Peter Blake (artist)

Sir Peter Thomas Blake (born 25 June 1932) is an English pop artist.

Peter Blake was born in Dartford, Kent, on 25 June 1932.

He was educated at the Gravesend Technical College school of art, and the Royal College of Art.

From the late 1950s, Blake's paintings included imagery from advertisements, music hall entertainment, and wrestlers, often including collaged elements.

Blake was included in group exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts.

On the Balcony (1955–1957) is a significant early work which remains an iconic piece of British Pop Art, showing Blake's interest in combining images from pop culture with fine art.

The work, which appears to be a collage but is wholly painted, shows, among other things, a boy on the left of the composition holding Édouard Manet's The Balcony, badges and magazines.

It was inspired by a painting by Honoré Sharrer depicting workers holding famous paintings, Workers and Paintings.

In the "Young Contemporaries" exhibition of 1961 in which he exhibited alongside David Hockney and R. B. Kitaj, he was first identified with the emerging British Pop Art movement.

Blake won the (1961) John Moores junior award for Self Portrait with Badges.

Another example, The First Real Target (1961) a standard archery target with the title written across the top is a play on paintings of targets by Kenneth Noland and Jasper Johns.

Blake has been commissioned to create many album sleeves.

He came to wider public attention when, along with Pauline Boty, Derek Boshier and Peter Phillips, he featured in Ken Russell's Monitor film on pop art, Pop Goes the Easel, broadcast on BBC television in 1962.

From 1963, Blake was represented by Robert Fraser placing him at the centre of Swinging London and bringing him into contact with leading figures of popular culture.

He designed the sleeve for Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band with his wife Jann Haworth, the American-born artist whom he married in 1963 and divorced in 1979.

The Sgt. Pepper's sleeve has become an iconic work of pop art, much imitated and Blake's best-known work.

Blake had his first solo exhibition with Robert Fraser Gallery in 1965 and appeared on the front cover of LIFE International in a photograph by Lord Snowdon.

He co-created the sleeve design for the Beatles' 1967 album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

His other works include the covers for two of The Who's albums, the cover of the Band Aid single "Do They Know It's Christmas?", and the Live Aid concert poster.

In 1968, commissioned by Dodo Editions, Blake made Babe Rainbow, a screen-print on tinplate, in an edition of 10,000, which sold for £1 each.

Blake was given the final exhibition held at Robert Fraser Gallery which closed in 1969.

The same year, Blake had his first exhibition with Waddington Galleries, owned by Leslie Waddington who became his lifelong supporter and representative.

In 1969, Blake left London to live near Bath.

His work changed direction to feature scenes based on English Folklore and characters from 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, Celia Wanless, as the model for Alice and in 1975 he was a founder of the Brotherhood of Ruralists.

Blake moved back to London in 1979 and his work returned to earlier popular culture references.

He designed the sleeves for Pentangle's Sweet Child, The Who's Face Dances (1981), which features portraits of the band by a number of artists, and 38 years later, The Who's WHO (2019).

Blake made sleeves for the Band Aid single, "Do They Know It's Christmas?" (1984), Paul Weller's Stanley Road (1995) and the Ian Dury tribute album Brand New Boots and Panties (2001; Blake was Dury's tutor at Walthamstow School of Art in the early 60s).

Blake participated in Prince Edward's charity television special The Grand Knockout Tournament in 1987.

In 1990 and 1991, Blake painted the artwork to Eric Clapton's 1991 million-selling live album 24 Nights.

In 1999, Blake painted Leslie Waddington with Portrait of a Young Man by Hans Memling.

In 2002 he was knighted at Buckingham Palace for his services to art.

Producing the collage necessitated the construction of a set with cut-out photographs and objects, such as flowers, centred on a drum (sold in auction in 2008) with the title of the album.

Blake has subsequently complained about the one-off fee he received for the design (£200 ), with no subsequent royalties.

Blake also designed the 2012 Brit Award statuette.

Blake is a prominent figure in the pop art movement.

Central to his paintings are his interest in images from popular culture which have infused his collages.

At the "Pop Art in Changing Britain" exhibit and as reported by The Telegraph on 21 February 2018, his Girls with Their Hero, a 1959 painting of facets of Elvis Presley was said to have "fashioned a highly personal form of Pop Art, infused by nostalgia for Victoriana and a long-lost world of native pastimes".

Blake has referred to the work of other artists many times.

His Captain Webb Matchbox, based on a Bryant & May matchbox design featuring the first man to swim the Channel unaided, is another of his early works in the pop art movement.