This photograph shows a cow grazing in a meadow in Cambridge (UK). Behind the animal, you can see the world famous perpendicular gothic chapel of Kings College – part of the University of Cambridge.
I posted this picture on Facebook. A few hours later, one of my friends added the witty comment:
“In one end and out the other…“
HUMOUR, IMAGINATION, PLAYFULNESS, wit, social criticism, and creativity – these are all words that can be applied to the works of the artist Peter Blake, which are on show in a superb exhibition at the Waddington Custot gallery in London’s Cork Street until the 13th of April 2024.
Blake was born in 1932 in Dartford (Kent). He studied art at Gravesend Technical College, and then at the Royal College of Art in Kensington. He is a leading British exponent of Pop Art, which, according to Wikipedia:
“… is an art movement that emerged in the United Kingdom and the United States during the mid- to late-1950s.The movement presented a challenge to traditions of fine art by including imagery from popular and mass culture, such as advertising, comic books and mundane mass-produced objects. One of its aims is to use images of popular culture in art, emphasizing the banal or kitschy elements of any culture, most often through the use of irony.”
One of Blake’s most familiar works is the album sleeve for the Beatle’s LP “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”, which he designed along with Jann Haworth, his wife between 1963 and 1979. I wonder how many Beatle’s fans know that Blake was involved with making the image on this.
The exhibition at Waddington Custot is dedicated to Blake’s sculptural works. There has not been one during the last 20 years. Although there are many of his sculptures in the gallery’s three interconnecting rooms, many of his ingeniously witty collages are also on display. Employing images from comics, old books, and other printed matter, these collages are so carefully assembled that unless one looks at them closely and extremely obliquely, it is difficult to realise that these artefacts are not prints but collages.
The sculptures are with only a very few exceptions, wonderful assemblages or tableaux constructed with found objects. For example, one of these is a shelf overloaded with miniature booze bottles, all positioned beneath a miniature image of Leonardo da Vinci’s depiction of the Last Supper. There are several model sailing boats, on which Blake has placed plastic models (toys) of people expressing a range of behaviours. Other sculptural assemblies are more complex and need to be seen rather than described. I mentioned ‘exceptions’ at the beginning of this paragraph. This refers to four objects – they look like large stones (one of which is a carved stone head) – which Blake called “Found Sculpture”. Each of these is mounted on its own plinth. By doing so, the artist has ‘elevated’ these natural objects to the status of ‘fine art’, and as the gallery’s hand-out said, they challenge:
“… conventional notions of artistic materials …”
I loved the exhibition. Every exhibit is both interesting and beautiful … and great fun. As the show’s hand-out correctly stated, Blake’s sculptures are:
“… by turns quirky, endearing or engaged with conceptual concerns.”
His creations:
“… offer starting points for imagined narratives, each with a glimmer of Blake’s typically gentle, English sense of humour.”
And this is quite correct. Skilfully conceived and executed, Blake’s works provide nourishment for both the eye and brain in a delightfully digestible form. If you view the exhibition with an open state of mind, you are bound to gain great enjoyment from it.
THERE IS A PHOTOGRAPH in the “Times of India” (Mumbai edition: 19th of December 2023). It is a good image showing a group of women wearing saris, and seated on a wall next to the sea close to the Gateway of India. The picture on its own is a pleasure to see, but what enhanced my enjoyment of it was its wonderfully witty title:
“SAREE SOIREE AT THE GATEWAY”
He invited her home. After entering, he said to her:
“What will it be? Gin and platonic, or whisky and sofa?”
My witty late father-in-law told me this many years ago.
IN THE SUMMER OF 1992, I began planning a trip to the USA. It was going to be the first trip that I had made to that country since 1963, when our family lived in Chicago for the last three months of that year. While we were in Chicago, President JF Kennedy was assassinated. Most of my 1992 trip was to stay with friends who lived in Manhattan. I was also going to stay in Boston with some other friends. When my cousin Anthea heard that I was going to be in New England, she suggested that I looked up some cousins of my father, who lived in Providence, Rhode Island.
I was keen not to waste a moment in Manhattan. So, unusually for me, I spent many hours of my spare time at home reading numerous guidebooks to New York. Each of these detailed tomes contained a section on keeping safe in New York. Each one of these explained what to do WHEN you get mugged rather than IF you get mugged. It seemed to me that getting mugged in New York was an inevitable experience for tourists in the city. The more I read, the more anxious I became. As the date of departure drew closer, my inclination to cancel my trip increased steadily. However, my desire to visit New York was greater than my fear of the dangers described in my guidebooks. I decided that should I get mugged, as seemed inevitable, I did not want all my money to be taken. I wanted to be left with some so that I could make my way back to where I was staying after the robbery had taken place. I decided that a safe place to hide my ‘emergency’ cash would be inside my sock beneath the sole of a foot. This is what I did every day in Manhattan, but, fortunately, the guidebooks were not entirely accurate: I was not mugged.
Plenty of beggars tried to entice me to put money into the paper cups they held out hopefully. Once, I succumbed and threw a coin into one of these cups, and its owner shouted:
“Is that all? I was hoping for a hundred Dollars,” adding a few seconds later, “well, it’s a start.”
I loved Manhattan. I loved the quick wittedness of almost everyone I met. I felt as if I was taking part in a Woody Allen comedy, but the things said by New Yorkers were often far cleverer and funnier than any of Woody’s lines.
One purchase I wanted to make in New York was a padded winter jacket. When I entered one shop, I explained what I wanted. When I told the salesman that I wanted both outside and inside pockets, he exclaimed:
“Hey, what are ya? Some kind of secret agent?”
He sold me a superb jacket, which I used until a couple of years ago.
My father had told me to look up one of his first cousins, who lived in Manhattan. She lived high up in an apartment on Fifth Avenue. Its windows overlooked The Metropolitan Museum and Central Park. After dinner, I announced that I would walk the few blocks to where I was staying. She was dead against this and insisted I went by taxi. As she and her husband were seeing me off, she said:
“Press the elevator button marked ‘taxi’.”
I boarded the lift, found the button, and pressed it. The lift descended and when the doors opened on the ground floor, I could see a taxi waiting just outside the doors to the apartment block. I was amazed. I had never encountered such a thing before. I felt like a country bumpkin marvelling over the wonders of the big city. This button that summoned taxis seemed to me an example of what made ‘America great’.
It was fun visiting my friends in Boston back in 1992. However, after the excitement and uniqueness of Manhattan, I was not as trilled by the city as many other visitors are.
I took a train from Boston to Providence. It was the time of the famous ‘Fall’ colours. The journey afforded me with a great opportunity to view the outstanding display of autumn leaf colours, which far exceeded my expectations. I had no idea about what sort of time I would be spending with my newly discovered cousins in Providence. My main worry was that they would not take me sightseeing. So, I told them that I would be arriving on a train that reached Providence in the late afternoon but boarded one which arrived in the middle of the day. That allowed me a few hours to look around before I met them.
After spending a few hours on my own in Providence, I returned to the station platform, and then walked up the stairs to the waiting area where I had planned to meet my relatives. I had no idea what any of them looked like. They had no idea about my appearance. I entered the waiting area and found that a lot of people were seated there. I scanned the faces and spotted an elderly lady sitting with two young boys. I fancied that the face of one of these looked like I did when I was only a few years old. Then, I thought that I was being silly, but I was right. I approached the elderly lady, the grandmother of the two boys and introduced myself. Greta, widow of one of my father’s cousins, said she had noticed me and thought that I had a family resemblance to her late husband. She drove us to her daughter’s home in a large American saloon car, swinging the steering wheel with gusto whenever a change of direction was required. My cousin’s family did take me sightseeing. I particularly remember the roads in an Italian neighbourhood. The median road markings were in the three colours of the Italian flag.
I enjoyed my trip to the USA in 1992. My next visit to Manhattan was in 2007. Things had changed a lot since 1992. The city seemed to have lost its edgy, almost electric feel. Gone were the men on the pavements with their paper cups and witty comments. Also missing, were the endless stream of dubious characters walking, often menacingly, along the corridors of the Subway trains. Although Manhattan had probably become a safer place for its inhabitants, I felt that it had become almost twee in comparison to what I had found so exciting in 1992.
Sadly, now in April 2020 as I write this piece, New York City is facing one of its greatest, if not greatest, crises: a viral epidemic that is trying to outdo the Spanish Flu that occurred at the end of WW1. May it return to normal as soon as possible.
yamey 