Allen Jones Moves

Allen Jones has created some of the most powerful and provocative images of the past half century. His Pop Art paintings are icons of Swinging London, while his controversial Furniture sculptures helped set the dystopian mood of the 1970s, the era of A Clockwork Orange and Punk, on which he exerted a crucial influence. Yet Jones’s art hasn’t stood still. From early shaped canvases to current experiments with virtual reality and AI, Jones’s career has developed through a succession of formal innovations - ＂moves＂ as he calls them - which are the subject of this ground breaking publication. Lavishly illustrated with many little-seen images, the book examines Jones’s personal iconography, and - not least - his contested approach to the female form in greater depth than any previous study. Far from uncritically reflecting the ＂male gaze＂, as some have claimed, Jones’s art has been preoccupied with themes of gender convergence and interchangeability from the outset. Allen Jones Moves takes us inside the artist’s thinking at the key junctures of his career, highlighting the intellectual curiosity that has powered a life of constant, intense creative activity.

Mark Hudson is the art critic of the Independent. His books include Titian, the Last Days, Our Grandmothers’ Drums (winner of the Thomas Cook and Somerset Maugham awards) and Coming Back Brockens (winner of the NCR Award). He has written for the Daily Telegraph, Guardian, Sunday Times, Observer and many other publications.