Jones, Allen

Jones, Allen (1937– ). British painter, printmaker, sculptor, and designer, born in Southampton. He studied at Hornsey College of Art, 1955–9 and 1960–1; in between these two periods he spent a year at the Royal College of Art, from which he was expelled. In 1961 he was one of the artists who stood out at the Young Contemporaries exhibition at which Pop art first made a major impact in Britain and he has remained one of the most committed exponents of Pop. Although he has worked primarily as a painter, printmaker, and designer, he is best known to the public for a distinctive type of sculpture in which figures of women—more or less life-size, dressed in fetishistic clothing, and with what Jones calls ‘high definition female parts'—double as pieces of furniture; for example, a woman on all fours supporting a sheet of glass on her back becomes a coffee table, and a standing figure with outstretched hands becomes a hatstand. He began making such sculptures in the late 1960s and was still producing them in the 1990s, although in a manner that he calls ‘less aggressive’ and ‘easier to take’ (they have come in for a good deal of criticism for allegedly demeaning women as sex objects; an article in the feminist journal Spare Rib in 1973 suggested that they expressed a castration complex). Jones says that ‘eroticism is an absolutely universal subject which relates you to every other human being', and his other work uses similar imagery—legs, stockings, high-heeled shoes, etc., often suggested by women's fashion magazines. His work as a designer has included sets and costumes for the erotic review Oh! Calcutta! (1969).