Peter Phillips, Who Was at the British Pop Art Frontier, Dies at 86

New York Times

7 days ago

Peter Phillips, a vanguard figure in the British Pop Art movement of the 1960s who drew from his working-class background in industrial Birmingham to incorporate images of gleaming automotive parts, pinups and film sirens in paintings that captured postwar culture's swirl of sex and consumerism, died on June 23 on the Sunshine Coast of Australia. He was 86.
His death was announced by his family. The announcement did not cite a cause. Mr. Phillips had been living in Australia since 2015.
Mr. Phillips was part of a new generation of art mavericks who shook up the staid culture of prewar Britain — and the doldrums of the post-World War II recovery years — just as the 1960s were starting to swing.
As a student at the Royal College of Art in London in 1961, he found inspiration in the work of American artists like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, who appropriated everyday objects like American flags and beer cans into their work, blurring the line between high culture and low.
He made his mark as one of the future stars featured in the seismic 'Young Contemporaries' exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in London's East End, alongside his current and former classmates David Hockney, Allen Jones, R.B. Kitaj and Derek Boshier.
'When I was young, the only way to make a living as an English artist was to either teach or to secure the patronage of a wealthy aristocrat,' Mr. Phillips once said in an interview with Orlebar Brown, a men's wear line with which he collaborated on swimsuits.
'But,' he added, 'London in the late '50s was changing, and a small group of us started to use popular images for our pictures, which was frowned upon at the time. We never called it 'Pop Art'; we were just trying to express who we were.'
While slight and boyish in his early years, Mr. Phillips was sometimes called the tough guy of the London Pop Art scene because of his muscular artistic approach.
His 1961 canvas 'For Men Only — Starring MM and BB' combined images of Marilyn Monroe and Brigitte Bardot with those of lingerie models and a snippet of newsprint from the music newspaper Melody Maker that mentions Elvis Presley.
Mr. Phillips further announced his arrival with an appearance, along with Mr. Boshier and their fellow artists Pauline Boty and Peter Blake, in 'Pop Goes the Easel,' a 1962 BBC documentary directed by Ken Russell.
The film shows Mr. Phillips coolly patrolling his home studio in West London, wearing a dark turtleneck, as a woman plays a pinball machine near his 1961 painting 'The Entertainment Machine,' which features mass-market detritus like piano keys, bullets and targets.
Fittingly, his work eventually transitioned from the thin air of high art back to the popular culture from which it emerged.
His 1972 painting 'Art-O-Matic Loop Di Loop' — a teenage boy's fantasy come to life, with its Plymouth Duster muscle car, scantily clad temptress and automotive parts, all floating as if in a dream — became the cover image for 'Heartbeat City,' the multiplatinum-selling 1984 album by the Cars. The Strokes used a portion of his 1961 painting 'War/Game,' with its pistols and playing cards, for their 2003 album, 'Room on Fire.'
'I believe in living in the times you are born into,' Mr. Phillips said in a 1963 interview with The Birmingham Post. 'I don't think a painter should isolate himself from the world he is living in — I can't, anyway.'
'Ours is a consumer society,' he added. 'That interests me.'
Mr. Phillips was born on May 21, 1939, in Bournville, a village in southwest Birmingham. His father, Reginald, was a carpenter; his mother, Marjorie, worked in a Cadbury's chocolate factory.
'I was born during the war as the bombs were dropping on Birmingham, which they did occasionally, blowing up houses where people lived,' Mr. Phillips once recalled in an interview with the journal Art + Australia. 'So many other people went through it, too,' he added, 'so that as so-called Pop artists, we were on to a lighter subject.'
He attended the Birmingham College of Art before enrolling in the Royal College of Art in London in 1959.
After the Young Contemporaries show, Mr. Phillips's emergence continued when he was featured at the Paris Biennale in 1963 and, the next year, at the influential 'Nieuwe Realisten' exhibition at the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague.
In 1964, he moved to New York, where he showed with the likes of Andy Warhol and James Rosenquist, as well as Roy Lichtenstein, who provided more than just moral support. 'When I first moved to New York, I tried to buy art materials,' he recalled in a 2018 interview with the website Artnet, 'but the store wouldn't take my credit. Roy, who was with me, simply put it on his bill.'
Over the years, he lived in Switzerland, the Seychelles, Spain and Costa Rica as he pursued his peripatetic life with his wife, Marion-Claude Phillips-Xylander, a model and fashion designer, whom he married in 1970.
Mr. Phillips's approach evolved over the years: He turned to a sleek, airbrushed style that further blurred the line between high art and commercial art, and at times veered into photorealism, as with his sensuous 'Mosaikbild' paintings from the mid-1970s. In the '80s, his work became more conceptual, featuring fantastical shapes and figures.
Mr. Phillips's survivors include his daughter Zoe Phillips-Price; a daughter, Tiffany Anderton, from a previous marriage, to Dinah Donald; and five grandchildren. Ms. Phillips died of cancer in 2003.
In more recent years, he largely disavowed the approach that made him famous more than a half-century ago for one that was more abstract. 'I definitely don't favor the early work,' he said in a 2019 interview with The Sydney Morning Herald. 'I am excited about some of the newest pieces, possibly because it is what interests me most at the moment.'
As for Pop Art, Mr. Phillips found it a rather meaningless term. As he told Orlebar Brown, 'For me, there are really only two forms of art — good and bad.'
Alain Delaquérière contributed research.