Asked by his students at St Martin’s School of Art how they might come to paint like Francis Bacon, Joe Tilson would reply: “Grow up in Ireland, get beaten up by sailors. Then you might paint like him.” As the startled young took this on board, their teacher would add: “In art, you’re stuck with your own personality. Who you are is also your fate.”
Tilson, who taught at St Martin’s in London from 1958 until 1963, and has died aged 95, had every reason to hold this view. It was the unpromising twin pillars of Tilson’s upbringing in Lewisham, south-east London – poverty and woodwork – that shaped him, specifically, as an artist.
In a postwar London of fogs and rationing, the US shone as a beacon of consumerist hope. There was, Tilson later said, “a belief at that time that everything was good about America – Hollywood, the movies, a celebration of newness. American culture was part of our lives in the suburbs.” This fascination with things – cars, comics, film posters – would define the movement, pop art, with which Tilson’s name, rightly or wrongly, came to be identified.
Joe’s parents, Ethel (nee Saunders) and Frederick Tilson, both telegraphists, were robustly philistine: “My father,” he recalled, ruefully, “disliked art really intensely.” This was problematic. At the age of eight, Joe designed a road safety banner that won an award in a London county council competition. The prize was a book on Giotto: leafing through its plates, Joe was struck by the immediate need to be a painter.
Frederick, however, wanted his son to have a trade. Accordingly, after an education interrupted by the blitz – “For a few years, I didn’t go to lessons at all,” Joe remembered – he was enrolled at the Brixton School of Building. There, he studied joinery, leaving at 15 to work as a carpenter and cabinet maker.
He spent the years 1946-49 doing national service in the RAF and then, demob grant in hand, the young ex-serviceman enrolled at St Martin’s in 1949, his contemporaries there including Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach. At the Royal College of Art, where he went on to study from 1952 until 1955, he met Peter Blake, whose style was edging towards what the critic Lawrence Alloway was shortly to dub pop.
Where Blake’s painted faux-collages blended modern magazine covers with Manet, Tilson, the ex-carpenter, made his pop art in wood. His Wood Relief No 17 (1961), in the Tate collection, consists of a faintly suggestive woman’s mouth with exclamation-mark teeth. Its various elements are hand-carved in softwoods, each being separable from the others.
A way with carpentry also marked A-Z Box of Friends and Family (1963), which looked like a traditional printer’s tray but held miniaturised screenprints of the works of artist contemporaries: thus D was for David Hockney, E for Eduardo Paolozzi, and so on.
On graduating from the RCA in 1955, Tilson had won a Rome prize. Painting in the Italian capital, he met Joslyn Morton, studying art in Milan. (Morton’s background, unlike her future husband’s, was artistically grand. Her father, Alastair, had commissioned Ben Nicholson and others to make designs for his family firm, Edinburgh Weavers.)
Daringly for the time, the two set up home in Sicily, and married in Venice the next year. They would return to London only in 1958, by which time Blake and the slightly older Richard Hamilton had staked out the territory of pop.
This tardiness was not as damaging as it might have been. In 1962 Tilson had his first one-man show at the Marlborough Gallery in London. In 1964, his was among work chosen for the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. In Venice, he first saw the art of Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg and Jasper Johns. Two years later, he spent a semester teaching at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Tilson’s excitement at all this was profound, but short-lived. With the escalation of the Vietnam war, his political allegiances began to shift.
By the late 1960s, he was making openly anti-American works with names such as Is This Che Guevara? (1969) – black-and-white screenprinted newspaper images of modern revolutionary heroes: Mao, Malcolm X, Ho Chi Minh. These had the distant feel of Andy Warhol’s earlier Death and Disasters series, but were grittier and less commodified. They remain some of Tilson’s best work, if not his most successful. “The [prints],” their maker recalled, “were incredibly badly received.”
When politics, in turn, began to pall, the Tilsons and their three children left London to live in a rectory in Wiltshire, immersing themselves in the Whole Earth Catalog and growing their own macrobiotic food. As with their stay in Rome, this flight proved ill-timed. “Leaving London was obviously the worst career move I could have made,” Tilson said later. “Instead of becoming famous and rich, we became unknown and poor.” He added, with a hollow laugh: “It’s worked out well.”
This was, perhaps, a touch disingenuous. Tilson managed well enough. From the 70s on, his work moved away from any obvious mainstream. While still showing its roots in pop, it became more and more bound up with Italy and with Mediterranean culture. The Le Crete Senesi (1995) series of domed canvas panels mounted on wood is a case in point, the overall aesthetic being Byzantine but with the stencilled name of each work spelled out along its bottom edge.
In 1980, Tilson had made a trip to Paris, meeting Henri Goetz, inventor of carborundum printmaking. For the next four decades, his most adventurous output was on paper, although, in the mid-90s, he also made objects in glass.
All of this was done in studios in Venice and Tuscany, where he and his wife kept properties. Tilson was not a fan of Brexit, which he described, in an interview in the Art Newspaper earlier this year, as having “plunged the art world into deep shit”. “I can’t print in Italy any more,” he raged. “It now takes three months for work to go from Verona to London.” That Boris Johnson reportedly had a set of his print suite Nine Muses (2005) in his Downing Street flat appalled him.
In London – where he and his wife eventually returned from Wiltshire – they lived in a house off Sloane Square to which Tilson liked to refer as “a labourer’s cottage”. He remained immensely industrious, working, as in his teens, in a carpenter’s apron.
He was elected RA in 1991, and in 2002 the Royal Academy held a retrospective, Joe Tilson: Pop to Present. His work is held in collections including the Tate, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He was represented by the Cristea Roberts Gallery and the Marlborough Gallery in London – both held exhibitions earlier this year to mark his 95th birthday.
He is survived by Joslyn and their children, Sophy, Jake and Anna.
• Joseph Charles Tilson, artist, born 4 August 1928; died 9 November 2023
