by Peter Phillips, who died at the age of 86, was a pioneer in the Pop Art in Great Britain. From all his colleagues, he appeared as “the most uncomplicated and uncomplicated in his response to the sheer joy of the mutable strength and vitality of the popular products and graphics”, as the Daily Telegraph in 1976 stated.
He made his entrance in Ken Russell’s 1962 documentary Pop Goes The Trail in a convertible Cadillac. Things went no less groovy than Phillips depends on his Kensington Live/Work Studio, leaf through the stack of Schlocky magazines and played flipper with friends.
The BBC film was an introduction to the world of pop art by four British artists: Phillips, Peter Blake, Pauline Boty and Derek Boshier. The critic Huw Whly Inges: “Filmstars, The Twist, Science Fiction, pop stars. A world that could be as Tawdry and second class … a world that view these four artists like his own mythology.”
When Phillips plays the Arcade machine in front of the camera, his painting machine hangs behind him (1960). Now in the Tate collection it shows the mechanical parts of the pinball table next to a piano keyboard, a monster head, a pistol and a diagram of different balls of different sizes.
Films stars, cars and card games were recurring motifs in Phillips’ often bizarre -painted combinations: Marilyn Monroe and Brigitte Bardot feature in the huge oil and collage on canvas only for men – rigid ring mm and BB (1960); A convertible speed through a stylized rainbow in AutoSomotive (1964).
Critics were wrong: In 1962 the Daily Telegraph thundered that Phillips’ work was only user -friendly in the worst case and at best the gap between the art of the galleries and the everyday “art” of the after -school care and the underground posters should bridge.
In the 1960s, he rarely produced a painting that did not include clubs, spades, hearts or diamonds. His paintings opposed any sense of narrative or realism, but reflected the growing cultural influence of the United States, mass advertising and celebrity culture. Phillips refused: “I had a different frequency at the time.”
In 1965 Phillips and his colleague Gerald Laing Hybrid Enterprises, a research vehicle for art market, of which they hoped it would make the “ideal art object” and 137 “research kits” – color bikes and material samples – to “art literature”.
The end product, which was made by consensus, was an elegant, striped, striped aluminum sculpture with neon tube in 1966. It caused critical anger. “The art scene is sick and hybrid is the clearest symptom of this disease,” wrote the critic Gene Swenson.
Peter Phillips was born on May 21, 1939 in Birmingham in Reginald, a carpenter, and Marjorie, an employee in the Cadbury Chocolate Factory.
At the age of 12, Peter visited the Moseley Road Secondary School of Art, which offered children three -year courses that had passed for more than 11 years. He drove to Birmingham College of Art in 1955.
The figurative painting, which Phillips from Gilbert Mason and Bernard Fleetwood Walker learned, was good for him when he came to pin-up girls in his later work.
In 1959 Phillips was included in the Royal College of Art and divided Studios with David Hockney, RB Kitaj, Allen Jones and Patrick Caulfield and immersed themselves in the Swinging London scene.
“When I was young there was the only way to earn his livelihood as an English artist, either to teach or to secure the patronage of a wealthy aristocrat,” recalled Phillips. “They wanted traditional paintings – landscapes, acts, still lifes. That was at the Royal College of Art. But London changed at the end of the 1950s … we never called it” pop art “. We only tried to express who we were.”
His career achieved through a number of generation shows in the capital, including young contemporaries in the RBA Galleries in 1962, alongside Hockney and Jones and the new realists of the Sidney Janis Gallery in the same year.
The companies were interested in this vision of young people modernity, and in 1963 BP Phillips commissioned to create a number of print advertisements for punch. In 1964 he was part of the new generation in the Whitechapel Gallery and introduced the trend in Europe with Nieuwe realists in the Hague who toured in Vienna and Berlin.
Pictures of Americana filled Phillips’ canvases and in 1964 he made a pilgrimage in a “big Chevy” with all Jones on a road trip through the USA. He spent two more years in the United States with a Harkness scholarship. In New York, he exhibited with Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and James Rosenquist and opened his first solo exhibition in Kornblee Gallery in New York in 1965.
Further European exhibitions followed for Phillips, first in 1967 in Zurich and an early retrospective in Munster in 1971. 1976 Tate London showed his pressure work. Phillips mixed lithograph with screen printing and beamed his motifs on images of mechanical age: flawless screws, feathers, gears and shiny auto parts that were increased in work. His Art-O-Matic Loop-Di loop was shown on the cover of the 1984 Cars album Heartbeat City.
In 1982 he had a solo exhibition in Fruitmarket in Edinburgh, who traveled to the Southampton Art Gallery and in the Barbican Art Gallery in London. Phillips moved into the sculpture and formed messy wall pyres by painted wooden elements on which nested magazine pictures of snakes and mussels were closed.
“I was a profound fear of snakes and thought that if I had a detailed painting, it would help. It didn’t help,” he recalled. He also tried to exorcise his childhood memories to the flash by painting a burning house. “That didn’t help either.”
His work in the following decade has taken the influence of art styles. “I was lucky enough to succeed as an artist at a young age. When I realized that I had enough money to survive, I could paint what interested me and not what others wanted from me.”
Poses (1991) with elements from textile and an image of a disassembled limes owes some surrealism, while works such as Sonde (1997) and Invisible (1998) overlap a circularly painted mashed mondrian grille with photographs from magazines.
Phillips has remained productive in his past decades and experimented with wax on canvas and digital deductions. In 2020 he checked Hybrid and exhibited a second version of the “Consumers determined, tasting -catalyzed, collector compatible work in London”.
Peter Phillips, who lived in Majorca, Costa Rica, Switzerland and Australia at various times, is survived by two daughters, one from his second marriage, Marion-Claude Xylander, who died in 2003, and one from his first marriage to Dinah Donald.
Peter Phillips, born on May 21, 1939, died on June 23, 2025
