Peter Blake and the Badges of British Pop

In 1961 a young painter entered a self-portrait in the John Moores exhibition in Liverpool and won. The picture shows a bearded man of 29, already losing his hair, standing in a pair of Levi’s 501 jeans, a denim jacket crowded with badges and patches, and holding a copy of Elvis Monthly against his thigh. According to Tate Etc., the jeans alone were a statement: they were scarce in Britain at the time. Self-Portrait with Badges made Peter Blake a public figure almost overnight.

A collector from Kent

Blake was born in Dartford, Kent, in 1932. The Gazette, the official public record, notes that he was evacuated at the age of seven during the Second World War, first to Worcester and then to Essex, and that he grew up an avid collector of comics, badges and records. That habit of accumulating the small printed things of popular life would supply the subject matter of a career.

He studied at Gravesend Technical College and School of Art from 1946 to 1951, where he was taught by Enid Marx, a designer known for her textiles and her writing on folk art. Two years of National Service in the Royal Air Force followed, from 1951 to 1953, and then the Royal College of Art in London, from which he graduated with a first-class diploma in 1956. A Leverhulme scholarship took him abroad in 1956 and 1957; Tate Etc. records that he spent it studying folk art in southern France.

On the Balcony

The painting that announced him was his diploma work at the Royal College, On the Balcony, begun in 1955 and finished in 1957, an oil on canvas a little over a metre high. According to the Contemporary Art Society, which gave it to the Tate Gallery in 1963, the canvas carries 27 variations on its title, from a famous painting by Manet to a newspaper photograph of the royal family. Among the other things in it are packets of fashionable American cigarettes, a photograph of his tutor John Minton, who had died in 1957, and a painting by his fellow student Leon Kossoff.

The picture also has an American source. The Society points to the realist Honoré Sharrer, whose work Blake probably saw at the Tate in January and February 1956, in an exhibition drawn from the Museum of Modern Art’s collection. The critic and curator Bryan Robertson bought it from Blake in 1959.

This was the decisive move in Blake’s art. Popular imagery, the badges, packets, magazines and photographs that filled his own rooms, was not quoted at a distance as a symptom of mass culture. It was gathered up affectionately and given the same careful attention as a painting by Manet.

British Pop, seen from a distance

Tate’s account of Pop art places the British version in the mid 1950s, with its peak in the 1960s, and describes it as a response to American popular culture viewed from across the Atlantic. Its precursor was the Independent Group of the 1950s. In 1957 Richard Hamilton drew up a list of what popular art should be, beginning: “Popular (designed for a mass audience), Transient (short-term solution), Expendable (easily forgotten)”. The list went on to low cost, mass production, youth, wit, sex, gimmickry, glamour and big business.

Tate draws a distinction that fits Blake well. British Pop, it argues, used irony and parody and was interested in what American imagery stood for and how it shaped the way people lived, whereas American Pop marked a return to representation in reaction against Abstract Expressionism. Blake’s self-portrait is a case in point. The jeans and the Elvis magazine both point across the Atlantic, and the painting is about the distance between a young man in Kent and the culture he admired.

A public figure

The self-portrait travelled quickly beyond the gallery. On 4 February 1962 it filled a page of the first Sunday Times colour section, in a feature presenting Blake as a pioneer of Pop art. In March the same year he appeared in Ken Russell’s BBC film Pop Goes the Easel, made for the Monitor programme. Elvis Monthly, the magazine he holds in the painting, reproduced the picture after the editors saw it.

The Gazette records his first solo exhibition, at the Portal Gallery in London in 1962. The Toy Shop also dates from 1962. In 1963 he married the artist Jann Haworth, began to be represented by the dealer Robert Fraser, and started a painting titled The Beatles that carries the dates 1963 to 1968.

The sleeve

Blake and Haworth designed the sleeve for the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band together, and it was released in 1967. The Victoria and Albert Museum holds a copy of the record sleeve, printed by colour offset lithography, and its record links the design to Blake, Haworth and the photographer Michael Cooper. A decade after On the Balcony, a painter who had built his reputation on borrowed popular images was now producing one, in an edition no gallery could match.

He returned to record design many times. The Gazette lists, among later commissions, artwork for the Band Aid single in 1984, an album for Paul Weller in 1995 and one for Oasis in 2006.

The Ruralists and after

In 1969 Blake left London and moved near Bath. In 1975 he became a founding member of a group of painters called the Brotherhood of Ruralists. He was elected an associate of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1974. His marriage to Haworth ended in 1979, and in 1987 he married the artist Chrissy Wilson. He was appointed CBE in 1983 and knighted for services to art in 2002, both honours recorded in the Gazette.

Tate Liverpool gave him a retrospective from 29 June to 23 September 2007, his largest since 1983, and billed him as “the godfather of British Pop art” and an adopted Liverpudlian. The exhibition included On the Balcony, Self-Portrait with Badges, The Toy Shop and The Beatles. The young man in denim was by then in his seventies, and the badges on the jacket in the 1961 picture had become period pieces themselves, as collectable as anything he had once pinned there.