Allen Jones – A new freedom in art
Allen Jones was born on 1 September 1937 in Southampton. The son of a labourer, he grew up in modest circumstances, but was interested in art from an early age. For five years, Allen Jones drove for three hours every day across the megacity of London to attend his desired art school – a city which would become a symbol of liberation from a cramped childhood. The pursuit of freedom also characterised his art: During his studies, Jones travelled to Paris and Provence, where he came into contact with the work of Robert Delaunay, which had a great influence on him. When he first saw Jackson Pollock’s paintings at an exhibition in the Whitechapel Gallery in 1958, it led to a realignment of his artistic coordinates. In retrospect, Jones jokingly explained that he would have liked to have sued his teachers because they had not shown him this free way of painting.
Naked women as furniture
At the Royal College of Art, Allen Jones met later famous fellow painters such as David Hockney, Ronald Brooks Kitaij and Peter Phillips. Together, the young art students turned to the newly emerging style of Pop Art which they interpreted in different ways. Jones’ desire for freedom and pursuit of an imagery which pushed the boundaries earned him a college reprimand, but also encouraged him to adhere to figurative representation in opposition to the prevailing current of Abstract Expressionism. In the 1960s, his focus was on female figures which he soon executed no longer as two-dimensional paintings, but as three-dimensional sculptures, with his first furniture sculptures inspired by an adult erotic comic in which naked women were depicted as supports for a table. Half-naked female mannequins in high-heeled boots and provocative patent corsets were shaped by the artist so that they could serve as a piece of furniture – a table, a hat stand, a chair. Jones did not shape the realistic dolls himself, however, but had them modelled from his drawings by a commercial sculptor who also worked for the world-famous wax figure museum of Madame Tussauds.
Lasting success despite controversy
Allen Jones has always been highly polarized with his blatant fascination for the female form. Feminists railed a storm against his sculpture group Hat Stand, Table and Chair and accused Jones of having a castration complex. However, Alen Jones wants his art by no means to be understood as chauvinistic or even sexist. Rather, he sees himself as a child of his time, the colourful 1960s and 1970s, in which it became possible to simultaneously clothe and reveal the human body. Despite the controversies, Jones is classed as a deciding contributor of British Pop Art and even in the context of #metoo, his art has not lost any fascination. The playboy and art collector Gunter Sachs owned several pieces by Jones which were sold for a record price after Sachs’ death, and when the director Stanley Kubrick filmed the novel Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, he partially based the décor on Allen Jones’ sculptures.
Allen Jones lives and works in London.
Allen Jones - Works that have already been sold at Kunsthaus Lempertz:
