ALLEN JONES, R.A. | A FIGMENT IN PIGMENT

Alan Clore

Sale, Christian de Quay, Hôtel Drouot, Paris, 30th June 1992, lot 79, where acquired by the present owner

Allen Jones Figures, Galerie Mikno and Edizioni O., Milan, 1969, illustrated p.63.

'At the end of the 1950s life painting and figure painting had lost their edge.. But a new approach developed from the realisation that it was possible to refer to the human figure in a vital way by forming a new visual language that drew upon previously untapped sources of visual potential. Our "nature" and inspiration was the urban life all around us: advertising, cinema, the proliferation of magazines and the pinball culture imported from America...' (Allen Jones, quoted in Allen Jones Works, (exh. cat.), Royal Academy of Art, London, 2005, p.14)

We are grateful to the Artist and his studio for their kind assistance with the cataloguing of the present work.

Allen Jones first visited the United States of America in 1964. Just as his friend David Hockney was blown away by the Californian sun and swimming pool lifestyle, Jones was enthralled by the loud graphics and commercial culture of the American Dream. He lived in New York for a year and like a kid in a sweet shop, lapped up the energy of a city at the apex of its influence: 'New York was the centre of the art world. I went to America, in the way I would have gone to Paris if I had been living in 1905 or 1910, determined to experience it first hand, not knowing whether I was going to kill myself artistically or not. One just had to leap in..' (Allen Jones, ibid., p.52). Bold billboards and a retail frenzy must have been eye-popping in contrast to what he had grown up with in austerity Britain. He became fascinated by mail-order catalogues, of hoisery and lingerie from stores such as Frederick's of Hollywood and absorbed page after page of stockinged legs and corseted torsos depicted with a stylized directness that he had never experienced. He began to amass catalogues and fetish magazines such as Exotique and Bizarre later referring to this treasure trove as his 'dictionary of forms'.

The impact of America was instantaneous. On returning to London, he began his now iconic series of paintings focusing on stockinged legs in high heels such as Wet Seal (1966, Tate Collection, London) and Sheer Magic (1967, Private Collection). The confidence he had experienced across the Atlantic is palpable: his painterly technique of years past metamorphosed into a bold stylization, the female leg portrayed with a clarity of definition clearly inspired by commercial imagery, by a page in his 'dictionary of forms'.

In the manner of commercial bill board painting, each form is brought into sharp focus, the artist's brushstroke invisible and each contour gloriously heightened with rich, saturated colour. In the present work, the stockinged high heel is no longer the chief protagonist as Jones introduces male partners, suffusing the composition with a rhythmic movement that is prophetic of his large scale 'party' compositions from the 1980s. High art meets low culture united under the artificial beam of a nightclub spotlight. This was not the art of verisimilitude but a sophisticated play on commercial graphics, celebrating pop culture in all its glory.

Artist's Statement, October 2019

By the mid twentieth century avant garde painting had gone against the idea of the canvas as being a window onto an imagined world. From Cubism to Abstract Expressionism the idea was to assert the materiality of the picture surface. The making of the picture became part of its subject.

In A Figment in Pigment I addressed this issue by including a seam sewn across the canvas that would mediate any illusion that there were figures dancing in a spotlight.