In Ken Russell’s 1962 documentary Pop Goes the Easel, a quartet of younger British artists are filmed dabbling in widespread tradition: they purchase comics at a road market, journey dodgems, dance the twist. One, tall, blond and in a neatly pressed shirt and tie, pours milk right into a bowl of cornflakes. “That’s the place the infiltration of American tradition begins,” he says, gloomily. “At breakfast.” This was Derek Boshier, who has died aged 87.
Boshier was then 24, and in his final yr as a graduate scholar on the Royal School of Artwork in London. Amongst his contemporaries had been RB Kitaj, Patrick Caulfield and David Hockney. The RCA class of ’62 would outline second-generation British pop artwork. The place Richard Hamilton’s 1956 present This Is Tomorrow had celebrated consumerism, these youthful artists would forged a extra crucial eye. Within the days of Aldermaston and civil rights marches, that eye would additionally usually be anti-American.
Thus Boshier’s 1961 portray Particular Ok. That includes Kellogg’s trademark letter about to gobble up a spoonful of cereal, the canvas is much less jolly than it appears to be like. To 1 facet are shadowy newspaper headlines and an intercontinental ballistic missile; the purple of the Ok’s left leg is smeared, as if bloody. A yr later, Boshier would paint England’s Glory, the depiction of a field of the eponymous matches with an American flag creeping throughout it. Nelson’s exhortation to his males to do their obligation is pushed apart by a picture of Yogi bear.
Boshier’s concern with the Americanisation of British tradition could have come from his father. Walter Boshier served within the Royal Navy for 28 years, and was absent for many of his son’s Portsmouth childhood. After the second world struggle, he and his spouse, Winifred (nee Harvey), moved to Sherborne in Dorset, the place Walter labored as a college caretaker and Derek went to major faculty. A poor scholar, he stunned his headteacher by passing the eleven-plus. (“He stated he thought my title had bought on the listing by mistake,” Boshier claimed later.)
This allowed him to go to grammar faculty after which to the Yeovil Faculty of Artwork (1953-57) for a nationwide diploma in design. Learning part-time at Guildford School of Artwork whereas doing his nationwide service, he went to the Royal School in 1959.
With Hockney and the remaining, Boshier was an RCA star. What he did subsequent, although, was usually unpredictable. Fairly than making use of for a journey grant to New York or Paris, he went as a substitute to Calcutta (now Kolkata). After a yr there, he returned to London to color formed canvases that married pop to hard-edged abstraction. Pop artists had been meant to supply pop artwork: the outcomes, proven within the 1964 New Technology present on the Whitechapel Gallery in London, had been greeted with puzzlement. Boshier’s dedication to not be certain by labels or markets usually dismayed his admirers. When he gave up portray for film-making within the early Seventies, he recalled, “some man got here as much as me and simply stated, ‘You. Fucking. Traitor.’”
Underpinning all this was a perception that for an artwork to be really widespread, it had to make use of widespread mediums. That pop must be in paint was not set in stone. “I’ve all the time shifted about,” Boshier stated. “Pop was completed for me in 1962. I exploit the medium that most accurately fits the thought. It’s so simple as that.” In a 2022 interview with the Press Affiliation, he stated: “It was a interval of my work. I’m not a pop artist. I’m a populist artist.”
This perception additionally underlay his engagement with musicians. In 1979, Boshier curated a present known as Lives on the Hayward Gallery. This brought about alarm amongst critics by together with the work of non-fine artists akin to cartoonists and stamp designers, but it surely additionally caught the attention of David Bowie.
Bowie requested the photographer Brian Duffy to introduce him to Boshier. The 2 can be pals till the musician’s demise in 2016, Boshier designing the duvet to his 1979 album, Lodger, which exhibits Bowie having apparently fallen from peak to a flooring. Each males had been fascinated by the determine of Icarus.
Boshier additionally made work for the Conflict, its founder and lead vocalist, Joe Strummer, having been taught by him on the Central Faculty of Artwork within the early 70s. Having not seen his ex-student since, Boshier ran into him in Oxford Road in 1978, hailing him by his outdated nickname of Woody. “He dragged me right into a shoe store and hissed, ‘I’m not known as that any extra’,” a laughing Boshier remembered.
Strummer invited him to design the group’s second songbook – which printed the group’s lyrics and photos – later that yr. “What excited me about working with David [Bowie] and the Conflict was that I used to be in a position to make work that reached out past the artwork world, to the world that my material got here from,” Boshier stated.
Regardless of his earlier antipathy to the US, he was to spend half of his life there. In 1980, he took a one-semester educating job on the College of Houston. He would keep in Texas for 13 years. Like his RCA modern and buddy Hockney, he would find yourself in Los Angeles, and spent his final 20 years within the metropolis.
As earlier than, his artwork consistently reinvented itself, dotting forwards and backwards between mediums. Having returned to portray within the 90s, he went again to film-making in 2016, with works such because the documentary I By no means Knew the World Was So Lovely (2019). His final present of work, a sequence known as Unusual Lands, was held on the Los Angeles Night time Gallery in April. That includes zombies and centaurs, these married summary shapes to particulars from El Lissitzky and Brueghel.
Boshier claimed that the strongest affect on his artwork and life had been his working-class roots. “I’ve discovered rather a lot from that and I’m happy with being working class,” he stated. He additionally remained unabashedly English, retaining his British citizenship whereas dwelling within the US.
“I spent my teenage years in Sherborne, Dorset, surrounded by lovely village names akin to Bradford Abbas and my favorite, Ryme Intrinseca,” he advised the Oldie journal, weeks earlier than his demise. “The very first thing I do when arriving in London from Los Angeles is to purchase a pork pie.” In 2016, he was made an honorary fellow of the Royal School of Artwork.
Boshier’s first marriage, to the Colombian artist Patricia Gonzalez, led to divorce. Their two daughters, Rosa and Lily, survive him, as does his second spouse, Thelma Gaskell.
