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Allen Jones, painter, sculptor and print-maker – he calls himself a painter who sculpts – is arguably the first, debatably the most famous British pop artist. I meet him in the studio he built 20 years ago, when he moved out of London to the Cotswolds, the kind of chocolate-box surroundings where they’ll only let you build something if it looks like a barn. “But a barn is designed specifically to keep light out!” he says in amused frustration, and huh, yes, sounds obvious when you say it. An architect found his way round that, and the place is swimming in light.
Against one wall of the studio are five of the fibreglass female figures he made as an ongoing series between the early 80s and 2015. At 5ft 2in, they are slightly smaller than lifesize mannequins. The critic Mark Hudson has described them as having “a faintly unnerving quality, with something of the doll, something of the surrealist totem and the automaton, like Coppélia”. In the facing corner is Hatstand, part of the fetish furniture series that inflamed the feminists of the second wave. Steps – comprising Hatstand, Chair and Table – have the distinction of having been controversial in pretty much every decade since the creation of the first, in 1969.
You’d recognise these sculptures immediately – Hatstand is a woman in thigh-high maroon leather lace-up boots. The model-maker’s “first question,” Jones recalls, “was, ‘What’s she doing?’ and I said, ‘Well, she’s standing. In this ancient gesture of “Here I am”.’ I’m drawn to that hieratic figure, the ultimate notion of the figure.”
Table is a woman with her breasts exposed, wearing long black gloves and a waspie corset – that old-school porn effect of clothes that accentuate nakedness – on all fours, with a pane of glass on her back. Chair is a woman lying on her back with a cushion on the backs of her thighs, so that you could sit on her. For 50 years now, critics and thinkers have been arguing about whether these represented a critique of the patriarchy, or were, themselves, patriarchal oppression. “I think it hampered my career,” he says quietly. “I’ve never said that to anybody.”
There are layers to this, the topsoil being discursive: for sure, and for years, the Step figures were all anyone wanted to talk about. When Jones was interviewed in Hamburg in 2016, that was the first time a journalist had ever not brought up Hatstand, “and then she rang up, later in the evening, and said, ‘My editor said, yeah, but what about the women?’”
Beneath that, there’s that sharp disappointment of feeling that you’ve been misconstrued. “Militant feminism was a reaction to the same society I was living in. If they’d asked me to illustrate their manifesto, you’d think that was the perfect image: a woman on all fours, being made into an object.” And beneath that was his true intention, which has got entirely lost in the sound and fury, and while the intellectual in him gets that even “when people look at a Turner, they’re bringing their experience and perception to it. They’re not interested in why that was painted like that”, the artist in him was trying to have a different conversation altogether.
“During the 60s,” he says, “the figurative artists in New York, who were working in sculpture, [George] Segal for example, there were echoes of surrealism, so it might be a real bicycle, but the figure was always in plaster. There was always this signal – it might look weird, but it’s art. And I thought, ‘How do you do it so that you remove that safety valve?’ And then I filtered that through my interest in pop culture, in fetish magazines, and memories as a child of going to Madame Tussauds.”
He removed the safety valve, all right. Then it blew up. Turns out those things are there for a reason. “Depending on your point of view, this sounds like an excuse or an apology,” he says. I actually never thought the Step sculptures were misogynistic, I always saw them more as a gauntlet, and fascinating – objectification rendered as object. But then, I’m just one feminist, and like so many of us, I disagree with half the others.
Allen Jones was born in 1937 and grew up in Ealing, London with a dad who loved to paint at weekends but was miles from any contemporary art scene, and who worked in a canning factory. Jones remembers seeing the Hoover building, “of course, in those days, it stood out like the Taj Mahal”. He remembers visits to Southampton, after the war, when the Queen Mary or Queen Elizabeth were in dock, “this illuminated ship, towering above the town”. His parents loved spectacle, the Lord Mayor’s Show, trooping the colour, “that thing, getting on the underground at Ealing Broadway, and 20 minutes later, arriving at Marble Arch, the beginning of the city. That idea of the glamour of the city stuck with me.”
He went to the Royal College of Art, and as a result of some incredibly 60s clash over who controlled the academy – the tutors or the students – he got kicked out, a random choice by all accounts, pour encourager les autres. He had expected the education to be more discursive and open to challenge than it was. “They’d say, ‘You can experiment in your third year. For now, look at nature.’ And you’d sit there thinking, ‘Is this a joke?’ We were working our arses off. I was in the life room pretty well every day, so was Hockney, so was Derek Boshier.”
Jones, exiled, did a teacher training course, but the Royal College accidentally crowned him winner of their young contemporaries mural competition the same year he got kicked out, and this launched him. The teaching qualification, meanwhile, came in useful when he got a teaching gig in the late 60s in America.
He went to New York in his mid-20s, newly married, moved in to the Chelsea Hotel, which was rammed with other artists and people giving cello recitals, naked. “It wasn’t group sex or anything, with us. We lived a very correct existence, and my wife [Janet, his first] became pregnant, as it happened, with twins.” (One daughter now works in arts administration, the other at law firm Clifford Chance).
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He went to teach for a while at the University of South Florida, then came back to the UK still predominantly a painter, making Neither Forget Your Legs and Shoe Wheel: “These legs painted as three-dimensionally, as grabbable as possible. I thought that I was inviting the viewer to go into the space. But by the end of the 60s, after I’d done about four or five of these paintings, I realised that actually I was inviting the figure to come out.”
That spurred him towards sculpture, and – skipping a number of years, here – another hot-button piece, Kate Moss in her sculpted fibreglass, leather and stainless steel suit, Body Armour, in 2013. It wasn’t controversial, as such. It generated more of a kind of critical confusion. Was this high brow or low, or no-brow, or what the hell?
“Over the years, I’d occasionally been invited to do a portrait. And I’ve never quite squared the circle of a commissioned portrait, where I feel that the obligation is to record the person, as opposed to the person as an artist’s model, giving themselves to the artist. The one that I liked is when Picasso painted Gertrude Stein, who then said, ‘It doesn’t look anything like me’, and he said, ‘Give it time.’”
I asked him which period of his life he felt most centre-stage – in the late 70s, when there were retrospectives at the ICA and the Serpentine, or maybe a decade ago, when the Royal Academy had one. Or perhaps in the mid-60s, when he went to America and doors swung open for him, as both visionary and interlocutor, cross-pollinating European upheavals in contemporary art and American iconoclasm.
“I’ll be very pleased if I think I’ve had my foot on the stage,” he says, modestly. “I don’t take any of that for granted at all. I think I’m sufficiently a realist to know …” he says tentatively, then starts again. “It might turn out that you put more on the stage than your foot. I do feel that I was part of the contemporary dialogue.” This is literally as well as creatively true: he has a searching openness that feels much closer to the beginning of a career than the end, not just about his own work, but about everything he’s ever seen.
