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Lot Essay
‘These pin-ups come before us in the guise of modernised vanitas images’ (David Alan Mellor)
An icon of British Pop Art, Beach Wear is the largest work in Gerald Laing’s landmark early series of ‘beach girls’. With its bikini-clad muse spanning over two and half metres in height, it captures the zeitgeist of glamour, consumerism and sexual liberation that defined the heyday of the Swinging Sixties. Painted in 1964, the year after his iconic portrait of Brigitte Bardot, the work coincides with Laing’s move to New York. It was shown in his first solo exhibition in the city at Richard Feigen Gallery, and was subsequently unseen in public for the next 52 years. Based on a cover advertisement from the Italian magazine Eva, it belongs to a suite of eight ‘beach girls’ illustrated in the artist’s catalogue raisonné, created between 1964 and 1965. These works echo the fascination with iconoclasm, commerce and mass media that, concurrently, was fuelling the work of Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselmann and Roy Lichtenstein. Independently of the latter’s ‘Ben Day’ dots, Laing had also begun to employ systems of gradated dots that mimicked the mechanisms of mechanical reproduction. Meticulously rendered by hand, Beach Wear is a masterpiece of technical virtuosity, standing today as an emblem of one of art history’s most exciting new chapters.
Laing’s ‘beach girls’ marked the start of his engagement with the world of everyday commercial advertising. Towering before the viewer, they stood in seductive contrast to the pictures of racing drivers that populated much of his early oeuvre. His pictures of Bardot and other actresses—including Lolita Through the Keyhole (1962), Anna Karina (1963) and his series of ‘starlets’—had propelled his early rise to critical acclaim. Now, as David Alan Mellor wrote, ‘the “heraldry” of leisure and sexuality laps over and invades the bodies of his “beach girls”—those recruits from contemporary surfing mythology and their endless summers—in his bikini paintings and prints. These pin-ups come before us in the guise of modernised vanitas images’ (D. A. Mellor, ‘Gerald Laing: Swift Passages and the Monumental Imagination’, in Gerald Laing 1963-1993: A Retrospective, exh. cat. Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh 1993, p. 11). Though cast as contemporary sirens in the same vein as Warhol’s film stars and Coca Cola bottles, they are also laced with nostalgia, evoking the halcyon bathers and odalisques of art’s bygone days.
Aside from Warhol, artists on both sides of the Atlantic were seduced by this new brand of contemporary iconography. Beach Wear takes its place alongside works such as Sigmar Polke’s Freundinnen (Girlfriends) (1965) and Bunnies (1966), Gerhard Richter’s Badende (Bathers) (1967), Richard Prince’s Nurses and Tom Wesselmann’s Great American Nudes. Laing, however, developed his interests somewhat independently. As a student at St. Martins during the early 1960s, he was inspired by the teachings of Richard Smith, who was beginning to explore the aesthetics of commercial advertising in his ICA lectures and screenings. ‘So strong were these [images] to our eyes’, noted Laing, ‘accustomed as they were only to the peeling stucco of wartime neglect, that they seemed to eclipse reality and acquired the pungent authority of the icon. Standing on the tube platform on my way to St. Martin’s in the mornings, I was transfixed by the crude but powerful printing processes used in poster advertisements, and the ambivalence between the whole image which they contained and the means by which it had been created—the dots and lines and cacophony of form and colour visible at a short range, and the reassuring integrity of the image at a distance’ (G. Laing, quoted in British Pop, exh. cat. Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, Bilbao 2006, p. 435).
Painstakingly replicating the appearance of these printed images, Laing sought to throw this duality in relief. He first developed this approach in 1963, around the same time that Lichtenstein and Polke were also exploring similar systems. Unlike his contemporaries, however—both of whom sought to critique the language of mass reproduction—Laing celebrated its optical power. ‘I chose photographs which appealed to me,’ he explained, ‘ones which I wished to make more permanent than the essentially ephemeral nature of the daily press would allow, and which were also absolutely of the moment.’ He relished the pseudo-scientific logic of the dots, which cast aside expressive brushwork and pictorial illusion and railed against the ‘vague and speculative content of Abstract Expressionist paintings’ (G. Laing, ibid.). Despite this, however, the present work nonetheless exudes a sense of sublime awe and wonder. Magnified to theatrical proportions, its drama lies in the virtuosic counterpoint between the different-sized dots and the flat areas of white and grey below. Still-visible pencil lines quiver with the trace of the artist’s hand. The image looms large in three-dimensional splendour: a smouldering totem to a brave new world.
An icon of British Pop Art, Beach Wear is the largest work in Gerald Laing’s landmark early series of ‘beach girls’. With its bikini-clad muse spanning over two and half metres in height, it captures the zeitgeist of glamour, consumerism and sexual liberation that defined the heyday of the Swinging Sixties. Painted in 1964, the year after his iconic portrait of Brigitte Bardot, the work coincides with Laing’s move to New York. It was shown in his first solo exhibition in the city at Richard Feigen Gallery, and was subsequently unseen in public for the next 52 years. Based on a cover advertisement from the Italian magazine Eva, it belongs to a suite of eight ‘beach girls’ illustrated in the artist’s catalogue raisonné, created between 1964 and 1965. These works echo the fascination with iconoclasm, commerce and mass media that, concurrently, was fuelling the work of Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselmann and Roy Lichtenstein. Independently of the latter’s ‘Ben Day’ dots, Laing had also begun to employ systems of gradated dots that mimicked the mechanisms of mechanical reproduction. Meticulously rendered by hand, Beach Wear is a masterpiece of technical virtuosity, standing today as an emblem of one of art history’s most exciting new chapters.
Laing’s ‘beach girls’ marked the start of his engagement with the world of everyday commercial advertising. Towering before the viewer, they stood in seductive contrast to the pictures of racing drivers that populated much of his early oeuvre. His pictures of Bardot and other actresses—including Lolita Through the Keyhole (1962), Anna Karina (1963) and his series of ‘starlets’—had propelled his early rise to critical acclaim. Now, as David Alan Mellor wrote, ‘the “heraldry” of leisure and sexuality laps over and invades the bodies of his “beach girls”—those recruits from contemporary surfing mythology and their endless summers—in his bikini paintings and prints. These pin-ups come before us in the guise of modernised vanitas images’ (D. A. Mellor, ‘Gerald Laing: Swift Passages and the Monumental Imagination’, in Gerald Laing 1963-1993: A Retrospective, exh. cat. Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh 1993, p. 11). Though cast as contemporary sirens in the same vein as Warhol’s film stars and Coca Cola bottles, they are also laced with nostalgia, evoking the halcyon bathers and odalisques of art’s bygone days.
Aside from Warhol, artists on both sides of the Atlantic were seduced by this new brand of contemporary iconography. Beach Wear takes its place alongside works such as Sigmar Polke’s Freundinnen (Girlfriends) (1965) and Bunnies (1966), Gerhard Richter’s Badende (Bathers) (1967), Richard Prince’s Nurses and Tom Wesselmann’s Great American Nudes. Laing, however, developed his interests somewhat independently. As a student at St. Martins during the early 1960s, he was inspired by the teachings of Richard Smith, who was beginning to explore the aesthetics of commercial advertising in his ICA lectures and screenings. ‘So strong were these [images] to our eyes’, noted Laing, ‘accustomed as they were only to the peeling stucco of wartime neglect, that they seemed to eclipse reality and acquired the pungent authority of the icon. Standing on the tube platform on my way to St. Martin’s in the mornings, I was transfixed by the crude but powerful printing processes used in poster advertisements, and the ambivalence between the whole image which they contained and the means by which it had been created—the dots and lines and cacophony of form and colour visible at a short range, and the reassuring integrity of the image at a distance’ (G. Laing, quoted in British Pop, exh. cat. Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, Bilbao 2006, p. 435).
Painstakingly replicating the appearance of these printed images, Laing sought to throw this duality in relief. He first developed this approach in 1963, around the same time that Lichtenstein and Polke were also exploring similar systems. Unlike his contemporaries, however—both of whom sought to critique the language of mass reproduction—Laing celebrated its optical power. ‘I chose photographs which appealed to me,’ he explained, ‘ones which I wished to make more permanent than the essentially ephemeral nature of the daily press would allow, and which were also absolutely of the moment.’ He relished the pseudo-scientific logic of the dots, which cast aside expressive brushwork and pictorial illusion and railed against the ‘vague and speculative content of Abstract Expressionist paintings’ (G. Laing, ibid.). Despite this, however, the present work nonetheless exudes a sense of sublime awe and wonder. Magnified to theatrical proportions, its drama lies in the virtuosic counterpoint between the different-sized dots and the flat areas of white and grey below. Still-visible pencil lines quiver with the trace of the artist’s hand. The image looms large in three-dimensional splendour: a smouldering totem to a brave new world.