Feminists have trouble keeping up with the Joneses

Fascinating Rhythm, 1982-3. Enamel on plywood.

Allen Jones’s work is evidently too difficult for some people who call themselves “feminists” to understand. In 1986 a posse of deranged women (or a single loonie)  attacked his 1969 “Chair” with paint stripper or acid (Google-accessed accounts vary); and his work was pointedly excluded from Penelope Curtis’ 2011 Tate Britain survey of “Modern British Sculpture.”

“Chair” was part of a series including “Table” and “Hat Stand,” featuring life-size, bewigged, booted and gloved, idealised (or fantasised) 1960s/70s women of the airbrushed Playboy centrefold genre. “Chair” had a black leather cushion attached to the lady’s folded back inner femurs, and the backs of her upright legs made the back of the chair. “Table” has the woman as it were on all fours, breasts exposed, balancing in a white fur rug, with a glass table-top bolted to her shoulders and buttocks. Only an ideology-blinded idiot could fail to spot the irony in these pieces. In any case, as the maiden name-using, fiercely feminist, actual head of my household says, “Why can’t they just get over it and rant about something important.”

In the Independent for November 17 Zoe Pilger sees the merit of even these works in the terrific current Royal Academy retrospective of Jones’s work, but in her almost reasonable piece she makes comments (about some objects from the artist’s studio): “It seems dangerous to take these images too lightly…The feminist response should have been included in the display too.” Huh? This is an exhibition of Allen Jones’s work, not of the responses to it.

In another case she thinks she is able to read the artist’s mind, when she claims “Desire Me” (1969) is the only work in the show in which the female subject returns the gaze of the viewer, whereby she asserts “her own desire.” Ms Pilger then tells us what Jones thinks about all this” “For this reason,” she pronounces, “she is shown as monstrous.”

The trouble with this tosh is that she simply states her premises where the ellipsis occurs in the quotation two paragraphs above: “We still live in a sexist time; women are still the second sex, expected to be subservient to men’s needs.” She can’t be faffed to argue them, and so begs the question by assuming their truth. With logic cast aside, we’re left with Pilger’s prejudices, not art criticism.

As readers of my Wall Street Journal columns might remember, last year I wrote a piece about Allen Jones’s studio. I know Allen Jones is no misogynist.We’ve been chums for about 25 years, and he is a man who loves women. On the other hand, though what they say about misogyny and Allen sounds like a statement of biographical fact, Pilger and Co are really not saying that he is a misogynist, but that they can deduce misogyny from a perusal of his work – in which case, they are guilty of missing its very obvious irony.

With that out of the way (forever, one would hope, but I don’t suppose mere logic is much of a deterrent in this case), I urge you to see this splendid, huge, beautifully installed show in the Burlington Gardens galleries.

Though this is his first big retrospective – indeed, his first major London exhibition in a long time — he emerges  from this exceptionally big show as a considerable artist. I prefer the metal sculptures, such as the colossal one in front of the gallery to the Madame Tussaud-like ladies – to my taste, the best are his dancers, the couple or pair that occurs in many of his post-1980 paintings and works on paper, as well as sculptures.  Even the genuinely rude works such as “Three-Part Invention” (2002) show his exquisite draughtsmanship, handling of colour and ability to convey movement and velocity. Much as I covet the Chatsworth “Levitation” (2000), I’d be very happy with the pencil on paper “Study for Levitation” which is (curiously) dated two years after the painting. Is the doubling of the male conjuror’s face a pentimento or a mask? Or is it there to convey movement? I stared at it for as long as was possible at the extraordinarily crowded opening (most of the London art world turned out that evening in support of Allen, a much loved and respected colleague).  It is a real treat to see some of the early work from the 1960s, but see if you don’t agree with me that the work really blossoms in the 1980s.

Allen Jones RA has contributed a good deal to the art world as  Trustee of some of the national collections and even as a curator of shows at the Royal Academy. It’s about time he received his due as an artist, and it’s a real pleasure to say that this show does him justice. It’s not often that virtue is rewarded so generously and so well.

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