Latest news with #BritishArt
New York Times
19-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Peter Phillips, Who Was at the British Pop Art Frontier, Dies at 86
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.
BBC News
11-07-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Sir Stanley Spencer's belongings sold by grandson at auction
Items that belonged to one of the leading figures in British art between the World Wars, along with some of his work, have been sold at of Sir Stanley Spencer's sketchbooks, a palette and a Bible given to him while he served as a soldier in World War One were amongst those put up for sale by his grandson John Spencer said he was struggling for space for all of the items, having grown up with them in Cookham, Stanley became synonymous with the village, where he was born, and his most famous works are perhaps biblical scenes he set there. "[The items have] been left in the family. I grew up with them in Cookham. I am a Cookham boy; they were in our house when I grew up," Mr Spencer, whose mother Unity was also an artist, work auctioned off at Dreweatts in Newbury on Thursday included work by Mr Spencer's grandmother Hilda Carline, who Sir Stanley divorced in the 1930s."It's just stuff we had. I had lots of the pictures of my grandfather, grandmother, my mother. And I've lived with it all of my life. I have had lots of it on my walls," he added."It's a responsibility looking after them all and it takes a lot of space and it's time for them to find new homes." Portrait of Mrs Carline, Sir Stanley's work of his mother-in-law Anne Carline, sold for £11,430. A long letter Sir Stanley wrote to Hilda Carline in 1937 on wallpaper following the breakdown of their marriage sold for £6, had filed for divorce and went onto marry artist Patricia Preece a week later. But that marriage was never consummated and Preece lived in Sir Stanley's house with her Stanley's palette sold for £3,048. It was the first one to have been sold at auction since one bought by David Bowie sold for £11,000 in 2016. The Bible Sir Stanley received on signing up to the 9th Battalion of the Royal Berkshire Regiment sold for £889 and of two sketchbooks, one sold for £4,445. The other failed to Mr Spencer, the items were sold simply to make room."We've still got sketchbooks and notebooks and other bits and pieces," he said. "I have got loads of letters on file that I have got to work through."There are masses of material and projects still to do. This is just finding new homes for interesting and varied works." You can follow BBC Berkshire on Facebook, X (Twitter), or Instagram.
Times
25-06-2025
- General
- Times
‘It's manky and awful', says man on mission to revive Tate Britain
Tate Britain may have the beauties of the pre-Raphaelites and the landscape delights of JMW Turner, but according to its chairman, it is 'awful'. Roland Rudd said that parts of the gallery, branded as the home of British art, were not a great location to visit given their 'manky' features. Rudd was speaking as he unveiled plans to create a £150 million endowment fund for Tate, which he said would be reserved for acquiring the world's best artworks and curators. Over £40 million has been contributed to the Tate Future Fund, started by Rudd, 64, who was appointed chairman in 2021 and who said he hoped it would be one of his legacies to the organisation, as well as fixing up Tate Britain. 'At the moment, let's be honest, when you go to Tate Britain it is awful,' Rudd said. 'You have got these rows of bushes [at the front] and they look very old, they look manky. People tend to relieve themselves behind them.
The Guardian
24-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘We thought we were being naughty!' The thrilling show by Black and Asian women that rocked the art world
It is November 1985 and in a corridor of London's ICA, a pivotal moment in British art history is about to take place. Curated by Lubaina Himid, The Thin Black Line displays work by 11 Black and Asian women artists, hung on the walls of the museum's narrow walkway – to signify just how they've been marginalised. Their work – which explores social, cultural, political, feminist and aesthetic issues – comes as a shock to the stuffy art establishment. Critics dismiss it, or deride the works as 'angry'. And yet this show, placing Black women artists firmly at the centre of contemporary British art history, will come to be seen as a turning point, paving the way for future winners of the Turner prize (Himid) and Venice Golden Lion (Sonia Boyce). Forty years on, the ICA is revisiting the show with Connecting Thin Black Lines 1985–2025, building on its legacy with new and old works from the original artists, and new contributors. Here, some of them reflect on the original exhibition, the reaction it received, and how the art world has changed. Sutapa Biswas: The 1980s were a charged time politically, socially and economically. I arrived at art college in 1981 with a great degree of understanding about the histories of the empire and how it impacted my parents. They were born in what was called British India. They experienced partition and genocide and were displaced. It was a complex time in the UK, too. In my community in west London, the Southall Youth Movement, an antiracist group, had burned down the Hambrough Tavern where skinhead bands played. Marlene Smith: I was a student, studying for my BA at Bradford School of Art. By the time I joined the BLK Art Group, an association of young Black artists, I was already thinking about my identity in relation to feminism. I was not the only Black person studying, but I was one of few. I was certainly the only person trying to make work with political overtones. Jennifer Comrie: I was living through a really interesting time: the Troubles, the miners' strike, Thatcherism, apartheid in South Africa. My work reflected this. Art for me has always been a wayto garner a better understanding of myself and the world around me. Ingrid Pollard: I was doing various jobs, and signing on for benefits. I was a cleaner. I was a gardener for the council. There weren't any rosy aspirations to be an artist. I had been doing screen-printing in an evening class and then a job came up in this feminist print shop in London, which I got, much to my surprise. There was a dark room there, so I started doing photography. Sutapa: One day on my university course, I was confronted by a painting by Turner titled The Slave Ship. My tutor was talking about the expressionistic nature of the brushmarks. I was sitting there thinking: 'What about what's in the water?' That moment, coupled with what I heard in another lecture, made me think: 'We're talking about class and gender – but we're not talking about race.' Marlene: My painting tutor didn't like what I was doing. He was not at all convinced that art could, or should, be political. So when Lubaina showed up and stood in front of my work and had a conversation with me, it was totally transformative. Jennifer: When Lubaina came in to my studio by chance and looked at my work, she was intrigued and asked if I would be interested in showing it. Initially I was unsure. I did not realise how pivotal this chance meeting would be. Sutapa: I found out Lubaina was doing a talk and went along. I introduced myself and said: 'I'm a student at the University of Leeds. I'd love to interview you.' When I submitted my dissertation, I invited Lubaina to do a talk at the university. There, she saw my painting Housewives with Steak-Knives and the video work Kali. 'I'm organising this exhibition,' she said. 'I would love to include your work.' Marlene: The show was coming up, but I had no idea what to make. Then Cherry Groce was shot [during a police raid on her Brixton home]. So I made Good Housekeeping – a larger than life painting of a woman leaning against a doorway. Behind her outstretched arm is a framed photograph of my sister's birthday party. Above that image, painted on the wall, are the words: 'My mother opens the door at 7am. She is not bulletproof.' I was thinking about Cherry Groce as a middle-aged single mum. Sutapa: The rhetoric was so racist in Britain. So I began to think about performance as strategic intervention. That's what emerged in Kali. But it also has a presence in Housewives with Steak-Knives. It's not a static piece, settled against the wall. It sits forward and looks as if it's going to fall on top of you. Jennifer: Coming to Terms Through Conflict, a work I put in the show, questions identity: northern, Jamaican, British, Black, Christian, etc. Untitled continued this journey. Its broken stitching is intentional, representing a refusal to be contained or defined by social constraints – church, family, anyone. It's a visual declaration of freedom. Marlene: Jenny had this beautiful singing voice. I remember her singing as we were installing. Even when I think of it now, it chokes me up. I remember Sutapa climbing up and writing the words for my work in black paint. Ingrid: It was fun installing it all. We thought we were being slightly naughty, because it was a well-known gallery. It was only later that I understood the ramifications, the politics of what Lubaina was trying to organise. Helen Cammock [participant in new show]: I was 15 when that exhibition was at the ICA. I wasn't interested in art then. It wasn't on my radar until 2005, when I did a photography BA. I had bought some books that contained Ingrid's work. Postcards Home [her photography book about England and the Caribbean] was on my desk while I wrote my dissertation. The images moved me. I was sad. I was angry. I found beauty. Marlene: The response to The Thin Black Line, in terms of art criticism, was pretty appalling. The critics came to it very defensively, rather than looking at what the work had to say. Sutapa and I wrote a piece for Spare Rib magazine, talking about the lack of useful critique around Black artists. Sutapa: The reviews were reduced to questions of identity and that became a platform for white guilt. But the real issue was avoiding the language of our practice, in the way that you might talk about the language of David Hockney's work or Helen Chadwick's. We weren't being afforded the same level criteria. They weren't dealing with the aesthetics of our practice. Helen: It's not a new thing. It happens now. This notion that you're angry. That you're didactic. It's a marginal experience and people aren't interested in it. The whole framing of the show undermined the quality of its ideas, of its potential to shake people's ways of thinking and seeing. Sign up to Art Weekly Your weekly art world round-up, sketching out all the biggest stories, scandals and exhibitions after newsletter promotion Marlene: You would expect a show like The Thin Black Line to create opportunities, but the opposite happened. If you examine the YBAs, there was a synergy with what had happened earlier with the Black Arts Movement; it's striking that they seemed to be using our methods of DIY. However, they were not including the Black artists in their projects. Ingrid: There was never a time, after, when I wasn't making art. I wasn't ill. I didn't have children. I was teaching as a way of keeping a regular income. I didn't have to deal with the aspirations of a gallery representing me. Those things were very alien. Marlene: In 2011, Tate did a show looking back at The Thin Black Line. And then Graves Gallery stumbled across work by the BLK Art Group and did a show. So that felt like something was happening. Over the last 10 years, it feels like there's been a resurgence of interest in the Black Arts Movement because, despite its significance, it has not made it into discussions of art history. Amber Akaunu [in the new show]: I studied art and art history at Liverpool Hope University from 2015 to 2018. I didn't really learn about Black art history. I feel a bit of pain when I find out about things I didn't know. I started a magazine with another artist in the course called Rooted. We just felt there was a big gap in knowledge. Sutapa: After the show, I continued to work. I showed with Vito Acconci, Tania Bruguera, Doris Salcedo and Louise Bourgeois at Iniva in London. In 2004 I had a show there that was not nominated for the Turner. Where is my retrospective at the Tate? Where is Claudette Johnson's? I have not received accolades for my recent exhibitions at the Baltic and Kettle's Yard. Ingrid: Getting recognition came after a long period of work, 20 to 30 years. I was surprised to be nominated for the Turner. It raises your public profile. The media had ignored me and a lot of artists for 40 years. Marlene: I had a solo show called Ah, Sugar in2024. At the opening, Lubaina introduced me to the curators from the ICA and said that this new exhibition, Connecting Thin Black Lines, would be coming up. It was a surprise, exciting. Helen: I was looking at the complete lineup. Their voices weren't heard before – and now they are being heard more loudly than ever. Amber: Lubaina hosted a lunch for some of the artists who were going to be in this new show. I just sat there and soaked everything in. It was shocking – but touching – to hear their stories. A lot of these artists have gained so much success, but you can still hear the hurt. I related so much. Some 30 to 40 years on, I'm having similar experiences. I remember curating an exhibition over four days, and showing some work for Black History Month, and we weren't paid for it. Ingrid: A lot of the young students I speak to are still complaining: lack of recognition, opportunities. Things change, but they remain the same. My advice is you need a gang. You can't do it on your own. It takes a village to make an artist. Helen: It happened to be a really monumental experience for me being in a show called Carte de Visite with Claudette Johnson and Ingrid Pollard in 2015. I think it encapsulated what's happening now, the interconnectedness across generations. Marlene: It was a real privilege for me to exhibit with them in the first place. And it's a real privilege to be reunited. It's always nerve-wracking when you make new work. There's a bit of an echo between the piece I've made this time and the 1985 piece. This piece is probably more gentle. Amber: The film I'm showing is about motherhood and friendship. It's a documentary style that that explores my childhood being raised by a single mum in Toxteth, Liverpool. Jennifer: It's incredible to see the works being recognised again after 40 years. It genuinely feels like a few moments ago we were setting up the works in the ICA's corridor. Ingrid: I'm hoping the exhibition annoys a lot of people in the art world. When they had an opportunity to engage with these artists, they didn't take it. So it's like: 'See what you missed out on, mate.' Connecting Thin Black Lines 1985-2025 is at the ICA, London, until 7 September
Yahoo
16-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Edward Burra - Ithell Colquhoun: Tate's double-bill is a revelation
Tate Britain's latest offer? Two exhibitions for the price of one. For the first time since 2013's Gary Hume-Patrick Caulfield double-header, separate yet similarly engrossing shows occupy the lower-floor galleries at Millbank, accessed with a single ticket. (The order in which you see them is unimportant, but some stamina is required; allow a couple of hours.) The juxtaposition isn't obvious but neither is it forced: although it's unlikely they ever met, the 20th-century British artists Edward Burra and Ithell Colquhoun were born only a year apart, to upper-middle-class families, and were both associated with Surrealism. They also shared preoccupations, such as an interest in same-sex relationships and a concern for the British landscape – as well as (to varying degrees) the paranormal and the occult. A ramshackle, sickly character from Sussex, Burra (1905-76) specialised in stylised, graphic watercolours with a satirical edge, often depicting people on society's margins. (For the artist Paul Nash, a friend, he was a modern Hogarth.) In part because watercolour was his preferred medium – thanks to lifelong rheumatoid arthritis and anaemia, he found it easier than painting in oils at an easel – he's often considered an idiosyncratic, tangential figure within British visitors to Tate Britain may be familiar with his composition The Snack Bar (1930), in which a chalky-faced barman suggestively slices a firm, pink ham (it remains on display upstairs), but this show of more than 80 paintings – Burra's first London retrospective in 40 years – contains so many exhibits from private collections (almost 50) that it feels like a revelation. Accompanied by music drawn from his collection of 78rpm gramophone records (he was a big fan of American jazz, which inspired a trip to Harlem during the 1930s), the exhibition tautly traces Burra's career, from his teeming early pictures of bohemians and pert-bottomed sailors living it up in France – Le Bal (1928) is a standout – to his brooding post-war visions of an enchanted British countryside blighted by motorways and concrete. Each picture is a mini-world of incident and observation, often saturated with seediness and innuendo. The conflicts of the 1930s and 1940s cut Burra deeply, darkening an already dour disposition, and inspiring in his work a menacing new strain (sometimes charged with sadomasochism), as the flirting, gurning hedonists of his earlier paintings are replaced by hooded wraiths and sinister men in birdlike masks. Colquhoun (1906-88), an avowed occultist, was more interested in magic and the power of female sexuality than in macho menace; whereas Burra fetishised the male form, Colquhoun – who may have been bisexual, and was married only briefly, during the 1940s – painted imagery evoking impotence and castration. Who knew that a trimmed cucumber could be so troubling?This show, first seen earlier this year (at Tate St Ives) in Cornwall, where Colquhoun lived during her latter decades, takes her obsession with magic seriously – devoting space to diagrams of tesseracts and tarot-card designs, and teasing out impenetrable alchemical concepts such as the 'Divine Androgyne'.Don't let this put you off. Inspired by the crisp art of Salvador Dalí, which she encountered in London in 1936 (at an exhibition of Surrealist art in which Burra also participated), Colquhoun's mature paintings – often produced using 'automatic' techniques – have a flaming, dream-like intensity. In Dance of the Nine Opals (1942), a ring of opalescent rocks inspired by a Cornish stone circle appears to revolve around a golden tree of life before pink-tinged mountains. Fantastical pictures like this – like much of Burra's original output (which, although the shows aren't in competition, probably edges it) – deserve greater prominence in the history of 20th-century British art. From June 13;
