Peter Phillips

There is no surviving correspondence between Peter Phillips and Ruth Borchard, but it seems that she saw his work at a Contemporary Art Society show in late 1962, and wrote to him in March 1964. She paid £20 for his self-portrait.

The picture was painted in 1958 when Phillips was just nineteen years old while still a student at Birmingham College of Art and Crafts, which he attended from 1955-59. Written verso is the title, Dawn, Noon and Night – reinforcing the timeless impression of intense blackness and brilliancyco-existing in the picture itself. Phillips, who was born in Birmingham in 1939, exhibited in 1959 for the first time in a 'Young Contemporaries' exhibition. So this early self-portrayal shows the artist before he attended the Royal College of Art in London from 1959-62, and before he had developed an early 60s reputation as an uncompromising Pop Artist.

In a sense, it goes against the grain of his future work: the foreground still-life of stoneware jar filled with dried flowers, white jar and somewhat streaky, stained bottle (containing maybe English brown sauce or vinegar) on a chequered black-and-white and mustard and olive chequered tablecloth seems quite contrary in spirit to his urbane 60s style. For a start, there are those dried or simply dead flowers, depicted with flourishing realism. The critic John McEwen has written: 'Peter Phillips's pictures first caught my attention in the Sixties because they were so totally to do with city life – not a blade of grass to be seen, everything unapologetically man-made, pin-ball machines, the stuff of an ordinary day, ordinary experience.' Yet this somewhat Kitchen-Sink still life ensemble in his self-portrait is painted with loving attention and real flair (in 1964, Phillips wrote: 'I'm basically interested in painting and not just in presentation of imagery.').

However, the conjunction here of still-life and the artist's bemused-looking, wide-eyed, rather pallid face hints at the kind of intuitive collagist approach that characterises his later Pop Art paintings. His face is apparently free-floating against a pitch black background – the oval contour around his chest suggesting a wall mirror reflection, maybe even a picture on the wall or even the artist oddly looking out through some kind of surreal port-hole. In a taped conversation from 1982 with Marco Livingstone, Phillips said: 'There is no such thing as nonsense. One "dreams" into a painting. Not in the sense of Dali, but this inexplicable feeling that one has, and a sudden, spur of the moment decision, are very important.' Livingstone has written: 'it is essential to Phillips that (artistic) decisions be made impulsively but that they be executed very methodically’. He goes on to quote Phillips (speaking in 1982): 'It's very related to Surrealist painting, the early beginnings of dissimilar elements together. This fascinates me. You put two things together, and it becomes something else. If you put them together right, it generates a totally new experience that can be very powerful [...] It becomes boring when you know what you're doing. That's why, even though it's always the same, there are abrupt stylistic changes in my work.'

Thus, though his self-portrait is by no means Surrealistic, the way the two things (the still-life and modish self-image – pictorial elements not conventionally considered 'dissimilar') are put together does indeed 'generate a totally new experience that [is] very powerful'. The dried or dead flowers may seem at odds with youthful grace and precocity (though the artist's youthful complexion here appears ashen and lacklustre) but the picture's circumambient blackness may allude to some awareness of mortality.

In the early and mid-60s, Phillips's face became quite well known in the media. There is a photograph in the November 1965 issue of Studio International of Phillips (Beatles-lookalike in a Beatnik-type black polo-neck sweater) seen peering through a five-sided star form created by him through manipulating the backs of framed canvases. In his self-portrait, in his hip black tie, white collar and black striped shirt, he is even more boyish – just nineteen, his sensuous features put in strong relief against the outlying blackness and the tablecloth's dazzling, proto-Op Art pattern.

At Birmingham College, Phillips became interested in fourteenth and fifteenth-century Italian painting, and during a 1959 visit to Italy was greatly impressed by 'pre-Renaissance Sienese and Florentine painting, where they split up the surface of the painting. It wasn't an illusionistic space [...] I was fascinated by the way they would divide up a panel. They would paint a figure and then they would have five or six little scenes going on, and to me that was very beautiful [...] because it deals with another sort of space.'

The atmosphere at the Royal College of Art was heady and experimental; fellow students included David Hockney, Ron Kitaj, Allen Jones and Derek Boshier; as the compiler of the Tate entry on Phillips noted in 1976, Phillips 'was particularly friendly [with them] they, like him had all started at the Royal College in October 1959, were painting in the same studio area and took coffee together'. Patrick Caulfield became a fellow student in 1960, and Pauline Boty  in 1962. The teaching staff tended to be much less sympathetic to new ideas, and, disapproving of Phillips's Pop Art pictures, had him transferred from the Painting School to Television School in late 1961. Influenced as much by magazine illustrations of works by Jasper Johns (b.1930) and Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) as by early Italian paintings, Phillips started making pictures subdivided into parts or 'panels'. These incorporated glossy, brash images of pin-ups (as in For Men Only - Staring MM and BB – Marilyn Monroe and Brigitte Bardot), contemporary cars, cartoon characters, movie stars, within a semi-heraldic, semi-pinball-machine format of vibrant psychedelia and abstract patterns. As (in his own words) 'a collage assemblist', Phillips created 60s works close in spirit, in many respects, to those of Peter Blake (b.1932), Richard Hamilton (1922-2011) and Eduordo Paolozzi (1924-2005). Increasingly, his work took on a seamless surface patina, one of air-brushed anonymity. Speaking of the 'glamour nudes' that appeared in his mid-60s pictures, he said: 'The figure is no more important than anything else in the painting. They're all recycled images which have been drawn by somebody else or reworked by somebody else.'

His intensely coloured, diagrammatically presented 1961 painting, The Entertainment Machine (Tate Collection), 'has a game board format but not a grid; some are empty and others are of complex activity [...] He aimed to paint impersonally without style or subject. His first work of this type was ‘Purple Flag’ 1960 (Private Collection, Switzerland), a Union Jack on a purple ground. In 1961 Phillips executed 6 or 7 paintings using as sources of imagery books and magazines in which reality was transformed by the painted image.

'Phillips says his attitude to painting has not changed considerably since 1960. In [The Entertainment Machine] he used imagery which reflected his interests at the time to make a painting. Sources included images of old machine parts, e.g. that at the bottom right of the picture is that of a pistol and a diagram of bullet sizes; at the top is a piano keyboard and a monster head; in the middle left are small targets. [...] Phillips sees [this picture] as reflecting a feeling of how he felt at the time, one relating vaguely to surrealism, without narrative or reference to any specific theme [...] The painted wooden strips around the painted canvas are part of the work, not of the frame.' (from The Tate Gallery 1974-6: Illustrated Catalogue of Acquisitions, London 1978).

In 1962 Ken Russell made his first full-length documentary for the BBC arts series Monitor: Pop Goes the Easel, focusing on four young British artists – Peter Blake, Peter Phillips, Derek Boshier and Pauline Boty, friends and colleagues, pioneers of the Pop Art movement. At forty-two minutes long, it evokes the youthful vitality, optimistic creative energy and social and critical awareness of this gifted foursome – Blake was twenty-nine, Phillips twenty-two, and both Boty and Boshier twenty-four – in what was at the time an elaborate, cutting-edge kaleidoscope of diverse, slickly urbane imagery, as the writer on cinema Michael Brooke has written, 'of film and pop stars (Brigitte Bardot, Buddy Holly), fashion magazines, fast cars, politicians, the space race, guns, girls, American culture in general, and anything else that could be made to convey a similarly vitality'.

The film opens with the artists seen exuberantly enjoying the pleasures of a fairground – playing pinball machines, riding dodgems, participating in a coconut shy and a rifle-shooting range; such activities helped inspire much of the spirit and subject matter of their collective art at the time. In the section of the film devoted to Phillips, we see him as both passenger and driver of a massive, snazzy American car in London, and then in the kitchen area of his flat, walls collaged with glamorous, sometimes saucy female pin-ups from newspapers and popular magazines. Phillips is seen having a cup of tea and rummaging through a magazine, called MONSTERS, coming across a page with a photo of man whose otherwise handsome face is horribly disfigured on one side – he chucks the kitsch periodical over to one of his female flatmates (or friends) to look at. He then walks into his bedroom, where another female flatmate (or friend) is playing on a gaudily ornate pinball machine inscribed with the name (or brand) KEWPIE DOLL.

The camera pans over various recent paintings by Phillips in the room, including The Entertainment Machine, which he had made the previous year. The sources of its vibrantly abstracted pinball machine references are partly clarified by what is seen here – as is the magazine source of a small panel near the top left of the picture, which contains the image of a man's head, gravely gouged and wounded on his right hand side, with a cartoon-like speech bubble above containing the plea 'HELP!' spelled out in poignantly miniaturist capital letters.

Towards the end of the film, the camera follows the four Pop Art pioneers as they saunter with gleeful high spirits through a London street market, then we see Blake and Boty stop at a newsagent to peruse with relish magazines of the occult and science fiction on a rack outside, with titles such as CREEPY, SECRETS UNKNOWN and SUSPENSE!Such garish, sensationalist, populist ephemera formed a prime inspirational source for all four artists.

A lengthy penultimate scene, which wonderfully captures the buoyancy and excitement of creative youth in the early Swinging Sixties, is set, presumably, in studio rooms at the Royal College, lined with students' paintings. Here, we see a host of partying students – including Peter Blake, Peter Phillips, Pauline Boty and Derek Boshier (as well as a young David Hockney with dyed blonde hair and in a white suit, improvising his own boisterous dance moves) fizzing with joy as they dance the Twist (the twist dance style dance had originated in the late 50s amongst teenagers, and was popularised by the American rock n' roll singer and dancer Chubby Checker in his rendition of 'The Twist', which had topped the pop music charts in 1960 – as it was to again in 1962).

Following this loud, effervescent scene, the film ends with the more meditative coda of views of the four young Pop Artists at work in their studios, to a soundtrack from Bach.

Phillips showed regularly in New York from the mid-1960s onwards, and later moved to Switzerland and, in 1988, Majorca. In a 1964 series, entitled 'Custom Paintings', he devised an elaborate method of composition, which he adhered to for the next ten years or so. The procedure was firstly to paint in the backgrounds, marking off image areas with masking tape and tissue paper, next to spray in abstract design effects with the aid of specially-cut stencils, then to paint in the larger figurative details using projected slide images, and finally to paint in shiny metallic surfaces with regular artist's silver paint – a slightly impudent take perhaps on the precious silver and gold surfaces in a medieval icon or on the gold and silver leaf covering many areas of early Renaissance works by painters such as the Sienese Duccio (active 1278; died 1319) and the Florentine Paolo Uccello (c.1397-1475).

Though the 'Custom Paintings' – with their whirling imagery of pin-up nudes, automobile fragments and well-deliberated presentation of inane mechanistic patternings – were thought out before he went to New York (in 1964-66 on a Harkness Fellowship), he says that in America 'I took my basic ideas and [...] doubled up on just how banal and aggressive I can get, and how clichéd I can get, and I took it to extremes. I think to greater extremes than most of the Americans.' By the late 1960s, Phillips's preoccupation with slick, anonymous-appearing surfaces had led him to use the airbrush almost exclusively.

The London-based art dealer Alan Wheatley has written: 'In his early 1960s work, Phillips trusted his intuitions in marrying the formal grandeur and ambitious scale of Abstract Expressionism with his passion for the trapping of youth culture, with all its associated glamour, energy, sexuality and violence; he borrowed his imagery and hard-edged formal patterns from game boards, the funfair, pin-ups, comic books and other popular sources.'

In the mid-70s, Phillips went on to reproduce highly fragmented photo-realistic imagery within painted grid forms. But by the early 80s, he was using the paintbrush again, though in an extremely measured way, sparingly setting all kinds of ominous imagery – 'open scissors poised for violence, insect and animal-like tools, a writhing female python [...] a masked head and gloved hands' (in Marco Livingstone's words) – against enticingly melodious colour fields. Wheatley has noted that 'During the 1970s he painted a series of Compositions and Select-O-Mat paintings, populated with predatory birds, molecular structures from the pages of ‘Scientific American’, motor engines and machine parts.'

Philips's 90s collagist pictures are subtler, more poetic and certainly more painterly than his work of the previous two decades. Two works of 2012, Implode and Furies (both mixed media and wax on canvas), present anarchically swirling biomorphic masses of dematerialising shapes and forms – the furiously imploding detritus of our high-tech civilisation perhaps (with its tendencies towards quite miraculous technological miniaturisation) – against, respectively, luminous lilac and crimson backdrops. These pictures continue to demonstrate the paradox of what he has called 'spontaneity' within 'a very logical way of working'.

- Text by Philip Vann, updated and revised from the first edition of Face to Face: British Self-Portraits in the Twentieth Century, 2004