Since his emergence
in the early 1960s as a key member of the Pop Art movement, Peter Blake
(b.1932) has been one of the best-known and widely loved artists of his
generation. Blake's reputation from the outset was based on working
across all media. Though primarily a painter, he has produced collages,
drawings, watercolors, sculpture, prints, as well as commercial art in
the form of graphics and album covers, most notably his design for The
Beatles' "Sgt Pepper album" in 1967. "Peter Blake: One-man Show"
considers the artist's remarkable diversity, assessing his work across
all media, from the 1950s to the present. Marco Livingstone grounds
Blake's art firmly in the working-class existence that he led as a child
and a teenager, identifying a yearning for the innocence of childhood
in Blake's bittersweet paintings of the early to mid-1950s depicting
children reading comics or going to the Saturday matinee at the cinema.
From that moment, while studying at the Royal College of Art in London,
Blake concerned himself with popular entertainments as subject matter,
and as the source of formal solutions, for his paintings. The directness
with which Blake gave expression to his enthusiasms for mass culture
during the 1950s brought him to the forefront of the Pop Art movement
before it had even been named, and independently of the investigations
into similar areas by other British, American and European artists. The
radical nature of his collage paintings of 1959-62, in particular, made
him a singularly influential figure within British Pop. Blake's parallel
life as a voracious collector not only of other art but of all kinds of
artifacts is touched on in the postscript as another manifestation of
the concerns behind much of his art, particularly his collages, as an
act of homage to the creativity of others. A separate chapter on his
commercial work examines how Blake has been able to satisfy the demands
of his clients while preserving his own artistic identity. Despite his
forays into a range of more experimental media, Blake sees figurative
painting as the core of his work, the trunk of a tree whose branches
include excursions into Pop Art, collage, sculpture, graphics and
printmaking. This book reflects the engagingly diverse and endlessly
imaginative one-man show that constitutes the extraordinary and prolific
work of Peter Blake.