The 1960s was a time of radical and far-reaching change in Britain, probably the historical turning point of the second half of the twentieth century. The nation’s urban landscape, the behaviour of its people and their view of the world altered fundamentally. The influence of the period in music, fashion, photography, design and fine art continues to enthrall successive generations. It was a time of optimism, wealth, health and leisure, liberation and, above all, youth. It was a time, as John Dunbar, co-founder of the Indica Gallery, put it, when “everything was on the move”. It was Britain’s high Modernist moment, as artists of all kinds engaged with theories of the city and emerging forms of communication.

The “long 1960s” started in 1956 – the year of the Suez crisis, Elvis and Abstract Expressionism – and ran until 1968, with students rioting in Paris and the Soviets rumbling into Prague. The period began with two seminal exhibitions – ‘This is Tomorrow’ (at the Whitechapel Art Gallery) and ‘Modern Art in the United States’ (a Museum of Modern Art, New York, touring show at Tate) – and was a time when new artistic languages and subjects for art emerged and developed. There were many similarities between them, such as in the work of the abstract painters of the ‘Situation’ exhibition at the RBA gallery in 1960, the Pop artists, the “New Generation” sculptors (for example, William Tucker and Phillip King) and the kinetic artists promoted by Signals gallery and its magazine. Alongside these, a performative art emerged within a developing counter-culture, typified by the Destruction in Art Symposium of September 1966, which brought artists from Europe and North America to Britain, and inspired a wide range of people, not least The Who’s Pete Townshend.

Artists, photographers, architects and designers often mixed in the same social milieu as the most glamorous musicians and actors. Venues such as The Robert Fraser Gallery became a nexus where painters, sculptors and photographers rubbed shoulders with The Beatles, the Rolling Stones and others. Artists featured prominently on television and in the new colour supplement magazines; David Hockney appeared in David Bailey’s Box of Pin Ups, the hit list of who was “in”. The work of artists and photographers showed a common interest in glamour, celebrity and the city and reflected new attitudes to sex, sexuality and gender. Theories of the city became practice in the work of the architects designing the new housing estates and learning institutions, while others, such as the members of Archigram, developed a more fanciful, futuristic architecture that critics related to Pop.

Of course, much of the swinging sixties was an illusion. The freedoms gained were limited and failed to reach many people. The fate of the housing schemes of the period, founded on an optimistic social theory, typified the disillusion that would set in. Hockney’s images of a Californian utopia may have epitomised an idea of the 1960s, but so did Don McCullin’s photographs of the Vietnam War. It is contrasts such as these that make this period so compelling.

Jann Haworth
(b. Los Angeles, 1942)
Slade School of Art, 1961–1963

TATE ETC. You grew up in the United States. What influences informed your early thinking?

JANN HAWORTH My parents had a huge impact on me and the ideas in my work. My mother was a part of a wave of Californian fine art silk-screen printmakers. When I was six, she and my father divorced, and I became the sounding board for her interest in Picasso, Matisse and Bauhaus colour theory. My mother taught me how to sew. I was eight when I made my first petticoat, and from that point on I made dolls, their clothing and almost everything I wore. My father was a Hollywood production designer. I shadowed him on the sets. This influenced my work in the 1960s. I thought of the installations that I did as film sets. The concept of the stand-in, the fake, the dummy, the latex model as surrogates for the real, came from being with my father.

TATE ETC. Why did you move to this country?

JANN HAWORTH I was obsessed with everything about London. Imagine a nineteen-year-old peach-fed Californian arriving in December 1961 to catch the last London fog, lamplighters, rag and bone men and three posts a day. The city was black-stained, coal-sooty, stone dark and Victorian, contrasted with the classic, clean design of the Underground. There was a lot going on. London’s new-edge culture was small enough for you to see all of it. I think the satirists took the lead (not The Beatles), then the playwrights and television (such as That Was the Week that Was)… and the artists, fashion designers, photographers, gallery dealers caught the bug. And the music played on.

TATE ETC.  What was the Slade like compared with St Martin’s and the Royal College of Art?

JOHN HAWORTH  The Slade was grey and dusty, full of in-articulate, proper bearded painters, and probably unchanged since the days of Stanley Spencer. By comparison, the Royal College was super cool at the time. They were very hip. St Martin’s was tight and smart. I liked the Slade’s fustiness; it was another thing to push against. If you were “cool”, you worked on the landing. I loved every minute of it. I was left completely free to work. The social life was comatose, the males shockingly self-absorbed, and everybody felt superior to everyone else. The assumption was that, as one tutor put it, “the girls were there to keep the boys happy”. He prefaced that by saying “it wasn’t necessary for them to look at the portfolios of the female students… they just needed to look at their photos”. From that point, it was head-on competition with the male students. I was annoyed enough, and American enough, to take that on. I was determined to better them, and that’s one of the reasons for the partly sarcastic choice of cloth, latex and sequins as media. It was a female language to which the male students didn’t have access.

TATE ETC.  Such as Calendula’s Cloak?

JANN HAWORTH  Yes, Calendula’s Cloak is a piece that relates to the four seasons. There are three other cloaks – Morning, Noon and Night, The Baptistry in Florence and Rainbow Cloak. Each one is drawn flat and assembled. All use patchwork conventions in 3-d. They also reference garments as hanging objects like fine art – either flat on a wall as in Rainbow Cloak or freestanding as in Baptistry or Calendula. It suggests the image of the dressmaker’s dummy as sculpture. It relates directly to my present work. Then, I accepted pre-existing cloth, much as in the patchwork quilt tradition; now, I control the surface of the cloth (I’m using canvas exclusively) by painting it first then cutting it up for large-scale abstract sewn canvases.

TATE ETC.  You co-designed the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band cover. What are your memories of that project?

JANN HAWORTH  Oh well, the story is 50 per cent told. Best not to get me started. I’m the person who didn’t do 50 per cent of the cover… I did the other 50 per cent.

Don McCullin
(b. London, 1942)

TATE ETC.  What are your memories of the Battle of Hue in 1968?

DON MCCULLIN  I still think of it today. Seventy men were killed and 300 wounded. I can never forget it. I was looking at my pictures of that battle recently. I noticed in one of them – with three marines firing over a wall – that I needed to add something to it, so I wrote on the back: “The man firing in the centre of this group was killed three weeks later in another conflict.” So I’m still there in a way. You can’t imagine what it was like to be with a battalion of soldiers who got smashed to pieces. I was always involved, never a voyeur. I have seen men shot dead in front of me. I’ve carried men with half their faces missing. I wasn’t there for a free ride. You are there to share their dangers, and when they see this, they respect you for it. At the same time, they think you are mad. I did it to show the price of war. You can’t go there just as the photographer – you have to go as the man.

TATE ETC.  Were the swinging sixties far away from your mind?

DON MCCULLIN  I didn’t belong in the frivolous 1960s world. Looking back on my life, I am happy with the path I chose. My work was very serious, and I took it seriously. I felt that the responsibility demanded that declaration of commitment.

TATE ETC.  At that time, you wanted the images to have an impact. Do you think they have?

DON MCCULLIN  In the late 1960s and 1970s I think what I was doing was having some impact. It may have affected a certain generation, but it wasn’t lasting. I felt the energy and the belief that I gave to this. And I felt slightly tarnished by the way we seem to value our existence by not being genuinely committed. It is a matter of having a voice and getting someone to hear it. My photography was the voice and I wanted to find the listeners. The fact is that now, not many people are listening any more. They have other priorities. That said, someone came up to me the other day and told me that my pictures had had such a profound effect on her, she went to study medicine and is now working in Africa. That is the most rewarding thing I have ever heard. If I can affect one person, then I haven’t broken down on my commitment.

 

Colin Self
(b. Norwich, 1941)
Norwich School of Art and Slade School of Fine Arts, 1961–1963

I’d suffered “nuclear dry heaves” since the Cold War arms race situation first hit me below the psychological belt after watching a 1950s television debate between J Robert Oppenheimer, Lady Dulles and Bertrand Russell, hosted by Ed Murrow. Russell won conclusively. Shocked, I suffered years of inner turmoil. I shared it with no one, living in a solitary state of post-nuclear non-being, un-living. Years later, smiling Kennedy and Khrushchev exchanged a peace document. I saw hope. The log-jam of my frozen psyche was unblocked.

My mature work poured forth. I made a giant stylistic reconnection back to the original way I worked when I was a child protégé, threw off the baggage of education, stylistically “regressed” – but took to it, my life’s experiences. I introduced the shading and coloured tone drawing of my childhood into contemporary art. I did my own thing. I’d spent years staring at four walls, thinking. Not the most gregarious of young men – subjective, secretly engrossed in inner dialogue about the real times in which I lived. About what art in our times should actually be. I wrote off all the modern art I’d seen. To me, none addressed this nuclear issue of life in the Cold War: the nuclear scene. All art had been in denial of so much twentieth-century iconography and opted for obscurantism.

The twentieth century happened. Where does one see aeroplane or car images in visual art? They’re in film and other art forms. My thinking then, in that age of “ostrich art”, was: Romans and Assyrians sculpted chariots (their transport), so… just get on with it. But, most importantly, through thought processes which had the power to make new timeless classicism out of objects that were expendable, both in function and fashion. A challenge to my sense of subversion and cultural anarchy.

I’m a member of the Pop Art movement – a vastly important movement predicted to last a month. Personally, I believe it to be the most important art movement since the Renaissance, literally changing the modern world. It styled Kennedy and Princess Diana, put a human face on science, giving the Midas touch to so much.

My art was a unique, crucial, post-nuclear, overt, uncompromisingly figurative art in that dominating, bullying abstract art/jazz/Brutalist architecture period. Oddly, the actual future when it arrived is, in fact, exactly the same, yet mysteriously different. It’s this future I worked out, foresaw. In 1965, demonstrating that I was coming out of life and not art history, I wrote: “Drawing to me is an art. Also skating, fishing – and putting the fish into a glass case for immortality.” The contents and subjects of my work were outside of art tradition. The style – direct, understandable communication to a level. Brit Art and YBA is exactly this.

Robert McNamara, us Secretary of Defence in Kennedy’s government at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, now says that crisis was easily the most critical moment in the whole of the twentieth century. Oblivion. Only one artist as far as I know (me) dared to create a concerted, avant-garde art, on a classical poetic level, about this epoch: the whole arms race and ideological struggle that could have been an internecine Armageddon. Picasso, I believe, was way, way above any other artist in the twentieth century, but Guernica was by comparison a mere bun fight. No other artist caught the nuclear wave or feeling at the time it happened. I believe my works to be important; hopefully, “cometh the hour, cometh the man”.

John Dunbar
(b. Mexico, 1943)
Co-founder of the Indica Gallery

I had just left Cambridge University, where I had been studying Baroque art under the great Michael Jaffe. I was introduced to Barry Miles in 1965 at the seminal poetry reading at the Albert Hall. We shared an interest in the beat poets Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs and had the same taste, so we decided to set up a gallery. We found a place in Mason’s Yard (now James Hyman Gallery). We felt that we needed to do something that went against the stuffiness of the existing galleries, but we didn’t really know what we were doing. I was very young and quite innocent about what was going on.

We showed artists such as Soto, de Marco, Julio Le Parc, Takis and Liliane Lijn. There were no painting shows, just what you might call conceptual works. From the beginning the place became a stopping-off point – everyone came through Indica. One of those who did was Yoko Ono, who had just been over for the Destruction in Art Symposium. She asked me if she could have a show and I said, yes. It was, of course, the place where Yoko was to meet John Lennon.

We had a casual way of running the gallery. I never took it seriously as a business in the way that they do now. We funded the space on a day-to-day basis, and we enjoyed it. Even though it was a critical success, at that time the galleries had to be there for ten years or so before the public institutions thought about buying anything.

The gallery became very popular, and there were always press turning up to do interviews with us. We were being paid a lot of attention. The gallerist Robert Fraser liked what we were doing and subsequently gave John Lennon his first one-person show there. It wasn’t competitive, though. We were friends. We were the first post-war generation, and the biggest changes happened then. It was a very different time. Everything was on the move – it made you want to do new things, whether it was in art, film, music.

Gerald Laing
(b. Newcastle, 1936)
St Martin’s School of Art, 1960–1964

TATE ETC.  What is your memory of the Pop Art period now?

GERALD LAING  Pop Art had a definite lifespan, from 1957 to 1965. During that period it was essential. Afterwards, it began to recede into history. Now it has an éclat similar to that of the 1920s. Last year I was invited to give a talk about the 1960s to a group of seventeen and eighteen-year-old schoolchildren. Before I began, I asked them what they thought it was like then. They had definite opinions, all of them inaccurate. But then all perceptions of history are more or less inaccurate. Television dramas of the Regency period never show the limbless of Waterloo. During my talk I began to feel like a time traveller from the past, for that is truly what I was. For a day or two afterwards, I had a disembodied sensation. It was not unpleasant; perhaps as one might feel as a happy ghost.

TATE ETC.  Who do you remember as being a big influence on your work?

GERALD LAING  Richard Smith was a very great influence on me when I was at St Martin’s. I think he is a vastly underrated and neglected artist. His brushwork in the early paintings is fantastic, his ideas insouciant and very cool, and he had perfected that full-frontal pseudo-naiveté that was characteristic of Pop. He influenced me by example – with his commitment and confidence in the idea that there actually was a role for the artist beyond teaching, and that there was new work to be made. It was a marked contrast to the attitudes of the permanent teachers at St Martin’s, believe me. He had got to know most of the American Pop artists, and when I went to New York in the summer of my third year he introduced me to Warhol, Rosenquist, Lichtenstein and Robert Indiana. I worked as Indiana’s assistant that summer, and when I left it was he who showed the paintings I’d done there to Richard Feigen, who then became my dealer throughout the 1960s and facilitated my move to New York after St Martin’s.

TATE ETC.  Why the interest in skydivers?

GERALD LAING  My interest in skydivers (as well as astronauts, dragsters and, indeed, starlets) was entirely to do with a “new mythical heroism”. There wasn’t much requirement for irony in the 1950s and early 1960s – that was a luxury reserved for the Americans, who had come out of the war more prosperous than when they entered it, unlike us. We were on our knees.

TATE ETC.  Is there continuity between your current work, which is largely figurative, and that of the 1960s?

GERALD LAING  Yes indeed. For me, Pop Art was a pursuit of a new perfection through strictly figurative art (the dotted parts are pure tonal drawing). The excursion through abstraction enabled me further to discipline my forms, and my current work is a variation on this continuing (and optimistic) idea.

Bruce Lacey
(b. London, 1927)
Hornsey School of Art, 1949–1951; Royal College of Art, 1951–1954

At the Royal College of Art, I performed at student shows sawing women in half, dancing with a dummy woman that disintegrated. The staff called this “silly bugger activity”. I left with a first class degree and a silver medal. I didn’t know whether to carry on as a painter, or to be a performer, as I had been since childhood. In West End nightclubs, I played tunes on the spokes of a penny farthing bicycle and exploding pianos.

My lodger, who was working in television, asked if I would make special trick props for Spike Milligan in a series called The Idiot Weekly, Price 2d. I appeared in and also supplied sets, costumes, props and special effects for The Running, Jumping and Standing Still Film, with Spike and Peter Sellers. After not receiving any credit or payment for this work, I began hating the whole of professional show business. To express this hatred, in 1961 I built two robot electric actors and performed with them at the Establishment nightclub, run by Peter Cook, showing their superiority over live actors.

I performed with the Alberts and Ivor Cutler in An Evening of British Rubbish (which I saw as a satire of show business) at the Comedy Theatre. At this time I was also creating automata and assemblages expressing other hates, fears, loves, wishes and dreams.

I could see a relationship between unrelated objects, as if they were meant to be together to express something afresh. I saw my machines as props, and was most surprised when a friend sent me off to Gallery One, run by Victor Musgrove, who gave me an exhibition in 1963. I had my second show at the Marlborough Gallery in 1965. The critics called it neo-Dada. I didn’t even know what Dada was, let alone whether it was art. I hated Pop Art as it was the very opposite of what I was concerned with – the state of the world around me: war, famine, spare-part surgery.

I built The Womaniser from objects I had around me. It was a fantasy wish to be an hermaphrodite with sex on the brain. It was satisfying to make these things using consumer objects and technology – to criticise the very society that had made them. It was my psychotherapy; why I had started art in the first place, suffering from TB in 1946, and how I’ve carried on since.

Barry Flanagan
(b. Prestatyn, 1941)
Birmingham College of Art 1957–1958;
St Martin’s School of Art, 1964–1966

TATE ETC.  What is your view on the 1960s today?

BARRY FLANAGAN  An American-style hype – the emerging Eng Lit boys stepped out of 1950s creepers.

TATE ETC.  How did your time as a student at St Martin’s affect the development of your work?

BARRY FLANAGAN  I am to this day so grateful for my grant from Gloucestershire Council that allowed me to be a vocational student for two years, from 1964 to 1966. My being there was a technical triumph, which I owe to the head of department, Frank Martin. I learned everything I already knew from Stan, who showed us the ropes as technical assistant to the entire department. As a vocationalist at St Martin’s, I always considered that identity as specific, and outside the influence and assumptions of the educational stream. That sense of self has roots in theatre in my case, where proof is in the pudding, such as it is.

TATE ETC.  You once wrote to Anthony Caro that you could write, or do anything but make sculpture, and still be a sculptor. What made you produce sculpture none the less?

BARRY FLANAGAN  I took up a trade.

TATE ETC.  Why did you choose the materials you used in your work of the 1960s, particularly in aaing j gni aa?

BARRY FLANAGAN  I applied an engineering instinct gleaned from architectural studies and intermediate sculpture at Birmingham College of Art, from 1958 to 1959. Philip King was responsible for the applied solution of the tape on the floor of aaing j gni aa.

TATE ETC.  Which other artists’ work influenced your own at the time?

BARRY FLANAGAN  Being an attentive young father of two, I wouldn’t choose between them.

Liliane Lijn
(b. New York City, 1939)
Archaeology, Sorbonne, 1958–1959;
art history, Ecole du Louvre, 1959–1960

TATE ETC.  Why did you come to London?

LILIANE LIJN  I first came in 1964 when Paul Keeler and David Medalla invited me to discuss having a show at Signals gallery. At the time I was living in Greece. Takis and I had just started building a house carved out of a hillside in a magically arid shanty town outside of Athens. Our plan was to create an art and science centre there, but in 1966 Papandreou’s government fell. Almost a million people took to the streets in protest and I decided it was time to move to London.

TATE ETC.  When you arrived, what was the art scene like?

LILIANE LIJN  The key to it, I think, was the openness of that moment, which led to frequent meetings, collisions even, between very different worlds. Scientists and artists, pop musicians, fashion models, designers, photographers, writers, poets and film-makers bumped into each other quite casually, exchanging ideas and crossing over into each other’s territory. It was a combination of a moment of economic affluence with the presence of a number of visionary people who were active in the art world. I am thinking of people such as Bryan Robertson at the Whitechapel Art Gallery; Roland Penrose; Jasia Reichardt at the ICA; Ronald Alley at Tate; Jim Haines, who created the Arts Lab; Cyril Barrett, who taught at the University of Warwick and organised the first kinetic exhibitions there; and Peter Townsend, editor of Studio International.

TATE ETC.  What was the idea behind the Liquid Reflections series?

LILIANE LIJN  Liquid Reflections was made in two series: the first in 1966 and the second, which incorporated a number of design changes and improvements, in 1968. Inspired by my interest in astronomy and the physics of light, it was the outcome of five years of experimental work with plastics and fire, acrylic polymers, lenses, prisms, light and finally water. It was first shown in London at the Indica Gallery in 1967, and comprised a hollow acrylic disc, containing water and revolving on a motorised turntable. On its surface, two acrylic balls rotate, their motion subject to opposing forces: the centrifugal force of the spin of the disc and the centripetal force due to the concavity of the disc surface. When the water is first poured in, it condenses into patterns that resemble interstellar clouds of gas, but soon it contracts into precise spherical droplets, alive and trembling, which in turn become increasingly homogeneous, covering the entire surface of the disc. The water both influences the total equilibrium and is influenced by it, exerting an effect on the movement of the balls. This movement is governed by the laws of momentum, as well as the two opposing forces. The balls also act as moving magnifying lenses, bringing to life now one area of the disc, now another, with a strange lunar landscape of reflections and shadows. Liquid Reflections is my attempt to contemplate the universe. I was awed by the result. It seemed to me that I was looking directly out into interstellar space.

Frank Bowling
(b. Guyana, 1936)
Slade School of Art and Royal College
of Art, 1959–1962

TATE ETC.  Who were you mostly influenced by in the 1960s?

FRANK BOWLING  Carel Weight, who ran the rca painting school. He made the college a brilliant, rich place, and, in my opinion, was the biggest influence on the Pop artists. He encouraged people such as Peter Blake and many others. He was very good to me and Ron Kitaj. He was reasonably strict with Dave Hockney, but I think that was because of Hockney’s proclivities, and I doubt his opinion would have had much effect on Hockney, anyway. Carel gave me pocket money, and in those times, £20 was a rather large sum.

One day he came round to the studio and said to me (he had a kind of high-pitched voice): “Bowling, you will not survive here if you want to be an abstract artist. While you are here you must knuckle down and work in the figurative.” So I became a figurative painter for the rest of my student days, and for quite a few years after that.

TATE ETC.  What were you painting at that time?

FRANK BOWLING  Pictures of post-colonial preoccupations about what was going on in the colonies and other themes that had to do with my own concerns as an artist. I did a series of paintings about a dying swan, which is something I actually encountered when I was young, living in Chelsea. At the time I didn’t have any lodgings, so I would sleep with whoever – you know, staying at the pub late and crashing on the floor or sofa of a friend’s house. During one of those evenings, we saw this swan trying desperately to get off the river and it made a lasting impression on me. I struggled with that theme all through my college career.

I made pictures about another striking moment in my life, when I saw a young woman attempting to deliver her own baby in Notting Hill in very seedy, awful conditions. It was in a house where people just had single rooms. So I did a whole series of pictures on childbirth.

Peter Blake
(b. Dartford, 1932)
Royal College of Art, 1953–1956

I was part of the generation that really started immediately after the war, and I was extremely grateful to be at the Royal College: we were getting grants and were the first generation of working-class students who had that sort of privilege. I used all the hours and loved being a student.

The best thing about the three years there was that you were actually taught. You sat at the donkey and there would be two or three staff and they would say, “May I sit down”. They’d draw either on your drawing or beside it, and would have no hesitation about rubbing out your work and adjusting it. Johnny Minton would sit down and show you how to use the paint, which was very good.

It was all more or less life rooms then – very much in the Victorian tradition. We’d avoid standing next to Frank Auerbach or Leon Kossoff, because we’d get showered with charcoal in an area of three feet around where they were working. One thing that you just didn’t do, which is now common practice, was work with photographs. So if I was working from a photograph when staff came round, I’d hide it; I’d sit on it and pretend I was making up the picture.

The whole tradition of models was still going when I was at the rca. You’d still get Italian families who’d arrive with the child and the equipment to dress up for “costume life”. They’d put on the “Spanish outfit” or the “Roman outfit”, and they loved to do the more difficult poses as a challenge. It was fascinating.

I was painting the things that were part of my own environment: little boys with badges on, and wrestlers and strippers and things like that, and that became my branch of Pop Art. In my first year I did a whole group of self-portraits and still-lifes which got lost – my locker was cleared, and I never saw them again. So I really started in 1954, at the same time as Dick Smith and Robyn Denny. In the following year Bill Green was riding a bicycle across his pictures, so they weren’t that worried about me. I was just quietly working away. There was a certain amount of laughter at what I was doing. Ruskin Spear would come round and guffaw at it.