(born in Southampton in 1937)
Blue Bosom (or Chest), 1964 – 65, paint, mixed media, rough canvas, lace, fiberglass on board, 50 x 36 x 13 cm

Provenance:
Richard Feigen Gallery, New York/ Chicago (labels on the reverse) Feigen Palmer Gallery, LA (label on the reverse)
Point Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Rome –
acquired 1983/4 from the above by the father of the present owner

Allen Jones was one of the hot young British Pop artists in the early 1960s alongside the likes of David Hockney and RB Kitaj. He is a widely known, divisive figure in the UK art scene for his controversial fetishistic sculptures of women which have lent fuel to a heated cultural debate. He has explored these issues for decades, and they are still incredibly topical, making his art more relevant than ever.

Allen Jones has worked hard to separate himself from his peers: while contemporaries such as Larry Rivers, Jim Dine and Claes Oldenburg were busy carrying ideas from abstract expressionism over into the pop art movement, Jones refused to give up figuration, making a steady return to ‘popular culture’ in the true sense of the term. Not ironic, not critical, not distanced; instead, his celebration of the sensibility of popular culture is given shape in a figurative high-style powered by cartoon illustration and design at its best.

“I realized with the language I’d taken from adult comic books and advertisements I’d created a kind of vocabulary about the figure which was very stylised. I was compelled to make the figures as tangible, grabbable, and three dimensional as possible,” he said.

The piece presented here was acquired at Richard Feigen Gallery in New York, where Jones’s historic show in 1970 was held and is particularly iconic of his work, fully embodying his aesthetic research.