Allen Jones (born 1 September 1937) is a British pop artist best known for his paintings, sculptures, and lithography. He was awarded the Prix des Jeunes Artistes at the 1963 Paris Biennale. He is a Senior Academician at the Royal Academy of Arts. In 2017 he returned to his home town to receive the award Honorary Doctor of Arts from Southampton Solent University
Jones has taught at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg, the University of South Florida, the University of California, the Banff Center School of Fine Arts in Canada, and the Berlin University of the Arts. His works reside in a number of collections; including the Tate, the Museum Ludwig, the Warwick Arts Centre and the Hirshhorn Museum. His best known work Hatstand, Table and Chair, involving fibreglass "fetish" mannequins, debuted to protests in 1970.
Early life and education "For my generation anyone who wanted to cut the mustard had to reckon with Abstract Expressionism.... I've never wanted to show the struggle involved in the making of the work, and to make it part of the painting the way it is with Pollock or de Kooning. That's just not me; constitutionally I couldn't abandon the figure. But I had to find a new way of doing it. Abstract Expressionism had swept everything away. You couldn't go back to representing the figure through some moribund visual language."— Allen Jones in a 2014 interview Jones was born in the English city of Southampton on 1 September 1937. The son of a Welsh factory worker, he was raised in the west London district of Ealing, and in his youth attended Ealing County Grammar School for Boys. Jones had an interest in art from an early age. In 1955, he began studying painting and lithography at Hornsey College of Art in London, where he would graduate in 1959. At the time the teaching method at Hornsey was based on Paul Klee's Pedagogical Sketchbook from the 1930s. While a student at Hornsey, Jones travelled to Paris and the French region of Provence, and was particularly influenced by the art of Robert Delaunay. He also attended a Jackson Pollock show at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1958, and according to Jones, "for me it was outside any known frame of reference. The scale, the ambition, the freedom. I felt like suing my teachers for not telling me what was happening in the world." He afterwards travelled to see the Musie Fernand Léger in the French commune of Biot, and in 1959 he left Hornsey to begin attending the Royal College of Art.
As one of the first British pop artists, Jones produced increasingly unusual paintings and prints in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and in particular enjoyed combining different visual languages to expose the historical constructions underlying them. According to Jones, about his early ambitions, "I wanted to kick over the traces of what was considered acceptable in art. I wanted to find a new language for representation... to get away from the idea that figurative art was romantic, that it wasn't tough." He was part of a unique generation of students at the Royal College, among which his fellow students were R. B. Kitaj, Peter Phillips, David Hockney, and Derek Boshier, but was expelled from the Royal College of Art in 1960, at the end of his first year. Explained by Mark Hudson in The Telegraph many years later, "horrified at the new developments brewing among their younger students, the college's academic old guard decided to make an example of someone. They chose Jones." Dismayed, Jones signed up for a teacher training course and returned to his studies at Hornsey College of Art in 1960, graduating the following year.
Art career
Early teaching and exhibits (1961–63) Despite his expulsion from the Royal College, in January 1961 Jones' work was included in the Young contemporaries 1961 exhibit. The annual Royal Society of British Artists exhibition was described in the press as "the exhibition that launched British pop art," Young Contemporaries helped expose England to the art of Jones, David Hockney, R. B. Kitaj, Billy Apple, Derek Boshier, Joe Tilson, Patrick Caulfield, and Peter Blake, all of whom were variously influenced by American Pop. Among his works, Jones entered several paintings of London buses on shaped canvases, which were afterwards put on display at the London West End gallery Arthur Tooth & Sons. One of the gallery's directors then introduced Jones to the work of American pop artists such as Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Claes Oldenburg, which proved inspirational to Jones. In 1961, he took a job teaching lithography at Croydon College of Art in London, where he would remain until 1963. Around this time, Jones was influenced by the works of writers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, and Carl Jung. According to Jones, his 1963 painting Hermaphrodite, depicting "fused male/female couples as metaphors of the creative act," draws from both Freud and Nietzsche. In 1963, Jones was awarded the Prix des Jeunes Artistes at the Paris Biennale. The following year, Jones and other Nouveau réalisme and pop artists such as Peter Phillips and Pauline Boty were featured in documentaries by Belgian director Jean Antoine, Evelyne Axell's husband.
Travel in United States and abroad (1964–69) "[In New York City Jones] found a scene dominated by the ideas of the influential critic Clement Greenberg: that the essence of painting lay in the flatness of the canvas, in hard edges, in the painting as object. Jones wanted to create a new kind of art that conformed to those principles... but which retained the human figure. He found the imagery that would allow him to do that in the seedy bookshops of Times Square."— Mark Hudson Intrigued by the "toughness" of American pop art, Jones moved to Manhattan in 1964 and took a studio at the Chelsea Hotel. In New York City, Jones recollects learning to "present what you were saying as clearly as possible," and he developed an interest in making his images tangible. For the year Jones remained in the city, he "discovered a rich fund of imagery in sexually motivated popular illustration of the 1940s and 1950s." According to Jones, about his art of the time:
Among other projects at the time, Jones "worked on a three-dimensional illusionism with obvious erotic components." When Jones' close friend Peter Phillips came to New York on a Harkness Fellowship in 1964, for two years they spent much of their time travelling together throughout the United States. Jones' style continued to develop, and his 1966 painting Perfect Match "made explicit [his] previously subdued eroticism, adopting a precise linear style as a means of emphasizing tactility."
In 1967, Jones' work along with the works of artists such as Piero Gilardi and David Hockney were included in an exhibition for the wedding of Guglielmo Achille Cavellini's daughter. The following year, when the xartcollection exhibition series was created in Zürich, Switzerland, Jones and artists such as Max Bill, Getulio Alviani, and Richard Hamilton were among the first to be included in the company's "multiples." Until it dissolved a few years later, the company's philosophy was to make contemporary art available to a large public by industrially producing three-dimensional "multiples," with several artists' work included on each. Jones was a guest lecturer at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg in Germany from 1968 to 1970, and in 1969 was also a visiting professor at the University of South Florida. His 1968 set of prints, Life Class, was among his first works to incorporate elements of sculpture. Each print is made of two-halves, the bottom being a realistic pair of women's legs in tights, while the upper halves are drawn in a 1940s fetishist graphic style representing "the secret face of British male desire in the gloomy post-war years." About his further experimentation with sculpture, Jones has stated that "I spent so much time giving my figures that grabbable quality, I thought, why don't I make them in three dimensions?"
Hatstand, Table and Chair (1970)
"When I looked at what other avant-garde artists were doing with the figure there was always a kind of prop, something that let the viewer off the hook, that told them 'this is a work of art'. I wanted to make a figure that was devoid of those props. There was an idea I'd seen in an adult comic strip where a person was used as a table, and that set off a whole host of resonances."— Allen Jones
While living in the London neighbourhood of Chelsea in the late 1960s, Jones began working in sculpture. His fibreglass sculpture Chair, which was completed in 1969, marked the start of a series of "life-size images of women as furniture with fetishist and sado-masochist overtones." The first three sculptures were each sculpted from Jones' drawings, with Jones overseeing professional sculptor as he produced the figures in clay. The three female figures were then cast in plaster by a company that specialised in producing shop mannequins. Each of the original three figures was produced in an edition of six.
Jones first group of erotic fibreglass sculptures, of a Hatstand, Table and Chair gained international attention when exhibited in 1970. The works were met with strong protests for perceived misogyny, which succeeded in making Jones a "cultural hot potato". Laura Mulvey writing for Spare Rib magazine suggested the sculptures was inspired by latent castration anxiety. Almost a decade later, when they were put on display at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1978, they were attacked with stink bombs. Eight years later, on International Women's Day, Chair was damaged by paint stripper while exhibited at the Tate. According to art historian and curator, Marco Livingstone, writing in 2004: "More than three decades later, these works still carry a powerful emotive charge, ensnaring every viewer's psychology and sexual outlook regardless of age, gender or experience."
The severe reaction from the art world, feminists, and the mainstream press after the sculptures' debut would limit Jones' exhibition career in England over the next several decades. When asked about their effect on his career, Jones was quoted stating "it's collateral damage. I wanted to offend the canons of accepted worth in art. I found the perfect image to do that, and it's an accident of history that these works coincided with the arrival of militant feminism." Roman Polanski, Elton John and Gunter Sachs all owned a piece at one stage, with one of the sets selling at auction in 2012 for £2.6 million. The sculptures have also been referenced in Stanley Kubrick's 1971 film A Clockwork Orange.
Maîtresse and teaching (1973–1980s)
Jones, photographer Brian Duffy, and air brush specialist Philip Castle were commissioned to collaborate on the annual and often salacious Pirelli calendar in 1973, resulting in a unique edition that Clive James would later jokingly call "the only Pirelli Calendar that nobody bothered to look at twice". In 1973, Jones spent time as a guest lecturer at the University of California, Los Angeles, and after visiting Japan in 1974, the following year he toured Canada. Jones designed Barbet Schroeder's 1975 film Maîtresse. Starring Bulle Ogier as the professional dominatrix Ariane and Gérard Depardieu as her obsessed lover, the film was refused a certificate in the United Kingdom because of its graphic depictions of sado-masochism.