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‘I think my fetish furniture hampered my career’: Allen Jones on decades of controversy
He wanted to remove sculpture’s safety valve – and blew up the 60s as a result. The great pop-pioneer looks back on an extraordinary career, from getting thrown out of art school to covering Kate Moss in fibreglassAllen Jones, painter, sculptor and print-maker – he calls himself a painter who sculpts – is arguably the first, debatably the most famous British pop artist. I meet him in the studio he built 20 years ago, when he moved out of London to the Cotswolds, the kind of chocolate-box surroundings where they’ll only let you build something if it looks like a barn. “But a barn is designed specifically to keep light out!” he says in amused frustration, and huh, yes, sounds obvious when you say it. An architect found his way round that, and the place is swimming in light.Against one wall of the studio are five of the fibreglass female figures he made as an ongoing series between the early 80s and 2015. At 5ft 2in, they are slightly smaller than lifesize mannequins. The critic Mark H...
Politics
