Allen Jones

Allen Jones spent only one year at the Royal College, expelled by the authorities on some trivial excuse as an example to his fellow students, all of whom were regarded as somewhat troublesome and too independent in their thinking. The friendships that Jones formed at that time however, and the sense of involvement in the early and vital stages of a new movement, helped give him the determination to pursue the distinctive path that he was already marking out for himself.

His bold use of colour and strong formal sense were formed at an early age through his study of early European modernists such as Wassily Kandinsky and Robert Delaunay: painters, moreover, whose work existed on the boundary between figuration and abstraction. Although, his painting The Artist Thinks 1960 was one of the first canvases produced anywhere to be based so blatantly on the idea of a comic-strip ‘speech’ balloon, Jones’s identity as a Pop artist emerged only gradually in succeeding years.

It was not until 1962 that he began to concentrate on more contemporary subject matter, as in the series of shaped canvases inspired by London’s double-decker red buses, but even here his professed ambition to allude to movement through shape and colour had its origins in early Modernism, in this case Futurism. Jones’s natural inclination as an artist towards sensuousness and eroticism, especially apparent in the male/female fused figures of 1963, pushed him finally towards the rich fund of imagery of sexually motivated illustration.

The fetishistic image of female legs proposed in First Step 1966 and succeeding works dramatically announced Jones’s transformation into a full-blown Pop artist. The sexual frisson of such images and particularly of the painted fibreglass sculptures of 1969 seem in retrospect to define that brief and elusive period of license and ‘permissiveness’ represented by the term ‘swinging London’. The outcry against such images in the wake of the feminist movement during the 1970s may account in part for Jones’s return to a more formalized and abstracted figure style, but the sensuous dimensions of colour and the human figure remain his most pressing concerns. Since 1962 he has also been a prolific lithographer, finding in the medium a means of disseminating his work at its most characteristic, vibrant in colour and drawn with a relaxed and confident fluency.

Courtesy of Marco Livingstone