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Dimensions: 152.5 by 152.5cm., 60 by 60in.
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Provenance: Waddington Galleries, London
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Exhibited:
Heleand Werterling Gallery, Stockholm, Allen Jones, 1989
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Notes: In the mid 1980s, Jones returned to painting having spent the early years of the decade primarily focussed on three dimensional work. He began a new series of large, multifigured compositions which took the theme of the party as their subject; 'I felt that such a big painting should represent a big subject, suitable for our time. The Party seemed the best excuse I could find for organising a lot of figures on a big canvas' (Jones, quoted in Andrew Lambirth, Allen Jones Works, Royal Academy of Art, London 2005, p.113). Works such as Harmony (1984, Private Collection) and Swing (1984, Private Collection) are peopled by exuberent characters energetically engaged with each other within a boldly coloured interior.
Executed circa 1986, the present work clearly stems from this new series but more specifically focuses on The Sitter or rather, the relationship between artist and sitter, between male and female. The Sitter takes her place straddling a stool in the centre of the composition as both subject and object; artist's subject whilst simultaneously object of desire. The complex dialectic between male and female protaganists signals Jones's ongoing interest in the relationship between genders and is most potently encapsulated by the inclusion of the yellow canvas in the bottom right corner, A Question of Grammar (1986, Private Collection). The work transforms the male figure into a red question mark, inviting her out, whilst she has been reduced to a vertical exclamation mark; although blue in the present work, she is green in the actual canvas as a clear indicator of her availability. The focus on the relationship between artist and sitter is also prophetic of Jones's oeuvre in the 1990s where the multifigured compositions of the 1980s gave way to a focus on two specific figures, the Artist and his Muse.
