For more than seventy years, Sir Peter Blake has found beauty in the spectacle – in boxers’ robes, wrestlers’ masks, and the crowds who believed in both. For this truly iconic conversation, Blake sits down with gallerist Paul Stolper to discuss his art, his relationship with sport, and the choreography of British popular life
Sir Peter Blake’s London studio is filled with fragments of British life: boxers, wrestlers, cyclists, rock stars, circus performers. They crowd the walls and tables like ghosts of a century of popular spectacle. Now 93, Blake remains the great archivist of modern British culture, the artist who saw beauty not in the ideal, but in the ordinary – in ticket stubs, matchday programs, posters, and people.
His work, which helped define Pop Art, has always blurred the line between high and low, between what is framed in a gallery and what is pasted on a pub wall. But if there is one current that runs quietly through his paintings and collages, it is sport – the rituals, the pageantry, and the people who turned movement into myth.
Blake’s relationship with sport began late. “When I was really young it was the war,” he recalls. “I was seven when it started and was evacuated a couple of times. In a curious way, childhood didn’t start until the end of the war.” When peace came, so did sport, a sudden, communal exhalation. Football, wrestling, and boxing flourished again in postwar Britain, their stadiums filling with crowds eager for something to believe in. “Everything started up at once,” Blake says. “People wanted to be happy again.”
He played football in the village where he was evacuated and later followed Dartford Football Club, his local team. But it was cycling that first pulled him into the world of sport as both participant and observer.
He joined the Dartford Wheelers, a club devoted to time trials and weekend races. “There were two tribes,” he says. “The Cyclists’ Touring Club and the League. The League were the smart ones – like mods. We were the bumbling ones. Khaki shorts, clanking shoes. Old-bloke cycling.”
The freedom of cycling, however, ended abruptly. One night, riding home with a friend after visiting a pub, he collided with a man pushing a baby carriage across a dark road. “The baby was fine,” he says softly. “I landed on my face on newly laid tarmac.” The crash left him disfigured and his friend concussed for weeks. It was the first of many collisions between Blake’s life and the world of sport, an intimacy that often came at a distance, as both fan and chronicler.
For a while, Blake stayed off the bike. “Then, when I did National Service (from 1951 to 1953) – I took a bike with me to the RAF,” he says. When asked whether cycling ever found its way into his paintings, he chuckles. “There’s an early drawing of a bike race – more of a cartoon,” he recalls. “I did a couple of cycling paintings too.” And where are they now? “The gallery might have them,” he says. “Not portraits of cyclists — more about cycling.”
By the time he entered Gravesend Art School, and later the Royal College of Art, Blake had begun to understand the visual power of spectacle. “From thirteen onwards I was interested in football, boxing, wrestling and all the things around them: the typography, the banners, the crowds,” he says. “It was all part of the same picture.”
At Gravesend Blake studied everything from carpentry and architecture to silversmithing and costume design, but it was lettering that stayed with him. His teachers urged him to pursue graphic design, although the principal of the Royal College, Robin Darwin, thought otherwise. After leafing through Blake’s portfolio — a mix of typographic experiments and a portrait of his sister — Darwin interrupted the review to say, “We should take this boy into the painting school.”
That hybrid education, between fine art and the applied arts, became Blake’s signature. His paintings were precise but affectionate, his compositions as informed by fairground signage as by Renaissance portraiture. “I do things painters don’t do,” he says. “I’m very involved with lettering and graphics.” Those instincts, once seen as amateurish, would eventually redefine British art.
Blake’s early fascination with boxing offered him both subject and metaphor. “It was very American then,” he says. “Joe Louis, Sonny Liston. Here it was Henry Cooper.” His family followed Dave Charnley, a local lightweight from Dartford who once fought Joe Brown for the world championship. “We’d meet and go to the Albert Hall,” Blake remembers. “My dad, my uncle, my brother. It was a family thing.”
The mixture of glamour and violence appealed to him, as did the theatre of the event. “Boxing had that American sheen,” he says. “But it was still intimate, still human.” He painted Joe Louis several times, often adding text to the canvas: The Brown Bomber. “Sonny Liston was another hero,” he adds. “It always felt like the fight where [Muhammad] Ali knocked him down – the phantom punch — was fixed. I think Liston took a dive. He needed the money. He went down too easily for someone that tough.”
In Blake’s world, the ring was as much stage as sport. His painting Blake’s Boxing Academy depicted a fairground boxer, flanked by Winston Churchill and Field Marshal Montgomery in the front row – a wry composition that collapsed history, politics, and popular entertainment into one crowded frame. “Fairgrounds always had Churchill and Montgomery,” he says, smiling. “It just felt right.”
Wrestling, too, found a lasting place in Blake’s imagination over the years. It was, to him, a cousin of boxing: half-dance, half-drama. He began attending matches in the late 1940s, when the sport was reaching the height of its television fame. “They might fight each other three nights in a row,” he says. “Margate, Rochester, Dartford. They’d work it out: ‘You take the first fall, I’ll take the second.’ Like dancers, they understood each other’s specialties.”
In 1986, Blake was invited, by producer Paul Yates, to make Masters of the Canvas, a BBC Arena documentary about the masked wrestler Kendo Nagasaki – a figure who combined mysticism with brute theatre (and also featured on the cover CircleZeroEight Issue 03). “I was asked to do the film,” Blake says. “And I also painted him.”
The resulting portrait, Kendo Nagasaki (Rainbow Stripes), shows the wrestler as both icon and idea: a study in disguise, identity, and performance. “The mask fascinated me,” Blake says. “It’s like a ritual object – part costume, part protection.”
His wrestlers, both real and imagined, read like characters from British folklore. There was Quasimodo, a French wrestler who entered the ring in a tattered fur coat and revealed, beneath it, immaculate maroon trunks. The Giant Anaconda, who carried a live snake. Bert Assirati, the world champion, a man of improbable strength. Blake recalls them all with warmth. “It was pantomime, but serious,” he says. “They were professionals.”
Occasionally, however, the fiction cracked. In wrestling, when a match turned into a real fight, it was called a shoot. “I think I saw two,” Blake says. “One was Jackie Pallo and Mick McManus, on television before the Cup Final. McManus butted Pallo again and again – well beyond any arrangement. Pallo couldn’t see and was pouring blood. That was a shoot.”
These stories, part sporting history and part folklore, feed into a larger theory of art that has guided Blake since the 1950s. “I was trying to make art about music,” he says, “something you could read the way you read pop music.”
He describes Pop Art not as a movement but as a confluence: America had Rauschenberg and Johns, then Warhol and Lichtenstein; Britain had the Independent Group at the ICA – Richard Hamilton, Eduardo Paolozzi, the Smithsons. “And then there was me,” Blake says. “Bringing my own vulgarity. Rock and roll, boxing, wrestling. My world.”
That world expanded beyond Britain. In 1985, Blake headed to the United States for the Hagler–Hearns fight in Las Vegas – one of the most anticipated bouts of the era. “We flew on Concorde,” he says. “Arrived before we left. Had breakfast in New York, then flew to Vegas for the fight.”
It is tempting to separate Blake’s work into categories, but his interests have always been consistent. The painter of wrestlers and boxers is the same artist who arranged The Beatles’ famous Sgt. Pepper’s gallery of icons. His fascination with masks, uniforms, and performance runs through every era. “Pop Art,” he once said, “isn’t about being popular. It’s about being honest about what you love.”
Blake’s art, like sport itself, is built on spectatorship, the communion between crowd and performer, the ordinary person’s moment of transcendence. His work suggests that the same language applies to painting, to music, to boxing, to wrestling: the choreography of people in motion, the beauty of repetition, the spectacle of belief.
“When the war ended,” he says again, “people wanted to be happy. Everything started up at once.” That sense of reawakening – of a world returning to colour after years in grayscale – never really left him.
In conversation, Blake speaks softly, as if still listening to the echoes of that first postwar cheer. Sport, for him, is not competition but continuity – the proof that movement, ritual, and imagination can survive any interruption. “It’s all theatre,” he says finally. “You know, it’s like painting. Everyone’s pretending. But the feeling’s real.”
