Peter Blake

Peter Blake – Grey war days are followed by colourful collage work

Peter Blake was born in Dartford in the English county of Kent on 25 June 1932. With the outbreak of World War II, he came into the care of his grandmother in the country, a time he found boring and full of privation. He later attempted to counter the trauma of the grey days with all the more colour: Blake collected everything he came across, from comics, toys, posters, stickers, to jewellery and accessories, with more or little use- a colour patchwork that would later become characteristic of his work with assemblages and collages and inspire him in many ways. He soon recognised art as his life’s path and from 1946 to 1951 attended the Gravesend Technical College and School of Art in London followed by the Royal College of Art until 1956. Peter Blake celebrated early success with his collage-like works composed of posters, advertisements and other pictures, offering a dazzling, fascinating panopticon. 

A world success from which the artist earned very little

Peter Blake quickly became part of the growing Pop Art scene and came into contact with celebrated musicians such as the Rolling Stones and the Beatles. The attempt by the Beatles bassist Paul McCartney to get the artist to take LSD failed due to Blake’s scepticism, but he still received the commission to produce the album cover for the successful British band. Together with his then wife, the feminist artist Jann Haworth, he designed a soon world-famous collage that united personalities such as Edgar Allan Poe, Marlon Brando, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Marlene Dietrich, Lewis Carroll and many more with a selection of whimsical objects in a carefully arranged but wild mixture. The cover for the album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band brought its originator Peter Blake world fame, but only minimal monetary gain: For the almost laughable amount of 200 GBP, his gallerist Robert Fraser sold all rights to the work, which is today one of the most important icons of pop culture. 

Rapid world fame, but unacknowledged for a long time

Peter Blake long struggled with the success of his most famous work, from which others made millions, but he himself had no share. However, Blake found the lacking recognition from the established art scene far more serious. For a long time he took on an outsider’s role, because although his work reached a high degree of recognition, it always defied a clear classification. The artist himself has made peace with this tense situation: he had chosen his path and he did not regret anything, he explained in retrospect of his life. In the meantime, he has arrived in the greatest museums of the world, has received a knighthood, and has made his works accessible to a large audience with the help of the screen-printing technique. Blake does not see anything wrong with this: accessibility and popularity were, after all, part of the essence of Pop Art. 

Peter Blake lives and works in London.