02. PETER BLAKE

Peter Blake and fellow artists Richard Hamilton (1922-2011) and David Hockney (born 1937) created an aesthetic that celebrated the unabashedly now. The world was waking to post-war renewal and the future, at least in artistic terms, was in the hands of British art. Peter Blakes sights like those of Hockney and Hamilton were set upon America. It is where they found inspiration in the design of cars and architecture, and importantly film and music.

Rock and roll arrived in 1956 with the release of Elvis Presleys Heartbreak Hotel. It was the start of youth culture and the beginning of the Pop age, the moment that subjectivity and style gained a value hitherto unseen. Beyond class and representation, popular imagery in music and in film became a new subject, a mirror, which would change perception.

Peter Blakes Elvis in Paris 2019 and Marilyn 2010 are subjects that have defined an age. They are the sine qua non of Pop, the royals of late twentieth-century imagery. How to better their respective brightness where reproduction is greater than the original? Despite the flashbulbs and the subsequent darkness, the images of Marilyn and Elvis have not faded. Marilyn has her diamond dust on and her best face forward. Elvis, despite best efforts to keep him in America, is now in Paris, his grin like the proverbial Cheshire.

Brett Ballard