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Lot Essay
'In the New York art climate of the 1960s illusionistic painting was an anathema to the avant-garde. The 'fact' of the picture surface and an exclusive use of matt, flat paint were rules that united a spectrum of artists from Ellsworth Kelly to Andy Warhol. To limit self-expression in this way seemed absurd to me and on my return to London I embarked on a small series of paintings using the unambiguous image of legs. By adding real shelves along the bottom edges, the canvases were clearly revealed as objects, regardless of what might be painted upon them. By defining the contours of the image very clearly, it became impossible to violate the picture plane.
In this picture I started with a flat red area and pulled an image out of it with black shading. Just enough to arouse a tactile sensation, but not enough to suggest that I had painted somebody's legs. The unused paint was added to the shelf, and that's a fact.'
Allen Jones.
Stretching up the expanse of the canvas are two life-sized, red-clad female legs, one of them revealing a clear stiletto heel, the other a near abstract swathe of paint. In Drama, painted by Allen Jones in 1966, the artist has revealed his investigation of the nature of figurative painting as well as his exploration of the iconography surrounding women in what is still often considered a man's world. Drama is one of five three-foot square canvases showing booted legs which Allen Jones exhibited at the Arthur Tooth & Sons Ltd. gallery in 1967, from where it was purchased by the present owners; one of the others, Wet Seal, is owned by Tate, London. Each of those five pictures took its title from the names of shoes in the mail order catalogues of Fredericks of Hollywood, several pages of which were used as sources in some of Jones's later works of the period.
Jones created Drama, one of a handful of important pictures with a shelf invading the viewer's space at the bottom, shortly after his return to his native Great Britain from the United States of America, where he had spent much of 1964 and 1965 living in New York at the forefront of the still emerging Pop Art. Drama shows the extent to which Jones was exploring similar subject matter to Roy Lichtenstein's spot paintings and Tom Wesselmann's Great American Nudes, turning to similar sources for his material and presenting it in a directly-painted manner that, as was the case with both of those artists, created a dialogue with the entire nature of representation.
Before returning to Britain, Jones had travelled widely across the USA. During his time there, he had been bowled over by the range of vivid, often racy imagery in advertising and in magazines, which at the time was so much more bracing and immersive than the more staid ads and illustrations in Britain. He began to use this to explore the way that women are viewed in society, launching an intriguing artistic probe that would later come to wide and controversial attention with the iconic sculpture-furniture pieces he made in the 1970s. In Drama, the seeds of that development are clearly on display; however, so too is an exploration of the nature of painting itself. Jones has taken a mass of red and left some of it almost untouched; however, by applying light and shading to a section of it, he has managed to give the impression of a slender leg that has a fetishistic immediacy, accentuated by the gleam of the material and the height and sharpness of the heel. Jones' interest in the concept of painting, and in disrupting the two-dimensionality of the surface, is clear from the shelf at the bottom, upon which some smears of paint spill. Jones himself recently discussed his revolutionary use of this device:
'Contrary to the wisdom of the time, I believed that it was possible to paint a spatial illusion without violating the fact of the picture surface. I painted a small series of canvases that included a narrow shelf as a notional floor on which the painted legs could stand. Adding a shelf to the canvas created a paradox. It contributed to the illusion of depth implied by the painted image, yet underscored the fact of the canvas as a flat object' (Interview with the artist, March 2011).
In Drama, that paradox is highlighted by the impasto of the paint marks, which spread from the canvas onto the shelf. These serve both to give a sense of three-dimensionality to the picture, and to add a sense of trompe-l'oeil to the image. At the same time it highlights and disrupts the illusionistic nature of the picture, shaking at the roots the entire nature of painting.
In this picture I started with a flat red area and pulled an image out of it with black shading. Just enough to arouse a tactile sensation, but not enough to suggest that I had painted somebody's legs. The unused paint was added to the shelf, and that's a fact.'
Allen Jones.
Stretching up the expanse of the canvas are two life-sized, red-clad female legs, one of them revealing a clear stiletto heel, the other a near abstract swathe of paint. In Drama, painted by Allen Jones in 1966, the artist has revealed his investigation of the nature of figurative painting as well as his exploration of the iconography surrounding women in what is still often considered a man's world. Drama is one of five three-foot square canvases showing booted legs which Allen Jones exhibited at the Arthur Tooth & Sons Ltd. gallery in 1967, from where it was purchased by the present owners; one of the others, Wet Seal, is owned by Tate, London. Each of those five pictures took its title from the names of shoes in the mail order catalogues of Fredericks of Hollywood, several pages of which were used as sources in some of Jones's later works of the period.
Jones created Drama, one of a handful of important pictures with a shelf invading the viewer's space at the bottom, shortly after his return to his native Great Britain from the United States of America, where he had spent much of 1964 and 1965 living in New York at the forefront of the still emerging Pop Art. Drama shows the extent to which Jones was exploring similar subject matter to Roy Lichtenstein's spot paintings and Tom Wesselmann's Great American Nudes, turning to similar sources for his material and presenting it in a directly-painted manner that, as was the case with both of those artists, created a dialogue with the entire nature of representation.
Before returning to Britain, Jones had travelled widely across the USA. During his time there, he had been bowled over by the range of vivid, often racy imagery in advertising and in magazines, which at the time was so much more bracing and immersive than the more staid ads and illustrations in Britain. He began to use this to explore the way that women are viewed in society, launching an intriguing artistic probe that would later come to wide and controversial attention with the iconic sculpture-furniture pieces he made in the 1970s. In Drama, the seeds of that development are clearly on display; however, so too is an exploration of the nature of painting itself. Jones has taken a mass of red and left some of it almost untouched; however, by applying light and shading to a section of it, he has managed to give the impression of a slender leg that has a fetishistic immediacy, accentuated by the gleam of the material and the height and sharpness of the heel. Jones' interest in the concept of painting, and in disrupting the two-dimensionality of the surface, is clear from the shelf at the bottom, upon which some smears of paint spill. Jones himself recently discussed his revolutionary use of this device:
'Contrary to the wisdom of the time, I believed that it was possible to paint a spatial illusion without violating the fact of the picture surface. I painted a small series of canvases that included a narrow shelf as a notional floor on which the painted legs could stand. Adding a shelf to the canvas created a paradox. It contributed to the illusion of depth implied by the painted image, yet underscored the fact of the canvas as a flat object' (Interview with the artist, March 2011).
In Drama, that paradox is highlighted by the impasto of the paint marks, which spread from the canvas onto the shelf. These serve both to give a sense of three-dimensionality to the picture, and to add a sense of trompe-l'oeil to the image. At the same time it highlights and disrupts the illusionistic nature of the picture, shaking at the roots the entire nature of painting.