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Lot Essay
Jones's reputation as a central figure within the British Pop Art movement was firmly established by the time he moved to New York with his first wife in 1964, but it was during his two years there that he took his work into the more extreme direction for which he became both famous and notorious. The incipient sexual imagery of the ambiguously intertwined male/female figures that had reached a resolution in such 1963 works as Hermaphrodite (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool) and Man Woman (Tate), conveyed in a fairly gentle painterly language that owed much to such early 20th century artists as Delaunay, Kandinsky and Chagall, now gave way to much more confrontational and overtly erotic motifs and to a smoother, more hard-edged delineation of forms that similarly challenged viewers' preconceptions about what art should look like. Taking his inspiration now from fetish magazines that he saw in New York for the first time, and in particular from the stylized illusionism of such illustrators as Eric Stanton and Eneg, Jones felt sufficiently exhilarated by the possibilities suggested by the imagery and style of execution alike as to risk turning his back on the belle peinture tradition to which he had previously been in thrall. This move, though it brought him to the forefront of Pop Art on an international level, was not without its dangers, introducing as it did a flirtation with Kitsch and bad taste and a spiky presentation of the voluptuous female form that was soon to earn him the opprobrium of the feminists of the late 1960s.
In interviews, Jones spoke of his desire to reference what some might term disapprovingly as pornographic illustration as a way of short-circuiting habitual responses to painted images of the human figure. Knowing full well that each viewer's response to a highly rendered and visually tactile representation of a shapely female leg would vary according to that person's gender, sexuality and personality, he consciously provoked strong reactions. The same was true of the illustrational style in which he chose to cloak these characteristically fragmented visions of the human body, since the tight linear emphasis on edges and the reliance on flat areas of often acid, 'unartistic', colour were anathema to anyone whose notion of beauty had been nurtured on European painting. Though the imagery in his mid-sixties paintings often seems to lurch towards the viewer, inviting one to enter into the illusionistic space, these are not 'friendly' paintings that allow one to bask in their admittedly sumptuous hues and enveloping space. The response they do provoke is a much more vigorous one, akin to the buzz engendered by the fetish illustrations that served as their prime source of energy.
Setting out during this period to question all the basic assumptions about painting that he had been taught to accept, Jones was particularly keen to challenge the insistence at the time - particularly in Clement Greenberg's circle of abstract painters - on the 'primacy of the picture plane', but to do so in a playful way. Much as he admired the formal investigations of abstract painters on both sides of the Atlantic, and shared with them a concern with large areas of saturated colour, his own devotion to the human figure took his art, as he well knew, beyond the pale. In a sense he therefore had nothing to lose by appearing to poke fun at the current tenets of painting that had turned into a kind of humourless academicism. There is certainly a full-blooded gusto and humour in the paintings that Jones made in response, which could be described as formally badly behaved just as they appear to be in breach of social conventions of polite deportment.
Jones's gleeful disobedience with regard to the strictures on the paint surface being self-evidently flat, non-illusionistic and non-representational came to a head in such works as Curious Woman 1964-65, in which the figure's voluminous breasts literally extend into three dimensions from the plywood ground, and in a series of square-format paintings he initiated in 1966 in which pairs of stilettoed female legs rest on a ground defined by an actual shelf attached to the lower edge of the canvas. Jones knew full well that he could model the forms in an extremely illusionistic manner while still making it clear that they rest on a flat surface; in some of these works, for instance, the tightly delineated forms suddenly dissolve into thick deposits of paint, destroying the carefully wrought illusion and bringing one's attention back to the straightforward facts of paint on a flat surface.
The first of these 'shelf paintings', made in 1966 after his return to London, were shown together in a solo show at Arthur Tooth & Sons in London in June - July 1967. Many of their titles, including Wet Seal 1966 (Tate) and Gallery Gasper 1966-67 (private collection), were the names of shoes he saw in the catalogues of Frederick's of Hollywood, the California firm noted for its wonderfully vulgar and sexual ranges of clothing and footwear. The Beverly Hills collector Betty Asher, known for her devotion to Pop Art, had been host to Jones during a stay in Los Angeles and kept in touch with him by sending him the Frederick's catalogues; reminiscing to me about these publications in conversation on 3 September 2012, he recalls that he was 'smitten with their non-design design and their robust compositional ideas'.
Artistic Foot(wear) is the last of the shelf paintings, and in its chequerboard floor pattern receding into the distance it also anticipates the larger 'step' paintings that followed in 1967. Its title pays homage to the brand of shoe, Jonbachs Artistic Footwear, described in paint on the canvas surface and present as a found object on the shelf, the conceit being that the woman is about to bring her left foot out of the imaginary space of the painting into the actual space of the 'real' world in which we are standing. Having needed only the one shoe for this work, Jones made use of the remaining shoe for another work, placing it on a tiny metal stand in front of a 12 x 10 inch canvas. These two solitary shoes, with their stiletto heels suggestive of dominatrixes and sadomasochistic sex, anticipate the notorious 'furniture sculptures' in the form of a Chair, a Table and a Hatstand, that brought this imagery to its most extreme and confrontational conclusion in 1969. One might say that with this left shoe he put his first toe in the water before taking the plunge that was to earn him a firm place in the history of late 20th century art.
We would like to thank Marco Livingstone for preparing this catalogue entry and Allen Jones for lending the photograph of the dealer Hans Neuendorf standing behind the painting when it was first shown in Hamburg.
In interviews, Jones spoke of his desire to reference what some might term disapprovingly as pornographic illustration as a way of short-circuiting habitual responses to painted images of the human figure. Knowing full well that each viewer's response to a highly rendered and visually tactile representation of a shapely female leg would vary according to that person's gender, sexuality and personality, he consciously provoked strong reactions. The same was true of the illustrational style in which he chose to cloak these characteristically fragmented visions of the human body, since the tight linear emphasis on edges and the reliance on flat areas of often acid, 'unartistic', colour were anathema to anyone whose notion of beauty had been nurtured on European painting. Though the imagery in his mid-sixties paintings often seems to lurch towards the viewer, inviting one to enter into the illusionistic space, these are not 'friendly' paintings that allow one to bask in their admittedly sumptuous hues and enveloping space. The response they do provoke is a much more vigorous one, akin to the buzz engendered by the fetish illustrations that served as their prime source of energy.
Setting out during this period to question all the basic assumptions about painting that he had been taught to accept, Jones was particularly keen to challenge the insistence at the time - particularly in Clement Greenberg's circle of abstract painters - on the 'primacy of the picture plane', but to do so in a playful way. Much as he admired the formal investigations of abstract painters on both sides of the Atlantic, and shared with them a concern with large areas of saturated colour, his own devotion to the human figure took his art, as he well knew, beyond the pale. In a sense he therefore had nothing to lose by appearing to poke fun at the current tenets of painting that had turned into a kind of humourless academicism. There is certainly a full-blooded gusto and humour in the paintings that Jones made in response, which could be described as formally badly behaved just as they appear to be in breach of social conventions of polite deportment.
Jones's gleeful disobedience with regard to the strictures on the paint surface being self-evidently flat, non-illusionistic and non-representational came to a head in such works as Curious Woman 1964-65, in which the figure's voluminous breasts literally extend into three dimensions from the plywood ground, and in a series of square-format paintings he initiated in 1966 in which pairs of stilettoed female legs rest on a ground defined by an actual shelf attached to the lower edge of the canvas. Jones knew full well that he could model the forms in an extremely illusionistic manner while still making it clear that they rest on a flat surface; in some of these works, for instance, the tightly delineated forms suddenly dissolve into thick deposits of paint, destroying the carefully wrought illusion and bringing one's attention back to the straightforward facts of paint on a flat surface.
The first of these 'shelf paintings', made in 1966 after his return to London, were shown together in a solo show at Arthur Tooth & Sons in London in June - July 1967. Many of their titles, including Wet Seal 1966 (Tate) and Gallery Gasper 1966-67 (private collection), were the names of shoes he saw in the catalogues of Frederick's of Hollywood, the California firm noted for its wonderfully vulgar and sexual ranges of clothing and footwear. The Beverly Hills collector Betty Asher, known for her devotion to Pop Art, had been host to Jones during a stay in Los Angeles and kept in touch with him by sending him the Frederick's catalogues; reminiscing to me about these publications in conversation on 3 September 2012, he recalls that he was 'smitten with their non-design design and their robust compositional ideas'.
Artistic Foot(wear) is the last of the shelf paintings, and in its chequerboard floor pattern receding into the distance it also anticipates the larger 'step' paintings that followed in 1967. Its title pays homage to the brand of shoe, Jonbachs Artistic Footwear, described in paint on the canvas surface and present as a found object on the shelf, the conceit being that the woman is about to bring her left foot out of the imaginary space of the painting into the actual space of the 'real' world in which we are standing. Having needed only the one shoe for this work, Jones made use of the remaining shoe for another work, placing it on a tiny metal stand in front of a 12 x 10 inch canvas. These two solitary shoes, with their stiletto heels suggestive of dominatrixes and sadomasochistic sex, anticipate the notorious 'furniture sculptures' in the form of a Chair, a Table and a Hatstand, that brought this imagery to its most extreme and confrontational conclusion in 1969. One might say that with this left shoe he put his first toe in the water before taking the plunge that was to earn him a firm place in the history of late 20th century art.
We would like to thank Marco Livingstone for preparing this catalogue entry and Allen Jones for lending the photograph of the dealer Hans Neuendorf standing behind the painting when it was first shown in Hamburg.