Peter Blake

A fully updated edition of the most comprehensive illustrated survey of the life and work of Peter Blake, one of Britain's most popular artists. Since his emergence in the early 1960s as a key member of the Pop Art movement, Peter Blake (b.1932) has become one of the best-known and most widely loved artists of his generation. Though primarily a painter, Blake has produced collages, drawings, watercolours, sculpture and prints, as well as commercial art in the form of graphics and album covers, most notably his design for The Beatles' Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album in 1967.Peter Blake considers the artist's remarkable diversity, assessing his work across all media, from the 1950s to the present. Marco Livingstone grounds Blake's art firmly in his working-class origins, identifying a yearning for the innocence of childhood in Blake's bittersweet paintings of the early to mid-1950s depicting children reading comics or going to the Saturday matinee at the cinema. From that moment, while studying at the Royal College of Art in London, Blake concerned himself with popular entertainments as subject matter for his paintings. The directness with which Blake gave expression to his enthusiasms for mass culture during the 1950s brought him to the forefront of the Pop Art movement before it had even been named, and independently of the investigations into similar areas by other British, American and European artists. First published in 2009, the book has been fully updated and includes a completely new chapter that brings the story up to date. It is a wonderful celebration of the diverse and endlessly imaginative one-man show that constitutes the extraordinary work of Peter Blake.