Sgt. Pepper With Badges

pop /art

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POP/ART SIDE FOUR: Sgt. Pepper With Badges David Dunnico

2017

Denim work jacket decorated with metal pin badges featuring the people from the cover of The Beatles album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, designed in 1967 by the pop artist Peter Blake. The jacket is a homage to Peter Blake’s painting Self-Portrait With Badges. It is the fourth in a series of artworks by David Dunnico inspired by the Sgt. Pepper cover produced during the album’s 50th anniversary.

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SIX YEARS BEFORE he designed the cover of Sgt. Pepper, Peter Blake painted ‘Self-Portrait With Badges’. The fauxnaive style is not necessarily what we think of as pop art, but includes several of its preoccupations, especially the cultural dominance of Americana at that time. Blake painted the work in 1961, when he was 29 years old and just gaining recognition as a pop artist. Blake the artist shows Blake the subject full length, standing in his back garden in Chiswick. He looks out of the painting directly at the viewer. He wears a blank, maybe glum expression.

But it is the way he is dressed that says most. He wears Converse baseball boots, Levi 501 jeans with overlong turn-ups, a red polo shirt and a blue denim work jacket. Thirty-four metal badges are pinned to the jacket, which also carries an American and a British flag patch. In time such clothes would become a common uniform of youth. But in a Britain where post war rationing was a still recent memory and National Service in the military still compulsory, the clothes would be in today’s language, ‘aspirational’. A few years earlier when he was an art student, Blake had had to resort to cutting down a boiler suit to ape this look.

Now Blake was the real thing a painter with a pair of American Levi jeans. But here, rather than the bohemian chic of Jackson Pollack, Blake paints himself as a somewhat awkward and obsessive pop fan – collecting badges and causes like schoolboys collecting stamps and train numbers.

Blake painted such schoolboys and was an avid collector himself.

‘Self-Portrait With Badges’ Peter Blake (1961) Oil paints on board 1743 x 1219 mm

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Many of Blake’s works are collections of one sort or another and repetition and typology have helped him maintain a prolific output. At this early point in his career, Blake was interested in identity – especially in how clothes and adornments (such as badges and medals) could be used to declare the allegiances and interests with which a person’s might define themselves by, or at least present themselves to the world.

Blake had already painted around ten self-portraits, notably ‘Self-Portrait in RAF Jacket’ (1952/53).

In this he wears his own National Service issue Royal Air Force blue jacket – but pairs it with (non-regulation) harlequin circus trousers. In “RAF Jacket” he is casting off a compulsory uniform – an identity he is given and in “With Badges” donning one of choice, an identity he is assuming. And he is assuming an identity, not necessarily revealing his true identity. It is still a uniform, though one that, as we have said is changing from art student to pop fan.

In this he was very much in tune with the times – which were a’ changing – and pop

music was the catalyst for much of the change.

But he is harking back to heros whose time was passing. In his hand Blake holds a recent copy of Elvis Monthly magazine, featuring a cover photograph Elvis Presley and Tuesday Weld from the film ‘Wild In The Country’. In a nice twist the magazine published a photograph of the painting (after Blake, who has an underappreciated commercial savvy, contacted them).

Like Blake, the Beatle’s were greatly inspired

by Elvis. Presley’s influence on music and the wider culture was as great in the 1950s as The Beatles would be in the 1960s. John Lennon once said, “Before Elvis there was nothing”. Until the Beatles, English youth culture was largely a pale impersonation of American – Compare Tommy Steele to Gene Vincent, or Marilyn Monroe to Diana Dors (the latter two both appear on the Sgt. Pepper cover). The painting was made as this was about to change – and the role of The Beatles in this change from being a copy of an American original to one of British invention cannot be overstated.

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Famously, Philip Larkin wrote in his poem Annus Mirabilis: “Sexual intercourse began In nineteen sixty-three (which was rather late for me) Between the end of the ‘Chatterley’ ban and the Beatles’ first L.P.” Pop Art was an English creation that was largely concerned with American culture, which it both celebrated and criticised. It celebrated the glossy exuberance seen in commercial art and used many techniques borrowed from advertising (and sometimes the actual advertisements themselves). Blake had wanted to study graphic design, but was accepted onto a fine art painting course. But British pop art also had a satiric and sometimes cynical attitude to the Americanisation of English culture that rock and roll and the consumer society was part of.

Blake was more celebratory than cynical, perhaps because of temperament (he seems a very nice sort of man) and perhaps because he loved American music. His contemporary Richard Hamilton (who would design the cover for the Beatles’ ‘White Album’ a year after Sgt. Pepper) used Americana to make critical comments about capitalism. notably in his seminal ‘Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?’ (1956). Blake for his part, would draw on English subjects from the past including Alice in Wonderland,

fairgrounds and circuses. Others shared his interest, which later in the decade gave English psychedelia a different, childlike feel than the American West Coast strain. Whilst the badges Blake pinned to his denim jacket were predominantly American (perhaps it should be called Self-Portrait With ‘Buttons’) the garden setting and the melancholic expression might hint at the tension between the Old World and the New World.

The badges were out of date at the time he wore them, and it is as if he is acknowledging that an identity built on someone else’s image is a shallow one. Badges and medals, and signs and lettering were all Blake preoccupations, so much so, Jonathan Jones described Blake as a “Chelsea Pensioner of the pop revolution, chest laden with medals” in a Guardian article about the Self-Portrait. When he was painting the picture, he pinned the badges to the jacket and hung the jacket over ‘Drum Majorette’, his 1959 piece consisting of a dress maker’s dummy which medals had been painted onto. It predates a fashion for military uniform that inspired the outfits worn by the Beatles on the cover of Sgt. Pepper.

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The painting was widely seen, winning the junior section of the 1961 John Moores Painting Prize. (In 2012, Blake became the first Patron of the event, which is held annually in Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery.) Self-Portrait featured full page in an article on Swinging London in the first ever issue of The Sunday Times Colour Supplement (4 February 1962 – the year the Beatles released their first single).

A month later it loomed large in ‘Pop Goes The Easel’, Ken Russel’s documentary on pop artists, for the BBC television arts series ‘Monitor’.

The following year, Tony Evans playfully photographed Blake dressed in the same jacket and jeans in the same Chiswick back garden, which forms the backdrop to the painting. In some of the photographs Blake holds a cloth doll of himself also dressed in jeans. This was presumably made by Jann Haworth, his then partner and collaborator on Sgt. Pepper. The cover included another of Haworth’s ‘soft sculptures’ – the old lady, which the doll wearing a “Welcome The Rolling Stones” shirt sits on.

From the Tate’s catalogue entry: “The badges in the portrait which can be identified are as follows: on the left (i.e.

Blake’s right), second row, a First World War medal and below a badge with the head of Yvonne de Carlo and to the right of it one with the head of Max Wall, the English actor. On the right, (Blake’s left), first row, is a badge with ‘I like Fiorello’ (a reference to a show in New York), an American Flag (a reference to ‘God Bless America’) and ‘Diana Crack Shot’ (a reference to ‘Diana’ airguns). Second row, left, a French General, Road Safety and Pepsi Cola badges. In the third row a large Elvis Presley badge, ‘Temperance 7’ (a pop group) and Red Cross Day (Blake had used this badge in the imagery of ‘On the Balcony’ 1955–7 (collection Tate Gallery, T00566); beneath them a Lodge Plug badge. In the fifth row an American Boy Scout badge and Adlai Stevenson campaign and Union Jack badges. In the sixth row is a badge with a portrait of an American football player and an Adlai Stevenson campaign badge without words. In the bottom row is a Dan Dare badge. Of the badges in the self-portrait only those of Elvis Presley, Yvonne de Carlo and Max Wall were of personal interest to Blake and he usually wore only one or two badges at a time”.