If you're seeing this message, it means we're having trouble loading external resources on our website.

If you're behind a web filter, please make sure that the domains *.kastatic.org and *.kasandbox.org are unblocked.

Main content

Peter Blake: Studio visit

This video brought to you by Tate.org.uk

Take a look inside the studio of artist Peter Blake, whose 1960s paintings and collages made him a leader of the Pop art movement. Perhaps best known for designing the sleeve cover for the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Blake continues to work with pop culture imagery, such as the cut-outs of vaudeville and film starts that populate his latest collage pieces. Through a diverse range of media including collage, painting, sculpture, and graphic work, Blake explores the world of pop idols and stardom. He even pre-dates some of his pop art colleagues, having worked with comic book images before Lichtenstein, and with sculptures of consumer goods even before Warhol.

Blake says that he sees his studio as a museum, and that "the act of collecting is a conceptual art form." When does a collection become a work of art? Can curating and arranging a group of objects be considered an artwork?
Created by Tate.

Want to join the conversation?

  • hopper cool style avatar for user Madeliv
    In the clip we see Peter Blake working on a collage with cut out famous people, a work which seems to resemble his 1960s work for the Beatles album a lot. Do 'great artists' usually improve their type of art their whole life (and are his current collages much more interesting than the work he made 50 years ago) or do 'great artists' usually change their preferred mediums and styles throughout their lives?
    (2 votes)
    Default Khan Academy avatar avatar for user
  • blobby green style avatar for user Dave Mac
    Is it true that an image of Adolf Hitler was supposed to have been one of the faces on the Sgt Pepper album cover, but was removed because it would have been too controversial?
    (1 vote)
    Default Khan Academy avatar avatar for user

Video transcript

I don't walk very well so I can't go to so many things so I think art fills those gaps and thank goodness now touch wood and my eyes with with glasses are still very good my hands are very steady so I can still do it a lot of the work I've done has been about kind of idolatry and stardom and things like that I'm very diverse I do all kinds of things your paint I make sculpture I do Young graphic work and one of the elements is college I used to share a flat with a an artist called dick smith and he explained to me about coach wishes and what the collage was I always thought that the colors had to have a bus ticket so the only ones always have a bus ticket American pop art came out of Jasper Johns arouse schanberg so I was influenced by them but they're not at all really bye-bye wall and liechtenstein I mean I made a sculpture of a box before and II did and I did work about comic books before liechtenstein did so did the point really as I predated them rather than being in for his body this one is called convention a vaudeville and film stars they're people dressed up as film stars so what I'm doing at the moment I've been cutting out all these pieces at home and I'm grading them in two sizes I've got an old catalog from 1927 of although the American border vallarta's but amongst them were people like the Marx Brothers and you people who hadn't really made their careers but it and it was at finding that book that added the board of element I mean the studio here it's become a museum and a lot of the work is about collecting I mean the actual collecting is a conceptual art form of food I've got some nice paintings of ships and objects about ships so some things I collect because collections just happened I'm doing a series called museums a black and white so all the time I look out for black and white things and they become our someone told me once I would probably lightheartedly to the CIA that they were encouraging the Abstract Expressionists and Lee and the American pop art it certainly wasn't in the interest of the American art world to admit that British pop art seeing as important as it later transpired to be you