Allen Jones

Allen Jones has openly admitted that he is a feminist and despite the heavy backlash he has received from feminists, he says that his work is dedicated to them.

Allen Jones stays and works in Oxfordshire, England.

Allen Jones was born in Southampton, England on September 1, 1937 to a factory worker father and a homemaker mother. He spent most of his childhood in west London and did his schooling from there only. Ever since he was a kid, he showed an inclination towards art and spent most of his free time creating sculptures from clay.

He got enrolled in Hornsey College of Arts in London to study lithography. He describes it as a very profound experience as it shaped him up as an artist in true sense and he got introduced to some of the best artists in the world. He visited France as a part of his curriculum and took particular interest in Robert Delaunay.

Allen wanted to do something different and he developed his own style of creating art, due to which he was expelled from Royal College of art in his very first year. He was guilty of trying to manipulate his fellow students to deny the existing norms prevalent in the teaching method in the college and to develop their own style of representing their art.

The expulsion from Royal College of Art didn’t impact Allen Jones negatively and in 1961, his work was showcased in the Young Contemporaries 1961 in London, an exhibition to promote young talent. That was the time when pop art was finding its own language among the contemporary artists and got adapted by many, including Allen.

Among his early works was one where he included buses of London and painted them on weirdly shaped canvases. London West End gallery exhibited his works and Allen received widespread appreciation for his different approach and point of view to art. The gallery owners observed immense talent in the young artist and introduced Allen to the art of American artists such as Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg. From 1961 to 1963, Allen taught in Croydon College of Arts and in 1963, he received ‘Prix des Jeunes Artistes’.

As a result of introduction to American pop art, he migrated to New York City and Allen spent most of his time roaming around the city, while exploring different art galleries to have a better understanding of the explicit arts made by American artists in 1930s and 40s. His erotic painting ‘Perfect Match’ was a result of this new found understanding of art, which got him into ‘The xart collection’ exhibition series in Zurich and he got to stand amongst some of the biggest names of that time.

He delivered lectures in University of Florida for some time and in 1968 he forayed into ‘structure art’ for the first time with a creation titled ‘Life Class’. He moved back to London in 1969 and completed his next work titled ‘Chair’, which indulged in eroticism and sado-masochist themes. He completed and exhibited his very first group of erotic fibreglass structures of a hatstand, table and chair and these creations made him a well-known name among the artist community in England.

However, his work wasn’t safe from criticism and Allen received a lot of flak for table, chair and hatstand when they were put on display in the Institute of Contemporary Art due to their explicit nature. Filmmaker Roman Polanski, however, was unaffected and admired Allen for his works and owned several of his sculptures. Master director Stanley Kubrick was also a big fan of Allen and included several of his sculptures in his 1971 film ‘A Clockwork Orange’.