Peter Blake: Collage

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Entering Blake’s studio for the first time is intensely evocative. Collage has always been central to his artworks, from Victoriana to Americana, and this is where he hoards his sources – fermenting folk memories into art. One of a series of wrestling scenes, Peter Blake’s Doktor K. Tortur (1965) was influenced by his childhood filled with attending wrestling matches. The Pop art artist said, “I loved it immediately. I loved the theatre, the fantasy, and the idea of good versus evil.”

Recalling his time studying at the Slade in the 1990s, Stuart Pearson Wright, who has paintings in the National Portrait Gallery, said they weren’t “really taught any drawing at all. I taught myself to draw”. Peter Blake grew up in Kent, England in a typical blue-collar household as a son of an electrician. Although he had a younger brother and sister, he claims he was always "a solitary child" who was "extremely shy". He experienced a disruption in his education when his family was evacuated during the Second World War. In 1961, Blake started working on wrestling series, which he achieved by first finding photographs of wrestlers in magazines to work from as a starting point.Blake’s first solo exhibition was held in 1962 at Portal Gallery, London; solo shows followed at Robert Fraser Gallery, London (1965) and at Leslie Waddington Prints, London (1969). His first retrospective exhibition was held in 1969 at the City Art Gallery, Bristol. Subsequent retrospectives were held in 1973 at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, touring to Hamburg and Brussels and the Tate Gallery in 1983. In 1994 he was made the Third Associate Artist of the National Gallery, London. In 2007, the Tate Liverpool held a major retrospective of Peter Blake’s work which toured to the Museo de Bellas Artes, Bilbao, Spain in 2008. A large retrospective of Blake’s collage work, including some of his earliest pieces, took place at Waddington Custot in 2021 with the title Peter Blake: Time Traveller. The major monograph Peter Blake Collage was published by Thames & Hudson alongside the exhibition. In 2022 Waddington Custot presented Blake’s Under Milk Wood series, the first time it had been exhibited outside of Wales to commemorate the artist’s 90th birthday. Marco Livingstone’s Peter Blake: One Man Show , was republished with an additional chapter by Thames & Hudson to commemorate the same occasion. An avid collector, Blake's collages combine junkyard treasures and found objects with images from popular culture. He revisits themes drawn from his childhood - the entertainments of the circus, the glamour of the cinema and the showmanship of the wrestling ring - weaving detailed, often humorous narratives. From his early paintings depicting assembled fragments of popular imagery, to his found-object constructions and his most recent inkjet print collages, Blake has broadened the scope of what collage can be and communicate. Peter Blake’s Pop art artwork Girlie Door, from 1959, is a door painted red, with images of women and movie stars, such as Marilyn Monroe and Sophia Loren. All are staring directly at the viewer. The work of collage and assemblage on hardboard recalls a bedroom of a teenaged boy. Self Portrait with Badges (1961) Self Portrait with Badges (1961) Peter Blake. Tate, London, United Kingdom.

The Butterfly Man – Venice (in homage to Damien Hirst) (2010), Peter Blake. Courtesy Waddington Custot He offered them masterclasses, studio visits and “a party bag” filled with pencils, an eraser and a note saying “I can’t teach you to draw, but here is a sketchbook, carry it always. The third time I did it, I gave them all a drawing … I gave them the facility to draw, the things to do it with, but admitted it wasn’t the right time to teach it.” Born in Dartford, Kent in 1932 Blake studied initially at Gravesend Technical College from 1949-51. After a period of national service in the Royal Air Force, Blake attended the Royal College of Art, graduating in 1956.Video still of Sir Peter Blake taken in 2016; The Academy on Vimeo, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons Joseph Cornell’s Holiday – Greece, Athens. ‘The Butterfly Man comes out of retirement to stage a Fly-past for 3 coach parties – Women Artists, Famous Blondes and Joseph Cornell’s Wanderlust Tour’ (2017), Peter Blake. Courtesy Waddington Custot When Peter Blake left London at the end of the 1960s, he moved to the countryside and started painting in a very different style. He took inspiration from the landscape and from an old-fashioned way of life, rather than focusing on the bright colors and consumer goods of Pop art. To create this work, Blake was extensively inspired by the Victorians, and their interest in fairies and fairy tales. Like many Victorian fairy lovers, he chose to depict a moment from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, painting the fairies who attend on Queen Titania and King Oberon.

Although this work is now Peter Blake’s most recognizable, he was paid a minimal wage of 200 British pounds sterling for the vinyl record cover. He would however go on to create numerous album sleeves for other bands. Peter Blake Education and Early Art There are plenty of other riches, though – including three charming, abstract collages from the 1950s. These were made by pasting rectangular bits of cloth, paper and silver foil onto a board, in arrangements that recall the canvases of Mark Rothko. Blake’s studio isn’t like most artists’ studios. It’s more like a museum – a colossal cabinet of curiosities. An obsessive collector of ephemera, everything from vintage toys to taxidermy, his secluded studio is crammed full of surreal and slightly sinister objets d’art.One of Bernar Venet’s iconic Indeterminate Line sculptures, created in rolled steel, shows the French artist’s approach to conceptualising and configuring space. Peter Blake is one of Britain’s best-loved artists. A founder of British Pop art in the 1950s and widely known for his cover design for The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album, his celebration of popular culture is set in the public consciousness. In a career spanning seven decades, the practice of collage has remained at the heart of his iconic, groundbreaking imagery, from his early paintings depicting fragments of popular ephemera, to his found-object assemblages and constructions, his pasted-paper collages and his most recent use of inkjet printing and digital processes. As part of 'The Big Egg Hunt' February 2012 Sir Peter Blake designed an egg on behalf of Dorchester Collection. Blake created the carpet which runs through the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom's Middlesex Guildhall building. [18] In 1962 Blake featured in Ken Russell’s celebrated BBC television documentary Pop Goes the Easel. This film, plus a feature about him in the recently launched Sunday Times Colour Section, turned Blake into a celebrity and one of the first representatives of a new phenomenon: Swinging London. In 1967, in collaboration with his then wife Jann Haworth, he created the cover of the Beatles’ album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, still the most identifiable image of that time and place. One might conclude that far from being an idiosyncratic outsider, like some of the ‘folk’ artists whose work he has long collected, Blake himself has been an insider – a famous artist who created perhaps the most famous album cover of all time. In fact, the truth is that he’s always been both insider and outsider. To paraphrase the great jazz alto saxophonist Paul Desmond, ‘I was unfashionable even before it was fashionable to be unfashionable.’ Blake could claim much the same.