Peter Blake And Pop Music

With his iconic image for The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band – at the time the most expensive album cover ever produced, costing more than £2,800 – Blake was able to create a little piece of pop art for every home, replacing the usual staid pictures of men in suits staring at the camera.

As a new exhibition at Pallant House Gallery proves, this wasn’t the start of his interest in popular music – and was by no means the end.

Spread across three rooms, Peter Blake And Pop Music moves from Blake’s earliest forays into art, inspired by 1950s teen idols and fandom, through to his most recent works, including a 2012 Brit Award and a watercolour for a 2006 John Peel retrospective compilation.

“We thought one aspect of British culture which has real world fame is the relationship between British pop art and pop music,” says gallery director Stefan van Raay.

“We have an important group of works by Peter Blake in our permanent collection, and a lot are music-related, so it was always on the cards to do something with Peter. His 80th birthday this year was an extra reason to do something for him.”

Blake has teamed up with gallery to produce an exclusive screenprint of The Beatles 1962, which was based on a found image spotted in a magazine.

It is one of the works that is central to the exhibition – taking pride of place in the second room, which is dedicated to The Beatles and British pop, and contains some of his most famous pieces.

In the centre of the room is the statue of Snow White which featured in the original life-size collage for Sgt Pepper, as well as the last two remaining cut-outs Blake has from the photoshoot – Max Miller and Richard Lindner – loaned specially to the gallery.

The exhibition also features Blake’s original designs for the cover, the Victoriana collage which formed part of the inner sleeve artwork, allowing Beatles fans to dress like their heroes, and his former wife Jann Haworth’s sculpture of Cowboy Andy, which just missed being photographed on the iconic cover.

The Beatles may have made him a household name but it wasn’t the end of Blake’s collaboration with musicians, as original artworks from Pentangle’s 1968 album Sweet Child, Paul Weller’s Stanley Road in 1995, and Brian Wilson’s That Lucky Old Sun from 2009 prove.

Perhaps what is most interesting is the material that wasn’t used, or rejected.

The exhibition includes a collage for Steeleye Span’s 1977 album Storm Force 10 – which, as head of collections and exhibitions Simon Martin points out, Blake has wrongly titled Gale Force 10 – and a letter from Francis Bacon declining an invitation to contribute a portrait to The Who’s Face Dances album cover in 1981. The album cover was put together by Blake using individual portraits of the four band members created by some of his contemporaries, including David Hockney, RB Kitaj and Patrick Caulfield.

Common themes in Blake’s work can be traced throughout the exhibition, including a fascination with Victoriana – most noticeably on the single cover for Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas from 1984 and the scary Victorian-style dummy used for Chris Jagger’s 1974 album The Adventures Of Valentine Vox The Ventriloquist.

And his recurring images of stars, targets and hearts can be traced from his earliest rock and roll-inspired work to his album cover for Oasis’s Stop The Clocks in 2006, which distilled many of his most closely linked images in something akin to a treasure hunt picture.

It is perhaps in the first room, though, that his musical heart beats strongest, as a 1963 Rockola jukebox packed with some of Blake’s favourite 45s soundtracks a selection of his earliest works.

“He went to Dartford Rhythm Club as a student at Gravesend School Of Art,” says Martin.

“His interest in music starts in his dad’s swing collection.”

There are images of Blake as a young music fan, including an early pen and ink self-portrait from 1950, drawn from a family snapshot, showing off a new pair of sunglasses and tie. And dominating the room is his 1961 Self Portrait With Badges [pictured on the cover of today’s Guide], which sees the bearded painter standing defiantly in an English suburban garden dressed head to toe in denim and adorned with pin badges including those of Elvis Presley, one of his most regular subjects.

“Blake says when you talk about rock and roll, you talk about Elvis,” says Martin. “His representations of Elvis came before Andy Warhol’s, even though British pop art was criticised in the US as being secondary to the American artists. Blake was influenced by Richard Linder, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns rather than Warhol.”

Speaking to Mark Ellen in the gallery’s summer magazine, Blake describes his discovery of the term pop art at a dinner party in the late 1950s with English critic Lawrence Alloway.

“I was there with [fellow Royal College students and artists] Dick Smith and Robyn Denny, and we were talking about what we were all doing; I was describing what I was trying to do, which was make an equivalent of pop music. I wanted to make a painting of Elvis so the same girl who loved Presley’s music would like the picture. And as I described it to Alloway, he said, ‘Like a pop art?’”

Elsewhere in his early work it’s easy to spot references to Blake’s life growing up in 1950s and 1960s Britain.

There’s his incorporation of fairground imagery on pieces such as the early 1960s collage Got A Girl and 1961’s EL alongside promotional photographs of teen idols; his depictions of fans showing off their ephemera in Girls With Their Hero; a black and white shrine to the king of rock ’n’ roll, Elvis Presley, and portraits of some of his favourite acts, including Sammy Davis Jr and the Everly Brothers.

The latter of which has been signed more than 20 years on by the singers themselves – perhaps showing the fan in Blake himself.

His influence on other artists is probably best expressed by one of his former students, the late Ian Dury.

Alongside one of his rhythm sticks – donated by Blake to the exhibition – are the handwritten lyrics to Dury’s 1984 tribute song to his former mentor, Peter The Painter, giving the order: “For goodness’ sake, take a look at those Blakes.”

* Peter Blake And Pop Music is at Pallant House Gallery, North Pallant, Chichester, until Sunday, October 7, open 10am to 5pm, Tues to Sat; 10am to 8pm, Thurs; 11am to 5pm, Sun, tickets £9/£5.50. For more information, call 01243 774557