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Lot Essay
In 1962, in an exuberant series of parallelogram-shaped canvases representing London’s red double-decker buses, Allen Jones was among the first painters in Britain to explore the expressive possibilities of ‘shaped’ canvases. Testing the descriptive potential of non-rectangular outline alone in identifying the subject, leaving him free to engage in plays of colour and mark-making more commonly encountered in gestural abstraction, he brought a pronounced Pop sensibility to bear on this engagement with formal concerns that had much in common with the work of such abstract painters as the Americans Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Stella and the Englishman Richard Smith. The issue of the shaped canvas, closely associated with art being made in New York, came to the fore in the mid-1960s. In works such as Marriage Medal, Jones can rightly be regarded as a trailblazer of what became common practice, using it as an animating force, and in an explicitly representational context, in a few key works made between 1962 and 1964.
One of the larger bus paintings, Second Bus, 1962, has a pair of appended small square canvases below, representing the wheels of the moving bus that form the larger shaped canvas. This witty conceit soon led Jones to devise other combinations of canvas shapes abutting each other, always with an eye to conveying images of modernity, fantasy, adventure and shared experiences of ordinary day-today existence. Even before the addition of painted imagery, the shape alone could express the essence of the subject at a glance. In Wunderbare Landung, 1963 (Ferens Art Gallery, Hull Museums), an octagon surmounting a rectangle represents a parachute and its human cargo floating earthwards through the sky; the same combination of shapes created over stretchers of identical dimensions was reconfigured a year later as Falling Woman, an upskirted view of female genitalia framed by the stockings and garters that define her legs.
In 1959-60 Jones was part of a group of painting students associated with a vibrant early wave of British Pop Art at the Royal College of Art. After he was expelled at the end of his first year of study for his supposed insubordination, he maintained contact with these friends and continued to explore many of the same concerns that were evident in their work and that gave rise to a sense of a communal style and common purpose. Like David Hockney, R. B. Kitaj, Peter Phillips and Derek Boshier, Jones found some of his inspiration in the mundane realities of his daily life, in his case for example in the bus paintings that referenced his daily commute on public transport. This is the case, too, both with Marriage Medal, 1963 and with the portfolio of eight lithographs titled Concerning Marriages, published in 1964, all of which were conceived in part as a personal celebration of his impending marriage in the latter year to Janet Bowen.
Playing with the idea of ‘marriages of style’ that Hockney, too, had explored in his 1962 painting The First Marriage (A Marriage of Styles) 1962 (Tate), Jones uses the two separate canvases of his Marriage Medal to clothe his imagery in distinct languages: the coloured striations of the ribbon itself paraphrasing the style of the American post-painterly abstractionist Morris Louis, the torsos of the male and female couple below brought to life in a loose and spontaneously improvised manner still bearing the traces of his early influences from such pioneers of abstraction as Wassily Kandinsky and Robert Delaunay. Marking one of the most important rites of passage in most of our lives – the loving union of two people in matrimony – the artist awards himself and his bride-to-be with a medal acknowledging their joint achievement. The overall format is an ingenious rephrasing of the parachutist paintings, the shapes simply turned upside down, the whole forming a larger-than-life depiction of an imaginary object. In presenting a two-dimensional painting not simply as the representation of a real thing, a graspable object, but as its literal physical embodiment, Jones also stepped in to the discussion of the canvas as object that had been initiated in the second half of the 1950s by the American proto-Pop artist Jasper Johns in his paintings of archery targets, maps and the American flag.
Jones’s work of the early 1960s was conditioned not only by his purely painterly concerns, steeped in modernist art history, but also by his readings in philosophy and psychology. In the writings of both Friedrich Nietzsche and C. G. Jung he found support for his embrace of the creative act as a fusion of male and female principles. This Marriage Medal stands as testimony, therefore, not only to a major event in his life but also to his conviction about art arising from a conjunction of ‘active’ and ‘contemplative’ qualities, the intellect and the emotions, the ‘anima’ and the ‘animus’. Complementing each other, these forces are seen to result through their synthesis in a life force that takes its strength from the interaction of male and female energies as equal partners.
We are very grateful to Marco Livingstone for preparing this catalogue entry.
One of the larger bus paintings, Second Bus, 1962, has a pair of appended small square canvases below, representing the wheels of the moving bus that form the larger shaped canvas. This witty conceit soon led Jones to devise other combinations of canvas shapes abutting each other, always with an eye to conveying images of modernity, fantasy, adventure and shared experiences of ordinary day-today existence. Even before the addition of painted imagery, the shape alone could express the essence of the subject at a glance. In Wunderbare Landung, 1963 (Ferens Art Gallery, Hull Museums), an octagon surmounting a rectangle represents a parachute and its human cargo floating earthwards through the sky; the same combination of shapes created over stretchers of identical dimensions was reconfigured a year later as Falling Woman, an upskirted view of female genitalia framed by the stockings and garters that define her legs.
In 1959-60 Jones was part of a group of painting students associated with a vibrant early wave of British Pop Art at the Royal College of Art. After he was expelled at the end of his first year of study for his supposed insubordination, he maintained contact with these friends and continued to explore many of the same concerns that were evident in their work and that gave rise to a sense of a communal style and common purpose. Like David Hockney, R. B. Kitaj, Peter Phillips and Derek Boshier, Jones found some of his inspiration in the mundane realities of his daily life, in his case for example in the bus paintings that referenced his daily commute on public transport. This is the case, too, both with Marriage Medal, 1963 and with the portfolio of eight lithographs titled Concerning Marriages, published in 1964, all of which were conceived in part as a personal celebration of his impending marriage in the latter year to Janet Bowen.
Playing with the idea of ‘marriages of style’ that Hockney, too, had explored in his 1962 painting The First Marriage (A Marriage of Styles) 1962 (Tate), Jones uses the two separate canvases of his Marriage Medal to clothe his imagery in distinct languages: the coloured striations of the ribbon itself paraphrasing the style of the American post-painterly abstractionist Morris Louis, the torsos of the male and female couple below brought to life in a loose and spontaneously improvised manner still bearing the traces of his early influences from such pioneers of abstraction as Wassily Kandinsky and Robert Delaunay. Marking one of the most important rites of passage in most of our lives – the loving union of two people in matrimony – the artist awards himself and his bride-to-be with a medal acknowledging their joint achievement. The overall format is an ingenious rephrasing of the parachutist paintings, the shapes simply turned upside down, the whole forming a larger-than-life depiction of an imaginary object. In presenting a two-dimensional painting not simply as the representation of a real thing, a graspable object, but as its literal physical embodiment, Jones also stepped in to the discussion of the canvas as object that had been initiated in the second half of the 1950s by the American proto-Pop artist Jasper Johns in his paintings of archery targets, maps and the American flag.
Jones’s work of the early 1960s was conditioned not only by his purely painterly concerns, steeped in modernist art history, but also by his readings in philosophy and psychology. In the writings of both Friedrich Nietzsche and C. G. Jung he found support for his embrace of the creative act as a fusion of male and female principles. This Marriage Medal stands as testimony, therefore, not only to a major event in his life but also to his conviction about art arising from a conjunction of ‘active’ and ‘contemplative’ qualities, the intellect and the emotions, the ‘anima’ and the ‘animus’. Complementing each other, these forces are seen to result through their synthesis in a life force that takes its strength from the interaction of male and female energies as equal partners.
We are very grateful to Marco Livingstone for preparing this catalogue entry.