Peter Blake

Overview

Sir Peter Blake was born in Kent in 1932 and became, during the late fifties and early sixties, one of the best known British pop artists. He defined a specifically British pop aesthetic, built less on advertising and consumer packaging than on the scruffier materials of popular life: fairgrounds, wrestlers, pin ups, badges, comics, record sleeves and the heroes of music, film and sport. He has worked across painting, drawing, printmaking, illustration, collage and sculpture, and on several occasions he has folded his art directly into popular culture itself. The clearest example is his cover for the Beatles album Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

The core paintings are now among the most familiar images in postwar British art: On the Balcony, Self Portrait with Badges, The Toy Shop, The Beatles, and the later realist pictures made after a trip to Los Angeles, among them the work titled The Meeting, or Have a Nice Day, Mr Hockney.

Career

At the end of the sixties Blake left London for Avon, choosing a rural setting for his studio. Country life redirected the work toward the Victorian imagination, fairies and an idealised vision of eternal childhood, and in the middle of the following decade he co founded the Brotherhood of Ruralists, a group whose painting combined an interest in nature with musical and literary sources. He returned to London at the end of the seventies, shortly before the Los Angeles visit that produced his strongest realist canvases. Some of these were shown in a specially decorated room in his Tate Gallery retrospective in 1983.

The major Pop Art survey at the Royal Academy in 1991 brought him back into public consciousness and introduced the work to a younger British generation including Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin. In 2000 he curated About Collage at Tate Liverpool, drawing on his own collection and on Tate's to trace the reach of collage through twentieth century art. Tate Liverpool gave him a full retrospective in 2007, the largest survey of his painting since the Tate Gallery show. His work is held in the Tate collection.

The market and the LLB lot

Blake is one of the most heavily editioned British artists of his generation, and his print market is deep, active and very wide in price. At the top of it, a large screenprint in colours with glitter and diamond dust titled 100 Sources of Pop Art, signed and numbered from an edition of one hundred and seventy five and published by CCA Galleries, made a strong five figure sum in pounds at Bonhams in London in 2023.

The lot LLB has offered, Disney (Red Nose Day), sits far below that. It is a seven colour silkscreen on Somerset Tub White paper, sixty two by sixty centimetres, signed and numbered from an edition of two hundred and fifty, printed by Coriander Studio and published in aid of Comic Relief, with the greater part of the original retail price going to the charity. It is a genuine signed Blake edition rather than a poster, but it was made in a comparatively large edition and sold originally at a modest price, and the secondary market reflects both facts.

What to check before buying

With Blake the single most useful distinction is between signed limited editions, unsigned posters and the many licensed reproductions of his best known images. Check for the pencil signature and edition number, and note the publisher: CCA Galleries, Coriander Studio and Paul Stolper are the names that recur on properly published editions. Condition is the other lever. Many of his prints use glitter, diamond dust, silver leaf, embossing or glaze, all of which mark easily and are difficult to restore, and works printed to the full sheet suffer badly from trimming.