First Step (crop) 1966 (oil on canvas), Jones, Allen (b.1937) / Private Collection / The Bridgeman Art Library
Allen Jones R.A.(b.1937) Bridgeman is very excited to announce that it has been chosen to represent one of Britain’s most distinguished and seductive artists from the pioneering Pop Art movement.
Over 200 high resolution images are now exclusively available for licensing via the Bridgeman website. Here is a brief overview of Jones’s life, work and influences with extracts taken from Allen Jones Works by Andrew Lambirth.
Allen Jones. Photo by David Worthington
Allen Jones was one of an outstanding generation of young painters, including Patrick Caulfield, David Hockney and R.B. Kitaj, who studied together at the Royal College of Art, London and were responsible for producing the first coherent exhibitions of British Pop Art, a movement that used the imagery of mass culture as the basis for its art.
Jones later recalled that by the end of the 1950s a new visual language was developing. ‘Our “nature” and inspiration was the urban life all around us: advertising, cinema, the proliferation of magazines and the pinball culture imported from America. I became excited by the aggressive strength that was present in depictions of the figure, outside the umbrella of “fine art”.’
Chair, 1969
Art as Provocation
In the mid-'60s Jones visited the States, living in America for a year, and was deeply impacted by the experience, returning to England determined to introduce a new clarity to his paintings, which he proceeded to do in a series of powerful canvases depicting stockinged legs in high heels. By the end of the decade, his work had burgeoned into three dimensions, with the controversial 'furniture' sculpture.'
Jones intended the furniture to provoke – but not as a political gender statement, as art. These sculptures are about the way we see things – in particular, the human figure and the functional object. They are also significant in broadening the definition of figurative sculpture.
Top-shelf magazine meets fine art; high-heeled, fetishistic women parade through a world of Matissean colour.’ Andrew Lambirth
Sheer Magic, 1967
2nd bus, 1962
Painting is, in many respects, Jones’s first love accounting for the larger part of his artistic output through a career that has lasted for more than forty-five years. In the famous Bus paintings of 1962, Jones adopted a shaped canvas to convey movement. They are also notable for their brilliance of colour, adopting a red/green polarity.
Shoe, from the series 'Shoe Box', 1968
‘Jones does for the leg what Stubbs did for the horse’ John McEwan (art critic)
After his visit to the States, the painterly brushmark disappeared largely from Jones’s work to be replaced by a harder-edged, graphic style reminiscent of commercial illustration.
Allen's later series of works include fresh, colourful watercolours and sculptures of interlocking couples that ask philosophical questions about humanity including the theory that each of us is a mixture of male and female.
The chief distinguishing features of Allen Jones’s work are his expert draughtsmanship, visual wit and passionate colour and it is these very qualities which we believe will prove very popular for licensing projects.
View over 200 images by Allen Jones