Peter Blake at Tate Liverpool June 29-September 23. (Tel: +44(0)151 702 7400)

The Financial Times - June 8 2007 - Peter Aspden
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007

Sir Peter Blake is busy preparing for two important events at the end of this month: his 75th birthday and a big exhibition of his work at Tate Liverpool. But don’t mention the two “R” words, retirement or retrospective, he warns me. They are banned. “I’ve decided that it isn’t a retrospective,” he says firmly, and then softens slightly. “Not the retrospective, anyway. There has already been one [at London’s Tate in 1983]. Perhaps there will be another one.”

As for retirement, he says he has no intention of stopping working. He announced a well-publicised “conceptual retirement” some years ago but that was something different entirely. “I decided to retire from anger, ambition and jealousy,” he says as if talking about giving up sweets. I ask if he has been successful. “I think so, yes. They are still there to a degree. But I know there are painters I can’t compete with. I know I can’t do what Frank Auerbach does. I can’t do some of what Lucian [Freud] does. Of course in my mind, I am still competing, but there is no jealousy.”

Blake’s idiosyncratic take on the autumn of his career should take no one by surprise. A pioneer of pop art in the 1950s, an essential component of London’s cultural scene in the decade that followed and creator of the most iconic album sleeve in history, The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, he has nevertheless remained something of a maverick, curiously distanced from true celebrity and stellar wealth.

We talk about the amount of money in contemporary art today and he tells me, without any palpable trace of anger, ambition or jealousy, that he has never seen much of it. “I live in a nice house, I have a nice studio, and I am not worried about money. Which I like.” What would it have been like to create art, as some of today’s artists do, that instantly made millions? “Impossible. I couldn’t have made the decisions I’ve made.”

He gives me an example. “Lucian had just made a portrait of Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza [the art collector] and there was discussion of who would do the next one. It was worth about a million. Chrissy [Blake’s wife] and I were invited round, and I sat at the head of the table while Chrissy sat at the other end, and no one talked to her. They completely blanked her. I decided then and there I didn’t want to do the commission.

“I’ve made decisions that were not conducive to making money,” he concludes neutrally.

He is approaching the Tate show with a similar obstinacy, refusing to use it as a seal to his career. A room containing works in progress will follow the main narrative of the exhibition, “like Monty Python, when they had a sketch after the credits and BBC logo”, just to hammer home the point that he is still working, and working happily.
A recent preoccupation is Marcel Duchamp, the conceptual artist who is increasingly looking, for his influence on today’s artists, like the key figure of 20th-century art. A series of five paintings has Duchamp meeting his successors-in-spirit, playing chess with Tracey Emin and hanging out with Damien Hirst, as well as greeting the Spice Girls and Elvis. Blake describes the series as a “thank you to Duchamp. I am giving him the gift of living forever. Everybody in the 21st century owes a debt to him.”

He clearly loves the idea of being the mediator between the great surrealist and today’s generation of artists. Blake has always been demonstrably supportive of the Young British Artist movement and describes Emin and Hirst as friends. I say I have just interviewed Hirst, and his face lights up. “I like him enormously. Did he get his cock out? He used to do that.” (He didn’t, for the record.)

He has a theory about Hirst’s work, that in his spot paintings and spin paintings he has covered both traditions of abstract painting, the one based on orderly grid patterns and the other on expressionistic swirls of colour. “It was an incredibly clever move. He is on a tightrope, but I can’t see him falling off.”

I ask if he likes to be called the godfather of the YBAs. “I do, yes,” he says rather tenderly. “Although at a dinner last night I said I would relinquish the title to Richard Hamilton.” He makes it sound at the same time mischievous and courtly. He also says he loves working with today’s pop artists, such as Oasis and Paul Weller. “It is very exciting, making those links across generations.”

We move uncertainly to Sgt Pepper. Blake doesn’t like to talk about it, not because he famously received just £200 for a work that adorned one of the biggest-selling albums in history, but out of boredom. He says he has still kept two of the cut-out heads, which will be on display in an educational section of the Tate show. “I couldn’t not do it in Liverpool, of all places.”

The subject still “rears its ugly head”, he says. He recently signed a copy for a fan in Oslo, only for him suddenly to pull out five more copies. “You either get churlish or you just accept they will all appear on eBay. It’s very difficult.”
He has said in the past that he would rather have designed the sleeve for The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds. Was that true? “Yes. I was a Beach Boys fan before I was a Beatles fan. It was a different phenomenon. Brian Wilson was a genius in a different way.” His remark led to a meeting with Wilson, and a commission for a new album sleeve. “We had lunch, and he was very happy within himself. The damage is done, all those trips. But he can live with that now. I love his records.”

I ask what it was about American culture that so fascinated his generation of artists. One of his most famous early works, “Self-portrait with Badges” showed Blake paying homage to the accessories of Americana: Elvis, Converse trainers. “It wasn’t that they were American, it was the figures themselves. If you were going to choose a cultural figure, it had to be Elvis.” I notice he is wearing Elvis cuff- links. Does he still carry a torch? “I still love him as a figure.”

Blake soon became more absorbed in the popular culture of his native Britain: his themes switched to fairgrounds, circuses, famous figures from the boxing and wrestling worlds. He says there were three sources for the pop art movement: one group of artists working in the US, another at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts, and another, his own, at the Royal College of Art. “That was in the mid-1950s. Then came the main thrust in the late 1950s, Warhol and Lichtenstein. The history of the movement then became rewritten. I made a wooden box before Andy Warhol.”

Blake’s days as a student were spent leading a double life, “studying Beethoven and Cézanne at college, and going to wrestling and jazz clubs in the evenings”. Then came an epiphanic bringing together of his art and his life, and the artist had found his voice. “People didn’t really understand what I was doing. But they accepted that I was a painter because my work was figurative.”

He explains how he has always worked in the figurative tradition, but then abruptly announces a possible and unlikely change in direction. “I have decided that on my birthday, I am going into my late period. I am going to seize the moment. A late period is always imposed on you by historians. [Henri] Gaudier-Brzeska and Aubrey Beardsley didn’t know they were in their late periods [both artists died in their 20s]. Picasso didn’t embrace it, he became more and more tortured.

”But I can become an eccentric old bloke. Maybe I’ll do some abstract expressionist pictures. This gives me the chance to go barmy.”

As we come to the end of what can only be described as a leisurely lunch, I ask if his interests in his Who’s Who entry still hold true: “Wining and dining” and “Living well is the best revenge”. “Absolutely,” he says. “And there is another one: staying ahead of the avant-garde. It’s a nice, impossible, surrealist idea.”