Peter Blake

Since his emergence in the early 1960s as a key member of the Pop Art movement, Peter Blake (b.1932) has been one of the best-known and widely loved artists of his generation. Blake's reputation from the outset was based on working across all media. Though primarily a painter, he has produced collages, drawings, watercolors, sculpture, prints, as well as commercial art in the form of graphics and album covers, most notably his design for The Beatles' "Sgt Pepper album" in 1967. "Peter One-man Show" 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 the working-class existence that he led as a child and a teenager, 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.