Peter Blake (artist)

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Peter Blake was born in Dartford, Kent, on the 25th of June 1932, and he would go on to create one of the most recognised images of the twentieth century. The sleeve for the Beatles' 1967 album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band became so famous that the drum at the heart of it sold at auction in 2008. Blake designed it with his then-wife Jann Haworth for a one-off fee of two hundred pounds, with no subsequent royalties. He has complained about that arrangement ever since.

  But the Sgt. Pepper sleeve is only one thread in a long career that wound through wrestlers and matchboxes, English folklore, Shakespeare, album art for The Who and Eric Clapton, a Band Aid single, a Live Aid poster, a Brit Award statuette, and a carpet in the Supreme Court. How did a boy from Kent become the most prominent figure in British pop art? And what did he make of the culture he was so eager to preserve?

• 2. From Dartford to Pop Art

  ›

  Gravesend Technical College school of art and then the Royal College of Art gave Blake his formal training. From the late 1950s, his canvases pulled in imagery from advertisements, music hall entertainment, and wrestlers, often built up with collaged elements. By 1961, he was showing alongside David Hockney and R. B. Kitaj in the "Young Contemporaries" exhibition, and critics first identified him with the emerging British Pop Art movement.

  That same year, Blake won the John Moores junior award for Self Portrait with Badges. Wider public attention followed in 1962 when Ken Russell's Monitor film Pop Goes the Easel aired on BBC television, featuring Blake alongside Pauline Boty, Derek Boshier, and Peter Phillips. It was an early and visible marker of the movement's arrival in British culture.

  From 1963, Blake was represented by Robert Fraser, a gallerist who placed him at the centre of Swinging London and brought him into contact with leading figures of popular culture. Blake had his first solo exhibition at the Robert Fraser Gallery in 1965, the same year a photograph by Lord Snowdon put him on the front cover of LIFE International.

• 3. Objects and Obsessions

  ›

  On the Balcony, painted between 1955 and 1957, is a piece that looks like a collage but is entirely painted. A boy on the left side of the composition holds Edouard Manet's The Balcony; badges and magazines fill the rest of the scene. Blake drew the idea from a painting by Honore Sharrer called Workers and Paintings, which showed workers holding famous artworks.

  His Captain Webb Matchbox took its starting point from a Bryant and May matchbox design featuring the first man to swim the English Channel unaided. The First Real Target, made in 1961, was a standard archery target with the title written across the top, a direct play on target paintings by Kenneth Noland and Jasper Johns. Each of these pieces treated everyday printed objects with the same seriousness fine art usually reserved for mythological scenes.

  A 1959 painting called Girls with Their Hero depicted facets of Elvis Presley. At the "Pop Art in Changing Britain" exhibit, as reported by The Telegraph on the 21st of February 2018, it was described as having "fashioned a highly personal form of Pop Art, infused by nostalgia for Victoriana and a long-lost world of native pastimes." That nostalgia would keep running through Blake's work across the following decades.

• 4. The Sgt. Pepper Commission

  ›

  Blake designed the Sgt. Pepper sleeve with Jann Haworth, the American-born artist he had married in 1963. Producing it required building an actual set, with cut-out photographs and objects, flowers among them, arranged around a drum painted with the album's title. The drum later sold at auction in 2008.

  Blake and Haworth won a Grammy Award for Best Album Cover, Graphic Arts for the work. That prize did nothing to offset what Blake saw as a bad deal. The one-off fee was two hundred pounds, with no royalties attached, and he has returned to the subject repeatedly over the years. The sleeve became one of the most imitated pieces of album artwork ever produced, which made the absence of ongoing payment all the more pointed.

  In 1968, commissioned by Dodo Editions, Blake made Babe Rainbow, a screen-print on tinplate in an edition of ten thousand, each sold for one pound. The contrast in scale between that project and the Sgt. Pepper commission captures something essential about the range Blake was willing to operate across.

• 5. A Retreat and a Return

  ›

  In 1969, Blake left London to live near Bath. His painting shifted toward English folklore and Shakespeare. In the early 1970s, he made a set of watercolour paintings to illustrate Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, using a young artist named Celia Wanless as the model for Alice.

  In 1975, Blake was a founder of the Brotherhood of Ruralists. The group represented a deliberate turn away from urban pop culture toward pastoral and literary subjects. By 1979, Blake had divorced Jann Haworth and moved back to London, and his work returned to the popular culture references he had built his early reputation on.

  Leslie Waddington had been his representative and lifelong supporter since 1969, when Blake had his first exhibition with Waddington Galleries the year Robert Fraser Gallery closed. In 1999, Blake painted a portrait of Waddington alongside Portrait of a Young Man by Hans Memling, a pairing that knitted together two centuries of artistic reference in a single image.

• 6. Music Art and Later Commissions

  ›

  In 1990 and 1991, Blake painted the artwork for Eric Clapton's live album 24 Nights, which sold in the millions when released in 1991. A scrapbook of all of Blake's drawings from the project was later published. In January 1992, he appeared on BBC2's Arena Masters of the Canvas documentary and painted the wrestler Kendo Nagasaki.

  Blake made the sleeve for the Band Aid single "Do They Know It's Christmas?" in 1984. He designed Pentangle's Sweet Child and The Who's Face Dances in 1981, which featured portraits of the band by several different artists. Thirty-eight years later, he returned to design the sleeve for The Who's WHO in 2019. He had also designed Paul Weller's Stanley Road in 1995 and the Ian Dury tribute album Brand New Boots and Panties in 2001; Blake had been Dury's tutor at Walthamstow School of Art in the early 1960s.

  In 2006, Blake designed the cover for the Oasis greatest hits album Stop the Clocks. He later said he chose the objects at random but had the sleeves of Sgt. Pepper's and Definitely Maybe at the back of his mind. The original cover featured an image of the Chelsea shop Granny Takes a Trip on the Kings Road, but that version was not used. For the 2016 Eric Clapton studio album I Still Do, Blake contributed the artwork again, extending a working relationship that had run for more than two decades.

• 7. Honours and Public Presence

  ›

  Blake became a Royal Academician in 1981. He was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 1983 Birthday Honours, and a retrospective of his work was held at the Tate that same year. In 2002, Blake was knighted by Prince Charles in an investiture ceremony at Buckingham Palace for his services to art. A second retrospective followed at Tate Liverpool in 2008.

  In February 2005, the Sir Peter Blake Music Art Gallery opened at the School of Music at the University of Leeds. The permanent exhibition holds twenty examples of his album sleeve art, including the only public display of a signed print of his Sgt. Pepper's artwork. In March 2011, the University of Leeds awarded him an honorary DMus, marked by the public unveiling of his artwork for the Boogie For Stu album. On the 18th of July 2011, Nottingham Trent University awarded him an honorary doctorate in Art.

  In March 2020, Blake's poster London Stands Together was distributed inside every copy of the London Evening Standard newspaper, a piece of public art placed in hundreds of thousands of hands on a single day.