Men's Vogue: How does the title "Father of Pop Art" sit with you? Is there something that separates you from your Pop Art contemporaries, specifically your American counterparts Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, and of course the enfant terrible Andy Warhol?
Peter Blake: I wouldn't claim to be the only originator. Pre-Pop Art started in three places; in America with Jasper Johns and Rauschenberg, in England with the Independent Group with Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Palozzi, and at the same time, I was at the Gravesend School doing what became my branch of Pop Art. So I think we all started at the same time in the mid-fifties and preceded another thrust of Pop Art maybe four or five years later—Warhol and Oldenburg and the next generation. So I think I would only be happy with the title "Godfather." Jasper and Rauschenberg and Richard Hamilton are also godfathers, and we're all kind of equal.
MV: Warhol took art in a very mass direction, and you've done things like Babe Rainbow, that bring art to a wider audience and take it out of this elite realm. At the same time, there's a conflict there because so much of mass culture is troublesome. What do you think about that?
PB: Well, I don't think Andy was ever interested in making art available. However much he did, it stayed very expensive, whereas I think my interest in doing that has always been to literally make art available to anybody, so Babe Rainbow sold for £1 at the time, and recently I did an equivalent that sold for £30.
MV: You use images that are comforting, common memories, like Marilyn Monroe or the cover of Life magazine, but are also somewhat unsettling because you use them to comment on something. How do you celebrate mass culture and at the same time critique it?
PB: This goes back to the last question. I think one of the important differences between British Pop Art and American Pop Art is that on the whole British Pop Art was, and is, a celebration, whereas I think the American artist—if we take Lichtenstein as an example—was far more cynical. I think it was instantly big business and I think he kind of got…Well, the background to it, I think, is that he did a painting for his son of a comic book character. He showed it to [art dealer] Leo Castelli, who really liked it and sold it and wanted more like it, and Lichtenstein was suddenly stuck in the kind of treadmill of only doing comic pictures, and I think he was an incredibly frustrated action painter, in fact. I think he really wanted to be like Jackson Pollock, but got stuck making this product and never really broke out from it. He always seemed to me to be a very unhappy painter; there was very little joy in the work, and I think that's often the big difference. The same with Andy, in a way. He was also melancholic and towards the end really quite macabre with the crash paintings and things like that. So I think the big difference was that British Pop Art celebrated and American Pop Art made a critique of the culture.
