Carnaby Street, miniskirts, Twiggy and The Beatles. The Kinks, The Who and The Yardbirds.  Richard Lester, Hard Day’s Night and Julie Christie.  All very ‘fab’. All very ‘pop’. If I were to throw the names ‘Peter Blake’ and ‘Richard Hamilton’ into this list of ‘Swinging Englishness’, they would surely not seem out of place.  As synonymous with Sixties London as Andrew Loog Oldam, Terence Conran and Mary Quant,  British Pop Art is seen as the visual element to an essentially musical culture, with Peter Blake’s 1967 album cover for The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band L.P placing both him and his contemporaries at the pinnacle of pop.

There is, however, something wrong with all this; ‘fab’ they might have been, but in the case of Peter Blake and Richard Hamilton, it was ‘fab’ avant la letter, and nothing to do with ‘Swinging England’.  For the artists in questions – the ‘inventors’ of Pop Art – were born of a different generation, a different world, a different England.  Theirs was not the Britain which ‘invaded’ America mid-Sixties. Theirs was not the England of Biba and Blow Up .  And their London certainly didn’t ‘swing’.  Far from it.

So how (and why) did the work of Hamilton and Blake become ‘adopted’ by the following generation?  Fifteen years older than The Beatles, why was Blake chosen for the Sgt Pepper project?  Why did the targets, arrows and badges he produced on canvas mid-Fifties become the visual correspondent to Sixties music?  The deliciously satirical ‘POP!’ on the giant lollipop of Hamilton’s Just What Is It That Makes Modern Homes So Different, So Appealing? ( 1959) was – by mid-decade – duplicated on a million T-shirts, a million tea mugs.

In the decade which claimed not to ‘trust anyone over thirty’, why did youth culture turn to the imagery of two ‘pushing-forty’ post-war painters to make visual sense of their musical culture?  It is my intent to argue that it shouldn’t have. The work of Blake and Hamilton was born of irony, an irony that was ‘missed’ by the Youthquake generation of the following decade.  Misinterpreted as a ‘celebration of Englishness’, the visual elements of British Pop Art were seized upon by a nation who sought a visual correspondent to the new, national pride.  And by 1964, Britain had much to be proud of.  The cultural epicentre of the new demographics, the ‘baby-boom’ British were plentiful.  Wilson’s strong Labour government lent the necessary stability for economic growth, and with little unemployment, Britain’s youth had the expendable income with which to enjoy the cultural explosion, an explosion of which they all truly felt a part.

The Beatles had put England back on the map.  The Post Office Tower climbed skyward at one end of Tottenham Court Road – Centrepoint climbed skyward at the other.  Mary Quant had revolutionised the way women dressed, the way women felt – and the introduction of The Pill allowed them the freedom to feel a lot .  Designers such as Terence Conran devised a whole new way of living.  Based upon the idea that everything was (and should) be as instantly disposable (and replaceable) as a lover, Conran devised furniture and homeware made of plastic, cardboard, cheap Indian imports.  ‘In’ today, ‘out’ tomorrow – it really didn’t matter, not when you could buy a blow up chair for three shillings and sixpence at the newly opened Habitat.  Conran’s biggest ‘seller’ of 1964?  A white tea mug with a target motif – a motif favoured by Blake of the previous decade.

Certainly, Pop Art imagery a la Hamilton and Blake ‘worked’ as the visual element of ‘Swinging England’.  Never a ‘visual’ culture, the failure to latch upon a ‘look’ for Modern Britannia at the Festival of Britain (1952) went unnoticed until the cultural renaissance of the 1960s.  Embarrassed by their Fifties’ adoration of American youth culture, the young of the ‘60s wanted nothing to do with their colonial cousins.  We had our own music, our own fashions.  Who needed Frankie Valley now that we had Beatles?  And we wanted our own visual representation, a visual representation that would be utterly ‘British’, utterly ‘youthful’, utterly ours .

How convenient, then, to find British artists using imagery that ‘celebrated’ England – that waved The Union Jack.  The problem is that it didn’t;  The British Pop Art Movement, with Peter Blake at one end and Hamilton and The Independent Group at the other, were not only playing with an entirely different deck of cards, but an entirely different set of rules.  They weren’t even playing the same game as their Sixties’ counterparts.  Whilst ‘Swinging England’ shunned The States, British Pop Art embraced it.  And they embraced it with irony, an  irony that had as much to do with England as it did with America, but not in the way the Sixties understood it.

Before looking at the Art, we must first look at the ‘world’;  in terms of Hamilton and Blake, it is essential.  They were not (as has often been thought) ‘baby-boomers’.  Perhaps not old enough to be a Beatle’s ‘Dad’, they could pass as ‘uncles’, and definitely ‘teachers’.  Theirs was not a universe of miniskirts and ‘beat groups’.  Theirs was a world of ration books and powdered egg, the bleak, post-war Britain of bomb sites and bingo halls.  Whatever ‘youth culture’ there was based itself on an American template.  Slick-backed hair and ‘bobby socks’, ‘poodle skirts’ and flick-knives.  Sadly, it’s a long way from West Side Story to Depford High Street, and British ‘youth culture’ of the 1950s read as a tepid American ‘wannabe’.  Yes, we had a few ‘home-grown’ icons, but who were Cliff Richard and Helen Shapiro but Elvis Presley and Connie Francis with grammar school accents?

Elvis Presley and Cliff Richard: Spot the Difference.

The only thing we had of our ‘own’ were films.  The period of ‘The Angry Young Man’, British cinema had something of a revolution in the Fifties, the ‘Kitchen Sink Drama’ giving forth a plethora of films which were strikingly ‘new’ – and bleakly depressing.  More ‘drab’ than ‘fab’, films such as Saturday Night, Sunday Morning and Room at the Top were reflection of the post-war gloom.  Actresses donned head-scarves and pushed prams along dirty, Salford streets  -   a far cry from Doris Day playing ‘mom’ in huge and spanking-new American kitchens. 

The dominant post-war culture was, by the mid-Fifties, American culture – and it was a ‘new’ culture.  Shiny big cars, washing machines, convenience foods and Elvis Presley.  America saw a post-war economic growth which gave birth to a frenzied consumerism.  And it was a consumerism of which the British desperately wanted to be part.  Still rationed, and with the sad reminders of the Blitz all around them, it is not surprising to find the British somewhat resentful of their American counterparts.  After all, America had not been bombed.  America had not been rationed.  WWII was a ‘home front’ war for the British; black-out curtains and air-ride sirens.  America had not been subjected to that, yet was seeming ‘taking credit’ for winning the war in Europe.  Military history aside, by the mid 1950s, America seemed like the ‘all round winners’, whilst Britain – the co-victors – was living the life of a ‘defeated nation’.  And it didn’t want to.  Britain wanted the big, shiny cars and the washing machines.  The introduction of Higher Purchase (the legendary ‘H.P’ which was to wreck so many lives) meant that, for just a few shillings a week, Mrs Doris Smith of Stepney Green could own a washing machine.  But where was she going to put her ‘top loader’?  And what use was Mrs Jones’s vacuum cleaner when all she had were Lyno floors?

All these questions – and more – were at the heart of British Pop Art, the ‘founding fathers’ of the movement the painters and critics who created The Independent Group.  The I.G was a forum comprised of artists and writers with often varying opinions, the one unifying force being an interest in technology, consumerism and contemporary Americana.  There was no real ‘group identity’ (no manifestos were written, no theory published), but via a series of discussions, the I.G’s key players (artists Richard Hamilton and lecturer Lawrence Alloway) eventually honed in on what the I.G meant – at least what it meant to them .  ‘If’, stated Hamilton, ‘there was one binding spirit amongst the people at the Independent Group, it was a distaste for Herbert Read’s attitudes’. Although president of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Read’s belief that the artist ‘was a leader in society, aware of eternal truths and detached from the lower order of daily existence’ ran contrary to the I.G’s belief that Life should not be removed from Art, with the artist as merely the ‘conducting agent’ running between the two.

Having no time for automatism, spiritualism, existentialism  and metaphysics, the young, British artists fiercely disliked Abstract Expressionism and would have happily substituted the ‘P’ for a ‘B’ in ‘Pollock’ and left it at that!  There is, after all, a big difference between; ‘I Am Nature’ and ‘I Like Elvis’.  1956’s Abstract Expressionist show at The Tate fuelled their desire to fuse Life and Art in increasingly bolder forms.  Finding their ‘guru’ in the form of artist Eduardo Paolozzi, whose collaged images of magazine photographs and packaging design addressed the I.G’s ‘Life as Art’ standpoint (Paolozzi was the guest and subject of an I.G seminar in 1952), the group eventually found the form in which their philosophy would manifest, the culmination of their endless discussions being what Alloway describes as ‘a celebrated incident in English art’, the This Is Tomorrow exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery (1956).

This Is Tomorrow acted as something for a springboard for Richard Hamilton, his first major oeuvre  seen today as ‘the’ seminal work of British Pop Art. Poking ironic fun at both American and Britain’s obsession with America,  Just What Is It That Makes Modern Homes That Makes Them So Comfortable, So Appealing is a mouthful of a title – and an eyeful of a collage.

Just What Is It…? (1956) is a small collage  (26 x 25 cm) which sees Hamilton pasting images culled from magazines, books and advertisements. ‘Today’s Home’ is something of ‘cheerful nightmare’;  a living room with a parquet and lino floor has a ‘planet’ for the ceiling, a planet which hovers above the cream and yellow walls.  To the left of the room, there is a large window with a view of a movie house.  We see that the current film advertised is The Jazz Singer, this reference to the first ‘talkie’ a probable allusion to the dominance of Hollywood on popular culture.   To the left of the window, a flight of stairs leading to a door are being vacuumed by a lady in a fashionable red dress.  The long chord of the Hoover stretces to the top step – far further than ‘ordinary cleaners’, which the advertising arrow tells us ‘only go this far’. Cropped at the bottom left of the collage we find a very modern and comfortable looking red armchair, a newspaper folded out across the arm; the media were as responsible for the explosion in consumerism as anyone, and this subtle nod towards one kind of media is mirrored at a direct angle by the television to the right of the picture plane.  The screen shows a glamorous lady speaking on the telephone, this ‘double technology’ of television and telephone echoing the I.G’s interest in technology and mass communication.

Modern life viewed by Richard Hamilton.

Above the television there hangs a framed portrait of a nineteenth-century gentleman who, in his stiff collar, stares out at the chaotic, modern scene with what we can’t help but imagine is despair.  Beside his portrait, there hangs the cover of a cheap magazine; Young Romance promises fifty-two pages of ‘original love and romance’ – and all for only 10 cents.  A bargain by anyone’s standards.

A table lamp in the corner of the room sports the Ford Auto insignia, Hamilton clearly addressing the ‘big car’ phenomenon of post-war America, as well as the assembly-line mass production to which the I.G were so fascinated.   A huge tin of name-brand ham sits atop a coffee table, ‘convenience foods’ and ease of consumption playfully addressed by Hamilton ‘displaying’ the ham as if it were an ornament or a sculpture.  On the parquet flooring, there rests a reel-to-reel tape deck, an obvious reference to the duplication, repetition and replication of mass production.

Two figures are found in the room; perfectly perched on a green settee, we find a seductively posed stripper wearing a sunhat (seemingly culled from another image) and sequined tassels concealing her nipples.  Yet the ‘star’ of the collage is undoubtedly the handsome muscle man standing to the left-centre of the picture plane.  Muscles flexed for competition, he stares at us directly, his right arm clutching an enormous red lollipop.  Although it is a ‘Tootsie Pop’, it is the word ‘Pop’ which screams at us, the yellow of the word highlighted by the red of the wrapper.

Chromatically, Just What Is It…? is chiefly comprised of black, white and cream, the touches of red leading our eye through the canvas; the red on the Ford insignia leads us to the red of Young Romance. This in turn leads us to the tin of ham, and henceforth to the red lollipop, red chair and red dress of the vacuuming lady.  Although we are led through the space by the use of red, the canvas is not collated with colour; it is perspective which holds it all together.  Every element in Hamilton’s work is ‘the right size’, this perspectival unity allowing the viewer the ability to read the disparate elements as a ‘whole’, to make ‘sense’ of the absolutely nonsensical  scene.  By this method, Hamilton was asking a far greater question; how do we make sense of a world where so many disparate images – products, movies, music, gadgets, magazines – are constantly thrown at us.

Just What Is It That Makes Modern Homes so Different, so Appealing?  addressed all the subjects the I.G held dear; space, women, food, history, appliances,  consumerism, gadgets and appliances.  Mass media has ‘invaded’, and Hamilton’s collage is testimony to this assault.  Using materials drawn from his subject (the cut-out magazine advertisements and photographs), Hamilton’s medium is in itself as much a part of the consumer culture he so obviously hoped the finished piece would encompass. His intent was not to turn ‘low art’  into ‘High Art’, for to do so would be to acknowledge a ‘difference’.  Just What Is It…? flips traditional hierarchy on the head.  There is no difference between ‘High Art’ and ‘low art’, Hamilton’s oeuvre as ‘low’ as the vacuum cleaner advertisement is ‘high’, the interdependence of Life and Art polarised this wonderful – and wonderfully playful – collage.

The irony is his work is not to be found in the collage but in the title. Just What Is It That Makes Modern Homes so Different, so Appealing? is a joke unto itself.   Seemingly drawn from a ‘header’ in a Sunday supplement or glossy magazine, the title alone pokes fun at the slick journalistic jargon which ‘sounded good’ but meant very little.  However, irony is taken a step further when we place the title next to the collage; the ‘modern home’ of Hamilton is certainly ‘different’, but it is far from ‘appealing’.  A cluttered nightmare of disparate images which – although connected – are somehow misplaced in the small, cramped room.  Although the images are drawn from American mass consumerism, we nevertheless come away with the feeling that this is a British living room we’re seeing, a British living room filled with an over-blown Americana it can little afford.  There’s no room for it.  It doesn’t ‘fit’.  The ‘spend-spend-spend’ philosophy of Higher Purchase no doubt found many British homes filled to the brim with the gadgets and appliances found in Hamilton’s work, the uncomfortable displacement of Just What Is It…? addressing the British obsession with America as much as America itself .

Hommage à Chrysler Corp (1957, metal foil and oil on wood) finds Hamilton returning to the theme of consumerism with a more painterly approach, the irony again to be found in the title.  Hommage finds a fragmented image of a car, a Chrysler, seemingly 'melting' over the lower half of the picture plane.  Worked in soft pinks and gentle yellow, the bumper is collaged with metal foil.  To the left of the picture plane, we find a vertical beige column, echoed by a horizontal black bar at the top right of the piece.   Above the car, we see a pair of bright red female lips; Hamilton is clearly evoking the manner in which car advertisements often pair luxury vehicles with sexy women.  By drawing on seemingly 'cheap' advertising ploys and working them into a 'painterly' end product, Hamilton states that he was attempting 'to come to terms with the engagement with life at a banal level without in any way relinquishing a commitment to fine art.

The irony is of course in the title; Homage to the Chrysler Corp would hold little irony; it's in English.  Hommage à Chrysler Corp, on the other hand, is a subtle reminder of America's influence on Europe, whose post-war economy generally prohibiting the purchase of imported American cars.  The 'hommage' paid is to an envious obsession, and not - as it might first appear - to the vehicle itself.

$he of 1959 (oil, cellulose and collage on wood) finds Hamilton retaining this painterly approach, and again, we find him combining disparate elements from popular culture, their appearance together in one piece imbuing the work with a narrative, a 'message'.

Painted in 'feminine' chroma (light pink, mauve and creamy-cream), the piece is a seeming hotchpotch of elements drawn from glossy magazines; a woman's headless silhouette, a toaster, a toilet seat and a refrigerator at first seem to bare little relationship to each other.  It is only when we remember the title that we find the pieces falling into place.  $he   is the 'everywoman'  that Madison Avenue tries to attract, the 'advertising executives' image of womankind.  Made up of nothing more than consumerist desire, the $he of the title inhabits a world of gadgets and appliances, the dollar sign in the title reducing an entire gender to that of a 'target group', the headless torso stripping Woman of individuality - of identity.

Although a beautiful painting, $he is a bitterly caustic commentary upon consumerism's need to reduce individuals to nothing more than part of a collective desire - and that desire is to buy .

The consumerisation of the individual is a constant in Hamilton's early work, yet as late as 1965 we find him returning to this theme.  My Marilyn (oil and collaged photo on board) uses multiple images of Marilyn Monroe, each marked with the actress's own hand (they had been part of a contact sheet the star herself had edited.)  The mosaic image holds a dozen photographs, many negated by the crosses Marilyn herself scrawled across those she rejected.  This 'human touch' is poignant; the multiple and - importantly - iconic images reinforce the multiplicity and reproductive quality of post-war consumerism, a social phenomenon with the power to turn an individual into a 'marketable product'.  And we can all own this product.  The title, again, proves the key; My Marilyn .  Reproduced a million times, we can all 'own' Marilyn, and by 'displaying' photographs the star herself rejected, is Hamilton telling us that the one person who doesn't 'own' Marilyn is Marilyn herself?

My Marilyn, 1965 – Richard Hamilton.  Just whose Marilyn is she?

Although Richard Hamilton was undoubtedly at the forefront of British Pop Art, it was painter Peter Blake who unintentionally proved the most troublesome perpetrator vis-à-vis the movement’s inclusion in the 'Swinging Sixties'.

Born in Dartford, Kent, Peter Blake studied – and later taught – at the both St. Martin’s and The Royal Academy, Blake was not part of the Independent Group, and his formal training is forever suggested in his oeuvre.  Firmly rooted in the British tradition of figurative art, his post-war work saw a bittersweet marriage of High Art and Low Culture.  Blake’s allegiance to American popular culture differs from that of Hamilton; whereas the latter artists focussed upon the hard-biting consumerism of Madison Avenue, Blake’s interests were centred more upon American youth culture, with figures such as Elvis Presley and Chubby Checker taking centre stage.

His gift for finding the ‘big picture’ in ‘small doses’ lends his work a ‘magpie’ touch; it’s the ‘bits and bobs’ which make up his oeuvre that engage the viewer eye far more than the overall composition or painterly quality.  ABC Minors (1955, oil on board) was his first major work, the disquieting effect of this very strange painting born of the irony so key to Blake’s methods; his adherence to traditional 'painterly' techniques and the constant dichotomy between style and subject.

ABC Minors was the name of a film club. The Odeon Cinema chain’s greatest competition, the ABC ran a Saturday morning movie club for children – ‘ABC Minors’ – which aired the American serialized Westerns and British ‘nature films’ aimed at youngsters. With their cartons of Kiora and soggy paper cup of ice-cream, British children would sit on the worn velvet seats of their local ‘ABC’ in the company of Roy Rogers, Lassie and Zorro.

ABC Minors captures a moment of childhood, a moment of ‘Englishness’. But this ‘Englishness’ is given by America  -  by the Hollywood films the two little boys in the painting are either on their way to see, or (as I suspect) from which they are returning.  As British film of the period offered little to interest pre-pubescent boys (the wonderful Ealing comedies and the ‘Kitchen Sink’ dramas were aimed at adults), it is likely that Blake’s minors were returning from a high-action Hollywood blockbuster, Alan Ladd or Burt Lancaster swashbuckling their way through an environment far removed from the little terraced houses to which the boys might be returning.

The ABC Cinema in Beckenham, photographed in the late 1950s.

The ‘minors’ are standing in a field, the mottled green horizon at their shoulders, the sky overhead a dismal light grey.  Cropped at the ankles, the two boys stand almost flush to the picture plane, their hands in their pockets as they gaze - not at us - but through us, absent-mindedly staring at nothing at all.  Or so it seems; far from animated, the two figures seem bored, displaced, their enormous heads too large for their pre-pubescent bodies, their spindly legs painted in such a way as to 'bleed' into the background canvas. Blake is leaving us in no doubt whatsoever as to medium; this is paint, and he wants us to know it.

Far from rosy-cheeked, the ABC Minors have a greyish, pallid complexion, the strict frontality of Blake's composition thrusting these strange faces to the forefront of the picture. The boys are almost 'too close for comfort', and yet their is a tremendous sympathy in Blake's handling of subject; the little boys are trying very hard to be 'grown' up, but their school uniforms and badge-laden lapels betray their juvenile innocence.

Certainly, Blake is addressing directly those elements which so fascinate the I.G (cinema, youth and reproductive duplicity; there are, after all, two schoolboys, physically almost identical.) Yet Blake's firm grounding in traditional, painterly techniques puts him intentionally 'at odds' with his subject matter, and the irony in Blake is born of this intentional dichotomy.

On The Balcony, Blake’s melancholy potpourri of pop imagery and figurative flatness.

On The Balcony takes this British obsession with traditional, figurative art and adds an even greater element of 'flatness', reminding us once again of Blake's ironic genius.

On the Balcony (1955-57) is an eclectic potpourri of  pop iconography.  Painted with an absolute ‘flatness’, Blake places his subjects on a baize green background.  It could be a carpet, it could be grass.  It is impossible to tell.  Four figures sit on what seems to be a park bench.  The figure on the right is a  schoolboy.  His face is long and his eyes wide.  He seems ‘surprised’, but not ‘dismayed’.  It is as if he has been captured off-guard by a ‘Box Brownie’ camera.  As in with the other figures in On the Balcony,  his head seems to large for his body, his tiny hands clutching another picture, a picture which is difficult to identify but seems to be a reproduction of an Old Master. Pinned onto his v-neck regulation school uniform jumper, we find another picture; a black and white ‘photograph’ of  a young man with black hair, possibly a popular crooner of the day, possibly not.

Sitting next to him on the bench, arms folded in adolescent nonchalance, we see another male figure, his right knee crossed over his left to reveal his upturned jeans, white socks and red plimsolls.  He is wearing a gaudy tie, a picture of a pin-up girl printed across it.  He wears a badge on his short-sleeved shirt, but it is impossible to make out what it actually says.  On his head, he seems to wear a little blue and yellow cap.  His face, however, is entirely obscured by the front cover of Life magazine. The cover shows a picture of Princess Margaret Rose wearing an off-the-shoulder white gown with long, white gloves.  She is standing on a balcony.

The third figure on the bench is a girl.  She too has her arms folded. She too wears what appears to be a school uniform; her starched, white collar, long, red sleeves and brown knee socks were seen on a million British school girls of the 1950s.  Her dark hair is cut short, her expression empty and rather dour; it is the face of a young woman and not, in fact, of a little girl.  The body of her dress is crammed with badges of different colours, different shapes, different allegiances.  In her mouth, there dangles a cigarette. Is she a child ‘old beyond her years’, weathered by the bleak and hopeless life that she is living? Or is she an adult, an adult who for some reason unknown is wearing a schoolgirl’s dress and the badges of ‘youth’?

Between the girl and the fellow in the cheeky tie, we find five other pictures.  The largest is framed in gold and appears to be some sort of Abstract Expressionist rendering.  Pinned to the back of the bench is another picture, impossible to decipher.  Resting on the seat is what seems to be another painting of the Abstract Expressionist school – and next to that, a ‘photograph’ of a little girl in a pink, party dress.

Running between the two figures is a long, narrow ‘photo’ of The Royal Family on the balcony of Buckingham Palace.  Ostensibly painted in meticulous detail from an actual photograph, the juxtaposition of New York Abstract Expressionism with a picture of The Royal Family – that absolute symbol of ‘Englishness’ – is interesting to say the least.

To the left of the ‘schoolgirl’ there sits another young man. Far more ‘hep’ than his compatriots, he has a ‘rocker’ hair-cut and wears steel-rimmed shades, the swarthy look of his stubbly face making it impossible to age him.  He wears a yellow shirt and striped tie, and – predictably – the lapel of his jacket is covered in badges.  The most striking element of this figure is the picture Blake has placed in his hands; it is a gilt-framed reproduction of Manet’s balcony scene. Manet – the ‘father of Modernism’, is found in a print which rests on the knees of a character who - had he really existed - would probably be unaware of who Manet was, let alone of what he painted.

On the ground in front of the figures on the bench we find more pictures, more photographs.  We also find a little table overflowing with items drawn from popular culture; a deck of cards, a toy flag, a bar of soap   - the ‘odds n’ ends’ one could always find at the newsagents on the corner or at  a Butlin’s gift shop.

With an absolute disregard of both gravity and perspectival space, Blake has placed a little table above the seated figures on the bench.  We find even more pictures pinned to the wooden surface, as well as a loan photo which has seemingly fallen to the floor.  Atop the table we find the pink-socked figure of a little girl in an A-line dress, but (as with the rest of the canvas) she is cropped, and we have no idea what she looks like from above the thigh.  It is probably just as well; there is a spirit bottle on the table, and underage drinking is not a pretty sight.

The rest of the canvas is peppered with stray cigarette cartons, comic books, magazines, the eclectic ‘junk yard’ of On The Balcony both arresting and disquieting.  It is genuinely impossible to find a central focal point, the eye constantly drawn from one element to another, never able to ‘settle’, never able to grasp what is actually going on in the painting.

On The Balcony takes this British obsession with the Figurative and the Painterly, adding an even greater element of ‘flatness’, which reminds us of the irony at play within Blake’s oeuvre.  By taking subject drawn from popular culture, Blake’s refusal to apply the techniques of ‘popular culture’ to his methods illustrates the irony at the heart of British Pop Art.  On The Balcony offered Blake a plethora of opportunity to use the techniques of modern,  consumerist culture; he could have easily collaged the Life cover and the photo of The Royals.  Had he collaged in the Manet, he would have added to the Duchampian tradition of questioning the veracity of reproductive art.  Pinning real badges onto the jackets of his stiff looking teenagers would have cleverly melded ‘life’ with art, adding both texture and playfulness.

Of course, had Blake used any of these techniques he would have stripped On The Balcony of its irony. To work with any ‘modern’ techniques would have been to invalidate the purpose; it was Britain’s embrace of American culture which Blake was discussing, not American culture itself .  And to make the joke ‘work’ – to make the irony ‘stick’ – he had to restrict himself to the very ‘English’ tradition of formal and figurative Art.

It doesn’t ‘sit’ comfortably; it is not a ‘happy marriage’. The quality of barren displacement of the schoolboys in ABC Minors, the stiff, unsmiling figures of On The Balcony seem ‘at odds’ with both themselves and their surroundings, Blake’s brilliant paring of ‘traditional with’ ‘pop’ lending his paintings a sense of disenfranchisement. And it’s all very English – and it’s all very sad. Self Portrait with Badges (1961, oil on canvas) finds Blake depicting himself as a teenager from On The Balcony, his over-sized head to large for his adolescent’s body. At the centre of the canvas and close to the picture plane, Blake stands stiffly, one hand in his pocket, as he stares at the viewer with absolute blankness. As with ABC Minors, the facture is handled in a heightened painterly fashion, the left food of his self-portrait literally ‘smudging’ into the green grass of the background.  Behind the figure, we see a wooden fence with trees beyond, each worked with a rough, expressive hand.

Far more compelling than Blake’s bearded face are the badges on his denim jacket and the Elvis fanzine clutched in his left hand.  Blake’s choice of colour throughout the canvas is interesting; the dull, muted greens of the trees and grass and the washed-out, pallid skin tones lie in sharp contrast to the dazzling reds, whites and blues of the badges and the fanzine.  In short, it is the badges and fanzine Blake wishes us to ‘notice’, his allegiance to popular culture somehow creating the identity of the man himself.

By the end of the decade and the beginning of the next, Blake was drawing more and more from the culture of American pop music.  Although he personally preferred jazz, he was nevertheless enamoured by the ‘legend’ of Elvis Presley and Chubby Checker, taking images of the stars and placing them in settings beyond their natural context.  Gotta Girl (oil on board, 1961) sees Blake playing with the split between ‘real’ and ‘ideal’.  The upper part of the board is collaged with photographs of famous male pop stars of the day, each lined up to show their physical similarities; all have dark, quiffed hair, all wear a typical ‘press release’ smile.  At the far left of this strip of celebrity, Blake has collaged a ‘real’ record; it is the Gotta Girl of the title, as performed by The Four Preps.  The lower part of the panel is made up of blue, red and white chevrons. Wooden and weather-beaten, the lower panel seems stolen from a stall at the end of Blackpool pier, Blake’s interest in craftsmanship allowing for this subtle fusion of ‘slick’ American pop culture with a somewhat decaying ‘holiday camp’ feel of a cold, British summer.

1962’s Elvis Mirror (collage and oil on board) finds Blake adhering to a similar format;  vertical in composition, a weathered, wooden board is topped with a collaged photograph of Elvis Presley.  Below, a paint smeared mirror adds a ‘double-edged’ realism; not only is it a ‘real’ mirror, but it reflects the world beyond the painting painting, thus fusing Life with Art in true British Pop Art style.  Below the mirror, there is a sharp, wooden divide – below that, a quarter of a target.  Taken as a whole, Elvis Mirror seems like a rock n’ roll guillotine, Elvis slicing his way through the far older – and decaying – British culture.

The First Real Target of 1961 (collage on wood) is as the title suggests; a target. Worked in the traditional red, blue and black chroma, the composition is offset by a black, horizontal bar at the top of the picture plane over which Blake had affixed the title.  In cut-out letters, we see that this is The First Real Target, and one can't help but wonder if this might be a 'cryptic reference to Jasper Johns' targets of the late 1950s, famous by 1961'. Visually attractive, their is little in Target to warrant further analysis, suffice to say that it is an important piece vis-à-vis Blake's inclusion as a figure of the 'Swinging Sixties'. The visual elements of Blake’s work were seized upon by Paul McCartney, who – at Robert Fraser’s suggestion – decided to hire a ‘real’ artist to design the cover of 1967’s Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band . The album was produced at the height of British ‘Sixties Smugness’ and was the quintessential celebration of ‘Englishness’, both past and present.  With songs such as ‘Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite’ and ‘Rita Meter Maid’, Sgt Pepper strove to imbue contemporary pop culture with a nostalgic sense of self drawn from Britain’s ‘golden age’.  This nostalgia is evident in the work of Blake, but whereas Blake was working from a sense of melancholy, The Beatles were working from a sense of celebration.

Using techniques initialised by Hamilton, the album cover is entirely collaged, featuring dozens of perspectivally correct photographs of nineteenth and twentieth century cultural icons; Marilyn Monroe, Johnny Weismuller, William Burroughs, Karl Marx, Diana Dors  and Oscar Wilde to name but a few.  Although the album cover owes more to Hamilton, the inner sleeve is pure Blake.  Featuring a cut-out handlebar moustache, a Victorian cavalryman and – of course – a badge, the inner sleeve of Sgt Pepper shows Blake at his quirky best. Yet whereas the intent was doubtlessly drawn from the artist’s melancholia, the ‘youthquake’ generation embraced these yesteryear graphics and – with no sense of irony – saw Blake’s work as a joyful ‘harking back’ to the last time Britain ruled the waves.

As we have seen, both Hamilton and Blake were dealing using irony as a medium alongside glue, paint and scissors.  Their work may have borrowed from America, but it was a commentary upon England; in Hamilton's case, this commentary was caustic, in Blake's, it was sad and nostalgic.  In both cases, it was born of a post-war malaise brought about by America's psychological domination of an economically ravaged British culture, a culture far removed from Carnaby Street and The Beatles.

So how then did Hamilton and Blake become synonymous with 'Swinging England?' I stated earlier that Blake was the unintentional culprit in this misallocation, his design for the Beatle's Sgt Pepper L.P giving rise to the myth that he (and others) were contemporaries of the 'Fab Four', with British Pop Art the visual element to the decade which 'swung'.   However, even before Sgt Pepper, elements drawn from Blake and Hamilton were 'borrowed' from 'high art' to act as visual signifiers for 'pop culture'.  The 'mod' movement used targets and arrows for group identification, with Union Jacks found on everything from coffee mugs to shopping bags.  The collage techniques used by Hamilton in the previous decade were 'rediscovered', applied to album covers and book jackets  - and labelled 'pop art'.

The problem is that of intent; whereas Hamilton and Blake were working from an irony born of the 'tragic' state of post-war Britain, by the mid 1960s, the socio-economic landscape of the country had changed dramatically - and that change was for the better.  The Beatles were 'international', Carnaby Street was the heart of world fashion, British cinema went 'avant-garde'  and London seemed the centre of the universe.  As the Roger Miller song went; 'England swings like a pendulum do' – and  by the middle of the Sixties, it certainly did.  The problem was how to find a visual identity for an essentially musical culture, and that visual identity was found - ironically enough - in the past, in Britain's 'other' great periods; Victorian, Edwardian and the 1920s.

By the end of the Sixties, even the 1940s were being visually rehashed, with stores like Biba introducing a 'Land Girls' range of shoulder padded, floral print dresses.  The nostalgia used by Blake to lament the disintegration of English culture in favour of American was suddenly being used to celebrate Englishness itself.  Union Jacks were to be found everywhere; designer Paul Clark's range of 'Buy British' coffee mugs with printed targets and Union Jacks the biggest selling crockery of 1965.[10]  Paper dresses with huge images of Elvis and Marilyn Monroe were manufactured by a company called 'Poster Dresses' and continually sold out.  1965 saw the introduction of Chips with Everything, a chain of youth-based restaurants sporting 'cheesy' magazine covers and record sleeves on the walls.

In short, everything we find in the work of Hamilton and Blake resurfaced by mid-decade, but far from being caustic (as in Hamilton) or melancholy (a la Blake), these visual signifier were seen as a 'celebration' of all that was British, all that was 'youthful', all that was 'pop', eventually usurping the initial intent of British Pop Art and turning it into something of its own; something 'fab'. In conclusion, Just What Was It That Made British Pop Art So Different, So Appealing?   The answer is; 'irony', an irony which was born of the War and lost with the Twist, but which - with forty years hindsight - can now be disentangled from its Sixties' misappropriation and enjoyed for what it was; an ironic homage to an England that no longer existed – and in reality, probably never did.

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Bibliography.
• Alloway, Lawrence, “The Development of British Pop Art”, Pop Art, Lippard, Lucy (ed.), Thames and Hudson, London, 1966.
• Arnason, H.H, A History of Modern Art, Thames and Hudson, New York, 1998.
• Compton, Michael, Movements in Modern Art, Hamlyn House, London, 1970.
• Fiell, Charlotte and Christopher (eds.), 60s Decorative Art, Taschen, Cologne, 2000.
• Mardoff, Steven, Pop Art: A Critical History, University of California Press, L.A, 1997.
• Miles, Barry, Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now, Vintage Press, London, 1997.
• Whiteley, Nicholas, Pop Design: Modernism to Mod, The Design Council, London, 1987.