Peter Blake is best known as one Britain’s first pop artists. On the Balcony (1955-57), painted as Blake's diploma composition while he was at the Royal College of Art, from 1955 and completed later in 1957, is a combination of images from high art and contemporary American and British popular culture. This picture includes 27 variations on the theme of ‘on the balcony’, from a famous painting by Edouard Manet (now in Musée d'Orsay, Paris) to a newspaper photograph of the royal family. He also includes a range of other references including fashionable American cigarettes, a photograph of his late tutor John Minton (1917-1957), and a painting by fellow-student Leon Kossoff (1926-2019).
Blake was undoubtedly inspired by the work of the American female realist artist, Honoré Desmond Sharrer (1920-2009) whose Workers and Paintings (1943), now in the Museum of Modern Art, New York and was included in its landmark 1946 exhibition Fourteen Americans, depicts ordinary American families presenting and reacting to well-known paintings including Grant Wood’s iconic American Gothic (1930) and Pablo Picasso's Girl Before a Mirror (1932), also in MoMA (1938). The artists Sharrer chose, including the French realist Jean-François Millet (1814-1875) and the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera (1886-1957), often attempted to dignify working people. Workers and Paintings was subsequently shown at the Tate Gallery in the controversial exhibition Modern Art in the United States: A Selection from the Collections of the Museum of Modern Art from January-February 1956, where Blake would have seen it, despite its relatively small size and, no doubt, eclipsed by the abstract expressionist works that were causing a furore.
