Joe Tilson: the forgotten king of British Pop art
On the eve of this year’s London Original Print Fair, the Alan Cristea Gallery is mounting a retrospective of neglected Sixties artist Joe Tilson, who found fame before the Beatles and David Hockney.
By Colin Gleadell
Affordable: a detail from Joe Tilson’s Stones of Venice, Pomegranate, which was inspired by San Marco in Venice and costs £1,500 Photo: COURTESY ALAN CRISTEA GALLERY, LONDON
Who is the best-known living British artist in Italy? Is it Lucian Freud, David Hockney or Damien Hirst? Wrong, wrong, and wrong again. The answer, according to Cork Street dealer Alan Cristea, is Joe Tilson, a first-generation British Pop artist, for whom Italy has been a second home for decades.
Tilson had been spotted for Marlborough in 1961 by John Kasmin, the dealer who later gave Hockney his first solo exhibition, and was the first of a group of young art stars to launch the gallery into the Swinging Sixties with a highly successful first show in 1962. “I was famous before the Beatles and Hockney,” Tilson says. However, fame, money and the machinations of the art market have never much interested him.
After he started making prints in 1963, similar objections were raised. When some were hung in the gallery window, the Printmakers Council objected on the grounds that they were not “original” prints because they had incorporated reproductions of images from magazines and newspapers.
“In the Sixties, I thought the question, ‘What is an original print?’ was totally irrelevant,” Tilson recalls. “My aim was to make things that corresponded to my feelings and thoughts – not to pre-established categories.” He made a list of things you were not supposed to do in printmaking: “Make each print different; paint on prints; tear the paper; crumple and fold the paper; make holes in the print; make three-dimensional prints; glue objects to the print…”, and so on. One by one, he broke each rule.