Allen 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 Hudson has described them as having “a faintly unnerving quality, with something of the doll, something of the surrealist totem and the automaton, like Coppélia”. In the facing corner is Hatstand, part of the fetish furniture series that inflamed the feminists of the second wave. Steps – comprising Hatstand, Chair and Table – have the distinction of having been controversial in pretty much every decade since the creation of the first, in 1969.
