture but continues to seek out the fantastical and magical in his world. As Sillars wonderfully summates, “Cerebrating imagery rather than celebrating it, however manufactured, is what distinguishes Blake’s particular British rather than American Pop art sensibility.” Blake’s paintings come from both his head and his heart, examining each visual rather than simply reproducing it while always seeking the humanity and sense of wonder that can be missing from some Warholian-style work. Blake may not be a Ruralist anymore, but he will always “paint about love, beauty, joy, sentiment and magic.”


[Many thanks to Tate Publishing for providing me with a review copy of the catalogue to and the images from the Tate Liverpool exhibit Peter Blake: A Retrospective.]

It Was 40 Years Ago Today…

…That Peter Blake designed the iconic cover art for The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (above). Actually, it wasn’t exactly 40 years ago today that he did this, but he was born 75 years ago today. Sir Peter continues to bask in the memories of the 1960s and the glory days of Swinging London. As Austin Powers would say, “Yeah, Baby!”

Blake began working in a Pop Art style in the 1950s, years before the American Pop Artists Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol. He first received public attention through his award-winning painting Self-Portrait With Badges from 1961 (above). Blake covers himself with blue denim, the official uniform of rebellious American youth at that time, and holds a magazine emblazoned with the name “Elvis” and featuring a photo of Elvis Presley with Ann-Margret, perhaps from their movie Viva Las Vegas. The badges covering his denim jacket bring in all different pieces of early 1960s popular culture and, oddly, resemble the “flair” that some chain restaurants require their waitpersons to wear in place of actual individuality and personality.

Blake also painted a fascinating series of illustrations for Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, including “Well, this is grand!” said Alice (above). The 1960s were one long Alice in Wonderland-esque adventure for many people and Blake’s work aptly captures that unique cultural moment. The sense of fun and inclusiveness seen in works such as the Sgt. Pepper cover remain as fresh and innovative today as they did 40 years ago. Who among us has not spent an afternoon listening to some format of Sgt. Pepper and trying to pick out the faces on that cover?