The Brooklyn Rail

Over the summer, Mark Hudson paid a visit to the studio of Allen Jones. It wasn’t his first. Hudson has been at work on a book about Jones, that moves from his student years as a young man to his student years as art world elder. Jones has always possessed an inquiring mind, which, as he states below, is the hallmark of a student. On the occasion of the book’s publication, Hudson and Jones revisited some of the key themes of Jones’s artistic journey, his path to working with avatars and AI, and how the figure—or any subject matter—operates as a vehicle for pictorial invention.

Mark Hudson (Rail): Allen, we’re sitting in your studio surrounded by diverse versions of the human form you’ve produced over the past sixty-plus years—from the unnervingly lifelike to the almost entirely abstract—in painting, sculpture, and digital media. The book we’re here to talk about was an attempt to put these approaches in order—as a succession of “moves”—according to your interests and impulses at particular moments. How does it feel to look back through this retrospective of your life’s work?

Allen Jones: Well, I’m kind of surprised, really, to see how the figure has been such a constant. Because in my head, that’s not necessarily the thing that’s been kicking off the painting. But I see now that the figure is the motif, and that the painting that’s built around it is about some kind of formal invention.

Rail: So the formal invention around the figure is—in your mind—almost more important than the figure itself.

Jones: Well, this so-called “subject matter” isn’t an illustration of somebody or a depiction of life. It’s a vehicle for pictorial invention.

Rail: We start with student paintings produced in the aftermath of the Second World War. We end with experiments with avatars and AI produced in the aftermath of the early 2020s COVID pandemic, at a point when the digital revolution is very far advanced. That’s a hell of a journey. What’s the one thing that really stands out for you when you look back on that journey, something that may not have been quite so apparent when it was happening?

Jones: Well, I was immediately struck that in both those circumstances, postwar and post-COVID, I was a student. The advances in technology and the ways of making form visible had become so far removed from when I was first a student that I had to become one again. I suppose the linking factor is an inquiring mind that’s always intrigued by new possibilities for representation.

Rail: So you were a student in both instances?

Jones: In that I knew nothing about digital technology, let alone animation. It was a totally new field for me, though to somebody who works in that field from day to day, my digital work may look rudimentary. But the thing was to try and use the technology to present something which seemed, to me, real. And that, of course, has been a continuing element in my thinking process throughout my career.

Rail: And what did you think that the real thing that you were able to say with this digital technology might be?

Jones: My opportunity to work in this area came through a commission from the footwear designer Christian Louboutin. And my concern in representing the figure, from the early days of moving into sculpture, has been with trying to make the figure more real. And to most people, the moving image is more real than a static, painted image. And so I thought, “How can I do that using this particular medium?” And so I thought that if the figure could actually look out of the picture and step out of it, that would be something I couldn’t do in paint. And so the figure appears to walk along a catwalk like a fashion model, and she looks out into the room where a sculpture of mine is standing, called Cover Story 4/4 (2021). This is a cast of my Hatstand (1969) sculpture that was cut in half many years ago, as a prop for a film that was never made. So the idea had been there on a back burner, just like ideas in my sketchbooks and notepads, which I’ve always kept, as I never know when, years later, I might see the birth of an idea that passed me by at the time. So in this digital work, the figure appears to step inside a sculpture I had made many years before.

Rail: When I mentioned to Phong Bui, the publisher and co-founder of the Brooklyn Rail, that I was doing a book with you, he said it would be fantastic to do an interview with “the great, visionary artist Allen Jones!” I mentioned this to you, and you were quite taken with that idea. I wondered, in what way in your own mind, you might be described as a “visionary artist.”

Jones: I think every artist, in their own head, is in a silent dialogue with art history. And in the moment when I’m working, I have to believe in myself. So while I don’t think of myself objectively in that way, it’s nice when someone I don’t know is fired up by the work from that perspective—particularly when, for quite a few years, I was the pivot of an argument against the representation of the female figure.

Rail: You made your name as part of the first wave of British Pop artists in the early sixties, and you still are often referred to as a Pop artist, even now, nearly seventy years later. How do you feel about that term in relation to your work as a whole? Do you still feel it’s relevant?

Jones: Well, as an old man, I can see that people looking at the work today don’t necessarily know I’m still alive and kicking and painting. Therefore, one is just identified with the moment when one came on stream. But I remember at the time, when the word was starting to be applied to our generation, that many of the artists I spoke to—Patrick Caulfield, for example—thought they had nothing to do with Pop art. But over the years, you just came to accept that as an epithet for our group of artists. But the great thing in my early experience of going to New York in the mid-sixties was to realize the significant difference between Pop art as it was emerging in America and in the UK. And that was before the term had even started to be extended into Continental Europe. I realized that the major difference was that the British artists really could not dump illusionistic representation. Even with Richard Hamilton, who would be seen as a sort of forefather of British Pop, the pictures were not formally, graphically flat, while the American artists really grew out of what has been characterized as the march from Mondrian to Minimalism. That fed into the idea of the artist realizing that they could use representation as a motif, while the pictures were formally declaring the material fact of the surface and the canvas. And what I realized through being in New York was that I could empathize with and understand the idea of emptying painting of extraneous ideas to do with “art.” But then you ended up with the pure Minimalism of Donald Judd and the idea that you can no longer represent the world around you. That seemed to me ludicrous, because representation is a compulsion which has existed since the dawn of humanity. I realized that it wasn’t representation that had hit the buffers, but the visual language being used that had run out of steam. And in talking with Roy Lichtenstein, I was interested to note that, for him, popular art was the source material. It wasn’t about making art that was popular in itself, like a visual equivalent of pop music. That was an interesting moment.

Rail: So when you talk about American Pop artists who had abandoned illusion, I assume you are thinking of Lichtenstein. And who else?

Jones: In terms of pictorial illusion, I would put Tom Wesselmann there. I mean, we’re not talking about the pictorial image, but his emphasis on the picture surface as a graphic fact. And James Rosenquist is an interesting person, as much as he actually did use volumetric illusionism, but his paintings were nevertheless stubbornly on the surface. Yes, it was a cultural difference. But as a visitor, I had an introduction to the New York scene through a man called Bryan Robertson, the director of the Whitechapel Gallery—which was then the place in London for seeing avant-garde art—who had introduced American painting, certainly Abstract Expressionism, to the UK. So any artist that he supported who was going to New York was given phone numbers, which in my case were basically Robert Motherwell and Helen Frankenthaler. Then I met Lichtenstein and Wesselmann, whom I became good friends with. From there it was a matter of being on the scene—and on Friday night, you’d go ice skating in Central Park. I couldn’t skate, so I was sort of shuffling around on blades. And what I liked was that afterwards, we would repair to one of the artists’ lofts for a meal. So you bounced off artists and met people you wouldn’t otherwise have come in contact with as a young person, fresh out of art school. I remember that so many people turned up at Lichtenstein’s one night that the table wasn’t big enough. So he got out one of his large enamels, a landscape, and laid it on trestles. And we all ate off the painting, which I, of course, thought was seriously impressive.

Rail: You grew up in a working-class, blue-collar family.

Jones: Yes.

Rail: Was there anything in that background that might have pointed you towards a career in art?

Jones: My father was what would be called a “Sunday painter”—an amateur watercolorist. Sunday was his only day off from the huge engineering company where he worked. And so my first memories were of standing with my eye level at table height, and looking at him practicing doing washes. There was this tilted board with laboriously stretched watercolor paper, and he would dip this brush into the paint, put it along the top, and then dip it into the water again, and by overlapping the previous stroke—with the paint, of course, dripped down the page—he got a flawless blue sky without any brush marks. So it was interesting that the thing that stuck in my mind, even then, was the act of painting, and how to do it without showing effort. And to this day, the brushstroke itself is not a part of my painting process, as I see it in my own mind.

Rail: But you do occasionally—more than occasionally—contrast this thinly painted, seamless illusionism with extremely large, thick brush strokes. What does that signify?

Jones: Well, it was discovering a material called Oleopasto, manufactured at the beginning of the acrylic era: a translucent, rather sticky liquid, which if you used it on its own, which I couldn’t resist doing once or twice, dried out with a look of the stain of sexual fluid—a fact that wasn’t lost on me. The claim was that if you mixed it fifty-fifty with your paint, you could make impasto paintings like Vincent van Gogh, which would never crack. I liked that idea. But with me that kind of brushstroke is used as an accent to assert the fact that the representation of the figure you’re making is not an illustration, but a painted image. I’m asserting the fact of the surface by putting the stroke on. And that is after a lot of meditation. So that’s how it happens in the way that you described.

Rail: You formed your decision to become an artist when you were very young. Apart from the physical pleasure of manipulating the materials, did you have an idea of what being an artist would involve? What did you imagine your life as an artist would be like?

Jones: Well, I had no idea. I mean, I was encouraged. There’s always someone in the class who’s good at art—put it that way. But I did have encouragement from a very early age. I came across an autograph book from my childhood the other day, and in it, under an autograph, it said, “Good luck with your career in art.” And it was signed, “Miss Summerhays,” who was the art teacher at the junior school. So I would have been leaving the school at eleven years old. And I was amazed to see there was that encouragement, which, at the time, I suppose I took for granted. But it was only around fifteen or sixteen years old that I knew I wanted to study art, and the art master in my school said, “Well, if you want to go to art school and be an artist, you won’t make a living selling paintings. So you have to become an art teacher, and you need to make sure you have all your O levels, or you won’t be able to get on a teaching degree course.” So that was a great incentive to do well in all the other subjects. And that was the reality for just about all the artists that I grew up with. It was interesting that in America, one of the artists said to me, “What’s this big deal about saying, ‘Where did you teach?’ or, ‘Where did you study?’” And I realized that in America, there wasn’t the idea that the automatic way into a professional career was to teach. You know, Rosenquist painted billboards. But I think almost without exception, artists progressed that way in England at that time.

Rail: You arrived at art school at a time when there was still the sense of a necessary revolt. There was the classic modernist sense that the artist has to rebel to find their path. So at what point did you realize—having gotten to Hornsey College of Art in North London—that you were going to have to develop a revolutionary position?

Jones: That idea has never occurred to me. But when I was studying, I must say that the general studies courses focused on art history and complementary studies were as interesting to me as the classes in drawing or painting. And I think it was because it was only in general studies that you heard about the world at large, rather than the opinion of the person peering over your shoulder, who in the fifties would have been what we would now call an “academic artist.” When you went to these lectures, you suddenly learned about the Bauhaus or Futurism. And there were lectures and talks, not about subject matter, but about the fact of your materials. Color theory was the thing which totally fired my imagination. And so when I graduated from there and went to the Royal College of Art, I assumed it would be the equivalent of going to university, where the exchange of ideas would be the thing that was most exciting. And so if one was at odds with one’s tutors, or had a different opinion about how you were doing things, I thought that would be the cut and thrust of learning. But suddenly, the head of the department called our group together (this was a three-year course) and said, “Listen, you can experiment in your final year, but in the first year, you should work from observation and nature.” And I thought he must be speaking about somebody else, because I was in the Life Room drawing from the figure—the same as David Hockney and R.B. Kitaj—every day. But history turned out to see it otherwise. So it never occurred to me to think, “Oh, we’ve got to rebel.” And I don’t think any of the other artists that I’m associated with thought that either. But we were all certainly moving things forward in our heads, given the arguments of the time.

It was interesting to have artists who were considered important at that time—such as Ruskin Spear, a realist influenced by Walter Sickert and Edgar Degas—observing one’s work. I was sitting doing a life painting, with him looking over my shoulder, and he said, “What has that color got to do with that model?” And what I had worked out from various lectures was that in Fauvism—which was the most recent avant-garde movement to have become part of art history—the dynamics of color had as much importance as the image being illustrated. So if I was painting the seated model mainly in reds, her extended arm might be painted green. So he said, “What has that got to do with the figure?” And I said, “Well, that green comes in front of that red, and her arm comes in front of her body.” And he said, “This is a gray winter. This is a gray model with gray prospects.” And he said, “You’re just a decorator!” And he moved on to the next person.

Rail: So you were forced into the position of becoming a kind of dissident at the Royal College of Art. And you paid a high price for it. You were expelled.

Jones: Our year was, in retrospect, a really interesting group, because my fellow students basically dominated the art scene in Britain for the next decade, if not a bit longer. Famously, it was David Hockney, Ron Kitaj, Patrick Caulfield, Derek Boshier, and Peter Blake, who had come slightly before us. All the artists that have subsequently been associated with the Pop movement.

Rail: But they decided to get rid of you.

Jones: Yeah, they stuck a pin in the list to decide who to get rid of, as an example. And it happened to be me. You make the best of the situation. But it was difficult at the time, because Royal College of Art graduates were automatically qualified to teach. So I felt I was being denied a living. Fortunately, no one else seemed to agree with the College staff. An art dealer saw my work in the Young Contemporaries, a major exhibition of student work, and I was given a contract at a West End gallery in what would have been my second year at the Royal College. At my first show, an art dealer from Chicago who had just opened in New York, Richard Feigen, bought one of my paintings and offered me a contract. I was sufficiently naive not to know whether it was a good gallery or not. I took one of those quick, ten-day, cheap trips to see how the gallery stood in the art world there. So I was in New York painting in what would have been my final year at the Royal College.

Rail: So although it seemed like a disaster at the time, getting kicked out might have been the best thing that happened to you. Because maybe it made you a bit hungrier than if you were complacently having a nice time with your fellow students at the Royal College. You went over to New York, and you got involved in all these things you’ve just talked about—these formalist approaches to painting—involving, to use a great buzzword of the time, a “tougher” approach. So maybe, actually, it was the making of you.

Jones: Well, it’s impossible to know, because within that same two-year span, the other artists in that little London fraternity also headed for New York, with or without contracts—with or without being thrown out. So I don’t know how different it would have been, but it would have been easier not to have been put through the wringer in that way. But that’s, as you say, history.

Rail: Looking around the studio, we’re surrounded by extraordinarily diverse ways of approaching the figure—specifically the female figure. And you know in the popular mind—and you are very fortunate as an artist to have a position in the popular mind, which most don’t have—you’re associated with what might be thought of as your core imagery: the female form as seen through a diverse range of popular imagery. How did you arrive at that quintessential approach to the female form that people know you by?

Jones: It’s been a matter of years of work, rather than a quick decision. The figure, not surprisingly, has been a cornerstone of art since the dawn of time. And from my earliest days as a student, the figure interested me more than the landscape. I grew up in the city and I only saw “nature” when I was in Wales, where my father came from, on holiday. Generally, I had no reason to go out into the countryside. Shortly after leaving art school, I put together a slide show as a teaching aid, of photographs I’d taken in Soho, in the West End of London, including parking markings on the road, which were a new invention at that moment. And it happened that they looked exactly like some of the paint gestures you saw in these strange paintings coming from America, from the Abstract Expressionists, in which the paint mark was the story. And so I made ten pounds a time for giving this slideshow with a talk and a pop music soundtrack in art schools around the suburbs of London. And the point was that all the students I was speaking to all lived in the city, and my message was that if the classic elements of nature weren’t outside your front door, don’t worry. Look at the pavement! That can be your inspiration.

Rail: Yet sitting here, I’ve got this long-legged, more or less naked, high-heeled figure striding out of a painting towards me. We’ve got a few more over there—a sort of figure that has, as I’ve described in the book, become the “Allen Jones Woman,” right? How did you arrive at the Allen Jones Woman?

Jones: Well again, in New York, in the heyday of Minimalism, I was looking around for artists who were still looking to the figure to create radical sculpture. There was Ed Kienholz. There was a young artist on the West Coast called Robert Graham. There was George Segal. And what I noticed looking at these artists was that although the work was seen in the popular imagination as modern and unusual, it nevertheless gave off a signal that it was fine art. Kienholz used assemblages which harked back to the early-twentieth century, and while Segal used objects from everyday life, like a bus wheel or a sofa or an armchair, the actual figure was cast in plaster, a traditional art material. And however outrageous—or not—there was this signal that it was actually art, which in a way let the viewer off the hook. And I wondered whether or not it was possible to represent the figure in a way which was free of those preconceptions, so that for someone confronting the figure it would be like bumping into a total stranger about whom you have no expectations. This moment coincided with my return to the UK after living for a year in New York. And I had the idea of reaching out to Madame Tussauds, the waxwork museum, and asking them who did their sculptures. They recommended a man called Dik Beech, who I commissioned to make a figure. And he asked, “What is the figure doing”? And of course, I thought, “I’m not interested in what the figure is doing. I just want to see the figure.” So I said, “What if it’s standing there saying, ‘Here I am.’” So the raised arms, which we used in the piece, had some reminiscences to the caryatids—columns in human form, seen in classical architecture—and so on. But it was simply saying, “Here I am.” And my original intention was to clothe the figure, go up to Oxford Street, and buy clothes and put them on it. But I realized it would look like some bizarre window mannequin. So I then thought, “What if the figure appears to have a function? That will remove it further from one’s expectation of art—of something involving the expressive touch of the artist’s hand.” I’d been introduced to the fetish comic strip artists in New York, and one of them had drawn a figure on all fours as a table. So the next sculpture I made using Dik Beech was a table. And that seemed to call for a chair. So when the works were first shown at the Arthur Tooth gallery in London, the press said, “If this is the table and the chair, what’s this standing figure?” And so they called it a “hatstand.” That has become its name now, but it was not how it was conceived.

Rail: And those still are your most famous works, aren’t they?

Jones: Yes, I suppose they are. I’m very happy if they’ve allowed me to at least put my foot on the world stage of art. I won’t use that particular figure again. But I used the same artist, many years later, to sculpt another figure which I’ve used in a whole series of works. What I’d noticed was that when you perceive a figure on a stage, you assign your own scale to the figure, and if you’re waiting afterwards for the person to come off the stage, you may notice that they’re smaller or taller than you are. So I was interested that if the figure is removed from your space, it assumes the scale it has in your head. So my idea first was to have the figure standing on a little table, which was an image I had seen of a flamenco dancer. I love the idea of someone dancing on the table, but I realized the scale of a full-size, nearly six-foot figure on a table would be too large. And so the size of these figures was dictated by looking at the clay model the guy was making, and making a decision on their scale. And it is an interesting thing, that if you take one of these sculptures off its plinth and put it on the floor, it looks like a twelve-year-old, because it’s actually a very small figure. And so it’s ticking quite a few boxes in terms of my interest in manipulating one’s perceptions of the figure in space. And most recently, I realised that if the figure was presented on a stool, juxtaposed with a painting, every time you moved the stool, you would totally change the compositional impact of the tableau. And it was interesting, even funny, to me that you could so easily change the dynamics of a picture.

Rail: But to go back to the so-called “furniture sculptures”—they’ve also given you a degree of controversy. How do you feel looking back on that?

Jones: I’ve realized that my interest in gender fluidity extends back to some of the earliest paintings I did professionally, which stemmed again from student studies in which I’d been introduced to the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche and his Thus Spoke Zarathustra. He puts forward this idea of dual identity, and my first professional folio of prints called “Concerning Marriage” took its title from the third chapter in his book. And it was about the marriage of one’s internal being with one’s external being. And he identified the creative process as being the feminine side of an individual and the active principle as being the masculine side. And it’s a very poetic way of viewing one’s human predicament. And I can now imagine what it would have been like to have been Juan Gris or Georges Braque or Pablo Picasso, creating images that would see them singled out or made to seem controversial. But now, looking back historically, we think of it as part of the march of time.

Rail: That’s fascinating. And funnily enough, I think we’re getting close to what makes you a visionary artist.

Jones: Well, how about it? I’ll go for that!

Rail: So we’re getting into mythic and archetypal ideas about identity?

Jones: Yes, that’s true. But it needn’t be conscious. I think that with any artist, their subject matter or their imagery—they might not like to call it “subject matter”—they are dealing with the essence of things.

Rail: There’s that extraordinary early work where what we see as a female figure turns out to be what you describe in the title as a “hermaphrodite.” There are numerous references to the “hermaphrodite” throughout your work. And this was one of those very early acrylic figures that you made, which was inspired, I believe, by a Roman sculpture you saw in the Louvre of a female figure raising her skirt. And when you walk around to the front, you see that she’s got an erect penis. And that ended up in this very abstracted sculpture you made in New York, where you see the skirt flying up and there's clearly a penis projecting through. And its seminal fluid is represented by paint.

Jones: Correct.

Rail: So it all comes back to paint.

Jones: The sculpture is now long lost, because it was made when I was living at the Chelsea Hotel in my first year in New York, when the French artist Arman was also in the hotel. I was intrigued to go to his studio, and find that he was working with resin, which was then a new discovery in art. He was freezing ball bearings into clear resin and then making them into a sort of coffee table, using acrylic sheeting. I was very taken with this idea that you could work on a transparent surface. And I realized that if I made a three-dimensional object out of acrylic sheet and painted on it, the color would appear to float in the room. And also, there was a strange phenomenon that if you painted on the surface of a sheet of acrylic—then called Plexiglas in the States—the color was transferred to the edge, and so you saw a colored line, which was virtual. And in making the boxed object, or whatever the form was, there would be lots of cut contours and edges, creating this virtual drawing that was appearing only to the viewer. Just before going to New York, I’d been in Paris, in the basement of the Louvre, and I saw the figure you just mentioned. It’s a Roman sculpture in a corridor of large marble figures. I couldn’t work out why this one was facing the wall, and when I looked up at it I could see this erect penis underneath the skirt they were holding up. And so it seemed to me that, in the spirit of Nietzsche, this was the subject matter for my acrylic sculpture. In those days, it was very hard to cut the acrylic sheet, and I didn’t know how to do it, so it was all in straight lines, in the form of a box, with the skirt represented by a diagonal sheet going through it, on which I painted a stylized pattern of a pleated dress. Then through the center of the box was the spine of the figure, a very thick piece of rope which hung down the middle of the figure and came out under the raised skirt and became the penis.

Rail: Looking around the room where we’re sitting, there’s a great deal of three-dimensional work, which has many of the attributes of painting. And the dialogue of the two and three-dimensional is everywhere in your painting. There are even paintings in which we see a dialogue of figures, where one is illusionistic, and the other like a piece of abstracted sculpture. So we have the kind of formalized flat, and the three-dimensional embodied in many, many works. This dialogue of the two and the three-dimensional seems to be something you’ve been preoccupied with from the outset. Nothing seems to want to stay entirely in one dimension or another.

Jones: Yes. I was thinking about this recently, because I’m just coming to the end of a little group of canvases which are shaped, not rectangular. But what I realize is that part of the incentive in making a painting is still to come to terms with the fact of the surface as an object. It’s a cultural thing that a canvas will read spatially if you put a mark on it. And I suppose—the shaped canvas, or putting a figure on a stool in front of it—that business of there being a three-dimensional fact which one has to incorporate or deal with has become the spark, really.

Rail: But hasn’t that been the case ever since you first went to New York and heard the ideas of Clement Greenberg? You then made your shelf paintings. You said that if you put a shelf in front of it, the canvas was declaring itself as an object, whatever you did with it. Hasn’t that been just a sixty-year project?

Jones: Well, there you go. I mean Greenberg stood for the other end of the spectrum really, and was a great writer and a sort of mediator to introduce the public and artists to the Color Field painting of the time. Funnily enough, I first saw that art at the American Embassy in London before I ever went to New York, at a time when art was being promoted as part of the image of America. The idea that you might go to an embassy to look at avant-garde work seems rather surprising now, but there was a very accessible foyer at the American Embassy in London, rather than the fortress that it is now. And that introduced one to cutting-edge painting, which presented a series of hurdles one had to jump over.

Rail: You once said that when one is painting something, almost inevitably, one becomes the thing one’s painting. When you’re really focused, you become the thing you’re painting. What did you mean by that?

Jones: What I mean is that when I’m painting something, I can feel it, as though I’m touching myself. And so if I’m painting a forearm—I mean, once upon a time, if an artist didn’t know what the anatomy looked like or what the inflection might be, they’d get a model and draw it. But it’s now become a kind of visual shorthand, and I think I know my anatomy well enough that I can use it for my own ends. But if I’m drawing, as in the painting behind you, where a man seems so excited he’s got his leg over the balcony in the theater, and he’s raising his arms—I can almost feel the surface of the anatomy I’m depicting, as though someone is running their hand over my own body. But my drawing is in the service of the painting. It’s an illusion.

Rail: My last question: You started as a painter, and we’re surrounded by three-dimensional images here in many forms. We’re surrounded by paintings that break up the edge of the typical rectangular canvas, that jut out of the wall, and by completely digital works. But I often feel that, fundamentally, you’re a painter, and that you think of yourself as, essentially, a painter.

Jones: I mean when people say, “What do you do?” I say, “I’m an artist.” But then they say, “And what do you actually do?” I see myself, actually, as a painter who sculpts. Because it is the color. That is the real thing. That’s it. Over and out.