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拍品专文
Aged just 20 when he began his postgraduate studies at the Royal College of Art in London, at least two years younger than any of the remarkable intake that included David Hockney, R. B. Kitaj, Allen Jones and Derek Boshier, Peter Phillips (born 1939) was the most precocious of all these artists in defining a critical moment in the early history of Pop Art in Britain before the term itself had gained general currency. Having left school early and begun his artistic training at the age of just 16, he was quick to pick up the many technical skills offered to him by this academic grounding at Birmingham College of Art at a time when such manual expertise was still encouraged rather than frowned upon as old-fashioned. At the RCA he found himself in the company of like-minded ambitious young painters engaged with contemporary culture who nevertheless took inspiration also from literature and political history (R. B. Kitaj), poetry (David Hockney), philosophy (Allen Jones) and semiology (Derek Boshier). Largely ignoring such intellectual tendencies, Phillips instead, like the previous graduate he befriended – Peter Blake, nine years his senior and a notable pioneer of Pop Art – unselfconsciously sought instead to reflect very directly the enthusiasms for the emerging teenage popular culture that he embraced in his everyday life as much as in his art. These included motorcycles and cars, cinema, amusement arcades and the nascent rock’n’roll music that proved a soundtrack to the lives of this generation brought up after the austerity of the immediate postwar years. The footage filmed in 1961 and screened in February 1962 as part of the BBC TV programme Pop Goes the Easel, directed by Ken Russell before he gained a reputation as one of the great film directors of his time, shows Phillips trailing around the very locations that provided the imagery embedded in his early paintings. That he featured there in the company of just three other artists whose individual voices and themes attracted Russell’s attention - Blake, Boshier and Pauline Boty – pays tribute to his originality and ambition.
Phillips gained early attention while still a student at the Young Contemporaries exhibitions in early 1961 and early 1962 and was much in demand by museums by the time he left for New York on a Harkness Fellowship in 1964. He ruefully recalled a decade later that he was unable as a student to respond to some of the many requests to participate in major group exhibitions because he spent so long refining each of his large paintings: his output at the time was just five or so of these a year, making the works he produced between 1960 and 1963 among his rarest and most sought after.
Motorpsycho/Ace was owned from 1971 by the highly respected Italian art critic, curator and art historian Enrico Crispolti, who published the first in-depth monographic study on Phillips’s work in 1977. It is a bold and striking example of the graphically arresting and colourful paintings that Phillips made in this critical early stage of his career. That he worked on such a large scale at a time when it was rare for British artists to do so, and with such contemporary and popular imagery, placed him closer to the work of his older American Pop Art counterparts such as James Rosenquist (born 1933) or Tom Wesselmann (born 1931) than to that of his friends in London. Indeed, the fact that he favoured such large dimensions and current imagery from outside the fine art tradition made life uncomfortable for him at the RCA, and in autumn 1961 he had transferred from the Painting School to the Television School so that he could continue making his swaggering pictures away from the prying eyes of the painting tutors.
For all its apparent simplicity, this particular painting encompasses many layers of his youthful enthusiasms including photography and cinema (in the photo-realistically hand-rendered black-and-white band near the top), playing cards (the Ace motif from the club suite of a standard pack) and Americana (in the form of a native American chief transferred to the painted surface in the form of a store-bought printed decal). These were recurrent motifs in Phillips’s paintings at the time, and consciously so as a way of creating a personal iconography, as Jasper Johns had done in the late 1950s with his paintings of targets or the American flag. The same Indian chief appears prominently in Tribal 1 x 4 1962, this time painted by hand and on a much larger scale, accompanied by four identical images of speeding motorcycles. Playing cards, which had featured also as motifs in paintings by Hockney and before him by the American Larry Rivers were useful to Phillips both for their flatness and as signs of the ludic quality of his work, which encouraged the playful engagement of the spectator; in Running Flush 1962 he features a set of five cards in a fan formation, as if laid triumphantly on the table by a poker player with a winning hand.
It is tempting to see the shrieking mouth in the grisaille panel as a reference to the terrified look on the face of Janet Leigh in the notorious shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s recently released psychological thriller Psycho, first screened in the UK on 4 August 1960. As Phillips used Motorpsycho as the first part of the title of three other paintings in the same year – Motorpsycho/Go, Motorpsycho/Tiger and Motorpsycho/Club Tiger – without including a similarly cinematic image, this can only be speculation. There seems to be no precedent for the use of the term ‘motorpsycho’, but it certainly had an afterlife, though later appearances may be coincidental: it may be that Phillips was not alone in thinking up this wordplay. Intriguingly, Motorpsycho was later used by Russ Meyer as the title of his 1965 action film, centred on a violent motorcycle gang, and in 1964 Bob Dylan released a song titled ‘Motorpsycho Nightmare’, which even includes a reference to the shower scene in Hitchcock’s film:
There stood Rita
Lookin’ just like Tony Perkins
She said, “Would you like to take a shower?
I’ll show you up to the door”
I said, “Oh, no! no!
I’ve been through this before”
The patterns of diagonal stripes in alternating colours that appear at the top and bottom, similar to those used at the time by Blake, relate to the signs indicating danger displayed on roads or on the backs of commercial vehicles: a useful warning, in the context of the painting, that the artist was inviting the viewer to accompany him into unknown and possibly dangerous territory. In the title Phillips explicitly identifies himself as one of the ‘ton-up boys’, the devotees of the sexy motorcycles recently made famous by Marlon Brando in the 1951 crime film The Wild One as a symbol of youthful rebellion and the outlaw biker life. The presence of the decal – an object commonly used at the time as decoration on motorcycles, cars and leather jackets – subtly seals and reinforces the power of the image as evidence of Phillips’s membership of his chosen tribe.
MARCO LIVINGSTONE
Phillips gained early attention while still a student at the Young Contemporaries exhibitions in early 1961 and early 1962 and was much in demand by museums by the time he left for New York on a Harkness Fellowship in 1964. He ruefully recalled a decade later that he was unable as a student to respond to some of the many requests to participate in major group exhibitions because he spent so long refining each of his large paintings: his output at the time was just five or so of these a year, making the works he produced between 1960 and 1963 among his rarest and most sought after.
Motorpsycho/Ace was owned from 1971 by the highly respected Italian art critic, curator and art historian Enrico Crispolti, who published the first in-depth monographic study on Phillips’s work in 1977. It is a bold and striking example of the graphically arresting and colourful paintings that Phillips made in this critical early stage of his career. That he worked on such a large scale at a time when it was rare for British artists to do so, and with such contemporary and popular imagery, placed him closer to the work of his older American Pop Art counterparts such as James Rosenquist (born 1933) or Tom Wesselmann (born 1931) than to that of his friends in London. Indeed, the fact that he favoured such large dimensions and current imagery from outside the fine art tradition made life uncomfortable for him at the RCA, and in autumn 1961 he had transferred from the Painting School to the Television School so that he could continue making his swaggering pictures away from the prying eyes of the painting tutors.
For all its apparent simplicity, this particular painting encompasses many layers of his youthful enthusiasms including photography and cinema (in the photo-realistically hand-rendered black-and-white band near the top), playing cards (the Ace motif from the club suite of a standard pack) and Americana (in the form of a native American chief transferred to the painted surface in the form of a store-bought printed decal). These were recurrent motifs in Phillips’s paintings at the time, and consciously so as a way of creating a personal iconography, as Jasper Johns had done in the late 1950s with his paintings of targets or the American flag. The same Indian chief appears prominently in Tribal 1 x 4 1962, this time painted by hand and on a much larger scale, accompanied by four identical images of speeding motorcycles. Playing cards, which had featured also as motifs in paintings by Hockney and before him by the American Larry Rivers were useful to Phillips both for their flatness and as signs of the ludic quality of his work, which encouraged the playful engagement of the spectator; in Running Flush 1962 he features a set of five cards in a fan formation, as if laid triumphantly on the table by a poker player with a winning hand.
It is tempting to see the shrieking mouth in the grisaille panel as a reference to the terrified look on the face of Janet Leigh in the notorious shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s recently released psychological thriller Psycho, first screened in the UK on 4 August 1960. As Phillips used Motorpsycho as the first part of the title of three other paintings in the same year – Motorpsycho/Go, Motorpsycho/Tiger and Motorpsycho/Club Tiger – without including a similarly cinematic image, this can only be speculation. There seems to be no precedent for the use of the term ‘motorpsycho’, but it certainly had an afterlife, though later appearances may be coincidental: it may be that Phillips was not alone in thinking up this wordplay. Intriguingly, Motorpsycho was later used by Russ Meyer as the title of his 1965 action film, centred on a violent motorcycle gang, and in 1964 Bob Dylan released a song titled ‘Motorpsycho Nightmare’, which even includes a reference to the shower scene in Hitchcock’s film:
There stood Rita
Lookin’ just like Tony Perkins
She said, “Would you like to take a shower?
I’ll show you up to the door”
I said, “Oh, no! no!
I’ve been through this before”
The patterns of diagonal stripes in alternating colours that appear at the top and bottom, similar to those used at the time by Blake, relate to the signs indicating danger displayed on roads or on the backs of commercial vehicles: a useful warning, in the context of the painting, that the artist was inviting the viewer to accompany him into unknown and possibly dangerous territory. In the title Phillips explicitly identifies himself as one of the ‘ton-up boys’, the devotees of the sexy motorcycles recently made famous by Marlon Brando in the 1951 crime film The Wild One as a symbol of youthful rebellion and the outlaw biker life. The presence of the decal – an object commonly used at the time as decoration on motorcycles, cars and leather jackets – subtly seals and reinforces the power of the image as evidence of Phillips’s membership of his chosen tribe.
MARCO LIVINGSTONE