Pop Goes The Arts Club: The World of Peter Blake

The Arts Club opened an exhibition bringing together paintings, found objects and collage artworks by Peter Blake, the President of The Arts Club and a long-standing member since 1981. 

Bringing together new and historic pieces, the exhibition includes Blake's recent painted portrait series Girl with a Disney Tattoo, on public display for the first time; portraits of both Queen Elizabeth II, painted in 2012, and Meghan Markle, painted in 2018; collage works from his Joseph Cornell’s Holiday series; and works featuring his long-time obsession, Pop icon Marilyn Monroe.

Pop Goes The Arts Club: The World of Peter Blake shows how an ongoing fascination with popular culture and history, including music, film, art historical figures, the Royals and celebrity is at the core of Blake’s work. Since the late 1950s and early 1960s, he has been one of Britain’s best-known Pop artists, and arguably its most idiosyncratic. Throughout his practice, Blake has cultivated a specifically British pop aesthetic on his own terms: a counterpart to both American Pop artists such as Warhol or Lichtenstein, and to his British peers Allen Jones, Patrick Caulfield and Joe Tilson, Blake also draws on his own interests in folk art, Victoriana and counterculture to form a highly distinctive visual language.