Peter Blake: Collage

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With hindsight, a great many 19th-century paintings have a vague look of the Sgt. Pepper cover – and that’s no accident. It’s because they were, so to speak, painted collages: created by fitting together a mosaic from photographs and sketches. ‘Pre-Raphaelite paintings look like collage,’ Blake points out, ‘because they are very photographic, aren’t they?’ There is indeed a Pre-Raphaelite aspect to Blake’s career. In 1969, he left London for an old railway station in Somerset and became a founding member of the Brotherhood of Ruralists, a group of urban artists who retreated to the countryside and rejected the ‘new media’ of the ’60s and ’70s in favour of traditional skills such as painting. ‘We’d all come through the ’60s and survived. I’d never done any drugs so with me it wasn’t a matter of physical damage, but people were tired. It felt like the end of something that was going wrong, a party that had gone on too long.’ This was the era of The Good Life; and the Ruralists’ echo of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was doubtless conscious. Once again, Blake was both against the times and of the moment.

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. Below the band are the words THE BEACH BOYS in graphic design in blue, orange, red, white, and brown.To see how Peter Blake’s Pop Art style compares to other Pop Art styles, see our article on the Characteristics of Pop Art. Peter Blake Art Teacher In 1990 and 1991, Blake painted the artwork to Eric Clapton's 1991 million-selling live album 24 Nights. A scrapbook featuring all of Blake's drawing was later released. In January 1992, Blake appeared on BBC2's acclaimed Arena Masters of the Canvas documentary and painted the portrait of the wrestler Kendo Nagasaki. [15] Barber, Lynn (17 June 2007). "Blake's progress". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 5 October 2014 . Retrieved 6 October 2015.

The Pop art movement began in England, during the mid-twentieth century and provided a radical shift in how art had been viewed throughout art history. Blending fine art with popular culture, pop artists incorporated images from everyday life, including advertising, images from comic books, newspapers, television, film, and consumer goods. Peter Blake and Pop Art Style

Peter Blake on his Wartime Childhood and Storytelling in Art

Exh: Five Painters, I.C.A., January–February 1958 (8); The Guggenheim Painting Award, Whitechapel Art Gallery, May–June 1958 (45). He taught at various art schools, which stimulated him – and his students. Astute but unassuming, you can see how he inspired them. He encouraged them to paint the world around them: “I opened doors.” The work is a modern take on Thomas Gainsborough's The Blue Boy (1770), which sets a beautifully dressed aristocratic young man in the dramatic English countryside. Instead of a windswept landscape, Blake stands in front of a dingy suburban fence, demonstrating the difference between the England of the 1960s and the romanticized landscapes of Gainsborough. It also points to the difference between Britain, which was still suffering economically after the Second World War, and America, which was going through a consumer boom.