Peter Blake On His Wartime Childhood, Celebrity And Storytelling In Art

Famed British Pop Art pioneer Peter Blake talks to Jing Zhang about his wartime childhood, celebrity and storytelling in art, and how a lifetime of collecting never really stops.

- Jing Zhang

That’s when Marcel Duchamp met the Spice Girls, at the same time as meeting Elvis, sitting on his travelling bus,” says artist Peter Blake of his Mystery Tour £2. 10s. 0d (2005), made from collaging together icons in art and pop culture across eras. Creating other-worldly scenes is “what the surrealists were doing, a lot” and that play on celebrity myth and fantasy “ just becomes part of the storytelling… Once you realise you can do it, there’s no reason not to”.

In a career spanning seven decades, with retrospectives at Tate Britain in 1983 and Tate Liverpool in 2008, 88-year old Blake holds towering status in the art world. Considered one of Britain’s living greats and knighted by Prince Charles in 2002, he’s dubbed the Godfather of British Pop Art. The music lover is also famous for creating album art for the likes of The Who, Eric Clapton and Oasis, but it’s The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band cover that remains his most recognisable work – a near-legendary, tongue-in cheek, star-studded collage.

Blake tells us from his home in Chiswick, West London, that he has been busy with a new exhibition, Peter Blake: Time Traveller, at London’s Waddington Custot Gallery (from Jun 18 to Aug 13). An exploration of his use of collage over a seven-decade period, it includes works from his famous Alphabet and Museum of Black and White series, his earliest collages from the ’50s and ’60s, as well as new, unseen pieces.