Peter Blake’s Rejection Letter: “I suppose that counts, getting rejected by the Queen!”

I’ve certainly been rejected. It isn’t something you think about often, but it’s interesting for it to be the subject of your thoughts for a while.

The first on my list is called ‘grammar school’. My brother and sister both passed the examination for Dartford Grammar School. I took the examination while I was evacuated at the beginning of World War Two and I failed. At the end of the war, aged 13, I went to Gravesend School of Art. You had to choose whether to do the fine art course or commercial art. I wanted to be a painter, but the advice was to do commercial art because I wouldn’t make a living as a painter. I took that advice. After the first year, somebody recommended I try for the Royal College. So I applied to the commercial art department. But Robin Darwin saw my portfolio with one little painting of my sister and said, “We shouldn’t take this student into commercial art, we should take him into the painting school!”. So that was fate – a positive rejection. Let’s go back to negative!

In 1956, I was in my last year at the RCA. Most of my tutors were famous Royal Academicians like Carel Weight and Ruskin Spear. Another Academician, James Fitton suggested that I apply for the RA Summer Exhibition. I submitted my painting Boys with New Ties. James loved it and hung it in the show. When he went back in the next day, it had gone. The president had taken it down because he didn’t like it. The second night, James put it up again, but it came down again. This happened for three nights. On the third night, just before the show was being sanctioned, James snuck it past the president. That was the first time I showed at the Academy – failure, acceptance, failure, acceptance, failure, acceptance. When I became a Royal Academician in 1981, I introduced the idea first of having one room in the Summer Exhibition that an artist was invited to curate. It became an established thing, even after I resigned.

Over my working life, which is now more than 70 years long, there have been a lot of rejections from exhibitions, but you tend to forget about those. Sometimes you lose and you just have to move on to the next. The first year I entered the John Moores Painting Prize in 1959, I was rejected. When I tried again in ‘61, I won the junior prize for under 35s with Self Portrait with Badges. I was up against artists like Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach! You can be rejected at one point and then suddenly accepted the next. Self-Portrait with Badges was a real painting; it looked like me and it ticked all the boxes at the time. In a way, that rose above the general babble of my work.

With Pop Art, there’s always the question of who did what first. But in around 1959 I went to Robyn Denny’s dinner party, and the critic and curator Lawrence Alloway was there, a huge supporter of my generation. I was trying to explain to Lawrence that I was making art like people make music; they all use the same notes, but you can have pop, rock and roll, rap or Beethoven. I was trying to make an art equivalent: you’re using the same canvas and paint, but you’re reading it like different music genres. And Lawrence said, “What, a kind of pop art?” I’ll stand by that story.

The next rejection was at the ICA in the late 1950s. Every year, they had a charity auction where several artists gave their work. They sold the tickets with a number on and the person who drew number one had the first choice of the 100 pictures on the list. Picasso always gave a drawing because of his link with Roland Penrose (the ICA’s then director), and the Picasso was always snapped up first. For three years running, I was the very last to be picked, and that list included some awful, awful pictures! One year, people could choose the pictures they wanted and take them down from the wall themselves. At the end of the night, my picture, a little collage incorporating a comic book character, was on the wall by itself. The person who’d drawn the last number went up to it and said to his wife, “Shall we just leave it, dear?” That was a pretty hefty rejection.

Another moment that really affected my career was when I took part in the group show, ‘New Realists’ at Sidney Janis Gallery, New York, in 1962. It was my first time showing in New York. It was a mix of European and American pop art, including people like Ed Ruscha. I got some really bad reviews from New York critics, saying that I was copying art like Andy Warhol’s. If you ever do an article on shooting yourself in the foot, we can include this, but I decided to never do a solo show in New York after that and didn’t until relatively recently. I turned down a solo drawing show at the Museum of Modern Art because I felt rejected by the reviews. I don’t regret it, and I don’t think my career would have been as complete and satisfying as it’s been, but who knows what might have happened! I might have been taken on by Leo Castelli.

The next one is called ‘Painting the Queen’. Do you remember the picture of the Queen painted by Pietro Annigoni in front of an Italian landscape in 1955? Well, there was to be a second important royal portrait commission in 1969. Roy Strong, who was then head of the National Portrait Gallery, recommended that I do it, but the Queen declined because she liked the first Annigoni and wanted him to do it again. I suppose that counts as a failure, getting rejected by the Queen! It’s probably one of those things that I shouldn’t even know about.

Another one that’s just come into my mind is that I’ve never represented the country in the Venice Biennale. Apparently, in 1995, I was on the shortlist, the year that Leon Kossoff did it. We were in the same year at college and about equal in our careers, but it was given to Leon. I never would have known about that, except one drunken night in Liverpool many years later, when we were selecting the John Moores Painting Prize, another member of the committee blabbed and said “You were nearly chosen for that!”. That was another rejection I shouldn’t know about.

In 2005, I was commissioned by our group, the Imperial Society of Knight’s Bachelor (those who have been knighted) to paint a mural for our new chapel in the crypt of St. Paul’s Cathedral. They said it was only the second commission they’d ever done in St. Paul’s, the other was The Light of the World (1900) by William Holman Hunt. The subject of the painting was the story of St. Martin, in which he comes across an old beggar, tears his cloak in half and gives half to the beggar. The beggar, of course, turns out to be Jesus and that’s how Martin became a saint. So I started working on it and got so involved with the project that I missed the deadline. Well, I missed two deadlines because I was putting a lot of work into it. They extended two deadlines, but said they couldn’t extend to another. I thought they were bluffing, and that they’d give me time to finish it, but they pulled the plug and recommissioned it, which is fair enough.

My advice to younger artists would be to just keep working and just keep going. I taught for years, and when you teach, you’re being employed to help young people learn how to do it. I did try and impart information. I befriended the YBAs because when I was a young painter, certain older artists befriended us, like Richard Hamilton, a patron and mentor of my generation, and Eduardo Paolozzi. I always remembered that as my career moved on, so I tried to do that with the next generation.

Now, my kids are 20-30 years into their careers. My daughter Rose has just been offered a regular teaching role for illustration at Kingston School of Art. I told her that one of the best things about educating students is that you’ll learn from them.

In a way, my career is over, and without a retrospective in the near future, what we’ve done at Waddington Custot over the years is had shows from each section of my work. We did a drawing show, a portraits show and recently a sculpture show. In a way, I’ve shown it all – the series is complete!

With my age and illness, I’ve had periods where I’ve had to stop working. When I feel better I start working again. And in the last three months, I’ve made a new group of works, so I’m back!

Note:

After our interview, Blake is handed a large pile of fan mail to open, a daily occurrence for the artist. The envelopes contain pages of handwritten admiration, but the mood of endearing modesty remains: “They just want me to sign things, mostly Sgt. Pepper.”