During the late 1950s, Sir Peter Blake became one of the best known British pop artists. Blake's paintings from this time included imagery from advertisements, music hall entertainment, and wrestlers, often including collaged elements.
Sir Peter Blake was included in group exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts and had his first solo exhibition in 1960. It was with the 'Young Contemporaries' exhibition of 1961 where he was exhibited alongside David Hockney and R.B. Kitaj that he was first identified with the emerging British Pop Art movement. Blake won the (1961) John Moores junior award for his work Self Portrait with Badges. He first came to wider public attention when, along with Pauline Boty, Derek Boshier and Peter Phillips, he was featured in Ken Russell's film on pop art, Pop Goes the Easel, which was broadcast on BBC television in 1962. From 1963 Blake was represented by Robert Fraser which placed him at the centre of swinging London and brought him into contact with leading figures of popular culture.
On the Balcony (1955-57) is a significant early work and still stands as one of the iconic pieces of British Pop Art, showing Blake's interest in combining images from pop culture with fine art. The work, which appear to be a collage but is in fact wholly painted, shows, among other things, a boy holding Edouard Manet's The Balcony, badges and magazines. It was inspired by a painting by Honoré Sharrer depicting workers holding famous paintings. Blake confronts the viewer with a picture plane that is deceptively flat, effectively blocking the viewer from venturing deeper into the picture plane. This spatial property however is a flatness that resounds starkly; a flat surface that at once becomes a presentation of characters and images as well as a culturally implicit sense of external facade. One of the most striking initial aspects of this piece is that it seems to radiate an illusionist child-like charm which the viewer can easily identify with making it from first glance an oddly powerful work.
His self-identification with the axioms of popular culture in effect show an awareness of the mechanisms of a society being faced with celebrity idolatry and cultural goods. Such banal goods and images were not frequently seen in artwork and created a new space for discourse within a painting. Blake’s characters are strangely static and scarcely seem to notice the accumulation around them even when images are tacked right on top of them. This was not merely whimsical thinking or dreams of consumer grandeur, and albeit not a simple display of products; it was life as Sir Peter Blake experienced it, as true and telling an account of the surroundings of the time as could be made.
Now one of the most sought after contemporary artists, Sir Peter Blake's contribution to popular culture is cast in stone and his limited edition prints are now some of the most sought after and rare on the market with many collectors benefiting from the rapid price appreciation of many of his works.
