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Lot Essay
A striking self-portrait made by Jones in 1957 shortly before his twentieth birthday, in which his silhouetted torso is projected against a flesh-coloured ground, prefigured by three years the first of a series of paintings in which a stylized rendering of the artist's own head serves as a conduit for his formal investigations and as a clue to the psychological basis of his image-making. His investigations of different pictorial languages rooted in early 20th-century modernism are particularly evident in these works of the early 1960s, such as Grey Self-Portrait 1960 (National Portrait Gallery, London), a canvas just one foot square in which the planes of the face are simplified in a post-Cubistic manner owing much to Robert Delaunay's Orphism, and the much larger The Artist Thinks 1960 (48 x 48 in., collection of the artist), a key declaration of intent in which the fragmented head is surmounted by brightly coloured improvised shapes - indebted both to Surrealist automatism and to the Surrealist-derived procedures of painterly improvisation employed by the American Abstract Expressionists - encased within an enormous cartoon 'thinks' balloon. This latter work, painted in the final term of his first and only year at the Royal College of Art, in the company of an ambitious group of young figurative painters (R.B. Kitaj, David Hockney, Peter Phillips and Derek Boshier), was his first major painting and a key work in the early history of British Pop Art.
By showing Jones's own face pressed against the window of a vehicle, Interesting Journey makes a direct link with his most celebrated early Pop pictures, the series of ten lozenge-shaped paintings that he produced in the same year - all but one of them featured in his first solo show, at Arthur Tooth & Sons Ltd in London between 12 February and 2 March 1963 - representing London's characteristic red buses in movement. His features (in particular his hairline, his thin nose and his strong bone structure) are clearly recognisable despite the level of abstraction, their recesses and protrusions indicated through flat shapes in the manner of contour maps. Through this strategy, Jones was able to suggest the three-dimensionality of the forms while still subscribing to the dictates about the flatness of the picture plane current in abstract painting at that time.
Jones's work of the early 1960s had a didactic aspect, prompted both by the teacher training course he undertook at Hornsea College of Art in 1960-61 and by his use in the classroom of writings by Wassily Kandinsky and especially Paul Klee's Pedagogical Sketchbook (first published in German in 1925 and in English translation in 1953). The bus paintings in particular had their origins in a classroom exercise that he had set his students, that of representing movement through the static painted object, which in turn had focussed his attention on Futurist painting.
Despite these professed formal considerations and network of debts to early Modernism, Jones was also keen, like many of his Pop colleagues, to make direct reference to the modern urban existence he was leading. The autobiographical strain so evident in the work of the least Pop of these artists, Kitaj and Hockney, is similarly apparent in Jones's acknowledgment here of his down-to-earth existence as a young man in the city, as he commuted by bus to the various colleges where he was teaching.
As in the shaped bus paintings, descriptive detail is stripped down to a minimum so that the essence of the subject is conveyed with maximum force and economy of means through shape and colour. Yet the image, notwithstanding its simplicity, remains haunting and mysterious, not least because of the geometric signs used to denote the eyes and the organic cloud-like shapes floating across the surface below. Wittily representing himself as if behind a glass pane, staring back at the spectator from the fictive space beyond, Jones makes a powerful case for representational painting as an arena of dreamlike illusion.
M.L.
By showing Jones's own face pressed against the window of a vehicle, Interesting Journey makes a direct link with his most celebrated early Pop pictures, the series of ten lozenge-shaped paintings that he produced in the same year - all but one of them featured in his first solo show, at Arthur Tooth & Sons Ltd in London between 12 February and 2 March 1963 - representing London's characteristic red buses in movement. His features (in particular his hairline, his thin nose and his strong bone structure) are clearly recognisable despite the level of abstraction, their recesses and protrusions indicated through flat shapes in the manner of contour maps. Through this strategy, Jones was able to suggest the three-dimensionality of the forms while still subscribing to the dictates about the flatness of the picture plane current in abstract painting at that time.
Jones's work of the early 1960s had a didactic aspect, prompted both by the teacher training course he undertook at Hornsea College of Art in 1960-61 and by his use in the classroom of writings by Wassily Kandinsky and especially Paul Klee's Pedagogical Sketchbook (first published in German in 1925 and in English translation in 1953). The bus paintings in particular had their origins in a classroom exercise that he had set his students, that of representing movement through the static painted object, which in turn had focussed his attention on Futurist painting.
Despite these professed formal considerations and network of debts to early Modernism, Jones was also keen, like many of his Pop colleagues, to make direct reference to the modern urban existence he was leading. The autobiographical strain so evident in the work of the least Pop of these artists, Kitaj and Hockney, is similarly apparent in Jones's acknowledgment here of his down-to-earth existence as a young man in the city, as he commuted by bus to the various colleges where he was teaching.
As in the shaped bus paintings, descriptive detail is stripped down to a minimum so that the essence of the subject is conveyed with maximum force and economy of means through shape and colour. Yet the image, notwithstanding its simplicity, remains haunting and mysterious, not least because of the geometric signs used to denote the eyes and the organic cloud-like shapes floating across the surface below. Wittily representing himself as if behind a glass pane, staring back at the spectator from the fictive space beyond, Jones makes a powerful case for representational painting as an arena of dreamlike illusion.
M.L.