Peter Blake – godfather of pop art – will be 88 in June, and appears to be feeling his age. He says that he is too old for parties now but then “you’re not gallivanting around in your late 80s”. The reason he didn’t have his knees replaced a few years ago is that “it takes quite a while to recuperate and I don’t have ‘quite a while’.”
But appearances can indeed be deceptive because he is still working as hard as ever. Most days – every day at the moment – are devoted to creating one or other of his projects: 12 individual labels for Macallan whisky, each bottle containing a new, unique distillation; a poster in conjunction with Roger Daltrey for Teenage Cancer Trust – “a kind of Sgt Pepper crowd of all the people who’ve performed for it”; a portrait of Michael Eavis, of Glastonbury fame, for the National Portrait Gallery.
This month, he is also part of the inaugural show, Pop by Design, in a new gallery in Walthamstow – his old stomping ground as a tutor where his most famous student was Ian Dury. The show, at One Hoe Street, is in partnership with the William Morris Gallery nearby. Blake is the biggest name in what has been until now a forgotten collective called Danad – a group of impressive British painters, architects and designers who worked together from 1958 to 1962. The co-founders were Barry Daniels (hence “Dan”) an abstract expressionist painter, and Tom Adams (“Ad”), a book designer for authors such as Agatha Christie and Raymond Chandler, and of album covers for the likes of Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix, Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground. The other members of the group were Peter Adams, Bernard Cohen, Robyn Denny, Colin Huntley and Edward Wright.
The story of Danad is extraordinary: a commune of six couples and their children in the grade II listed Marden Hill in the Hertfordshire countryside. In the 1790s the building had been owned by the governor of the Bank of England, who commissioned Sir John Soane (the architect who later did work on the bank) to create the staircase and extensions. As Mark Daniels, son of Barry and conserver of the Danad collection, puts it: “Soane went a bit mad in the place experimenting. All the pillars on the outside were prototypes for the Bank of England, and there’s a room in which he did his first vaulted ceiling for which he became famous later.”
There are Bloomsbury elements (both the unconventional living arrangements of the group’s home, Charleston, and the business of Omega) as well as the spirit of William Morris – a group of artistic friends living together, and creating pieces for the home for sale. There was certainly drama. Mark’s mother, Diana, fell in love with fellow tenant Richard Lipsey, the renowned economist who taught at the LSE; he was divorced from Assia Gutmann, who had left him for a young poet, David Wevill. Assia then had an affair with Ted Hughes, and later gassed herself and their four-year-old daughter to death in 1969, the method Hughes’s first wife Sylvia Plath had used to kill herself six years before.
Mark was born the day his parents moved into Marden Hill in 1958. He tells the story of having a gun held at his head by Assia when he was four years old. “I have no memory of it all,” he says, “ but I was talking to my mother about it recently and she just said, ‘We managed to get the gun off her and send her away’. These days, obviously the police would be called.” Whether she was looking for Hughes or for her ex-husband is unclear.
“When my stepfather and mother got together, Assia would send my mother, anonymously, a red rose every day just to try to send my stepfather mad with jealousy, thinking it was from another man,” he says. “This went on for two years.”
What was life like growing up at Marden Hill, with his mother, her lover and her husband, as well as the Danad members Bernard Cohen and Tom Adams, and sundry other commune members, including the then home correspondent of the Observer, Barty Phillips? “It was probably, by today’s standards, totally inappropriate; we were feral. They didn’t know how to be parents, really, but we got fed eventually and bathed occasionally,” he says. “The thing was, we were totally loved and given absolute confidence so I couldn’t think of a better upbringing. It was heaven, in a way.”
There were wild parties. He remembers going into his bedroom to find a member of a famous band in bed with three women. Mick Jagger came to visit because he was in Lipsey’s class at the LSE, “when he was just a grubby student rolled up in a sleeping bag in the morning”. Jimi Hendrix and Lou Reed were guests. Rod Stewart stayed in the summer of 1969, and it has been suggested that he may have written Maggie May, recorded the following year, at Marden Hill.
Mark only left the house five years ago, when a divorce necessitated the move. Before he left, he went into the basement and found 50 works from the Danad years. “We just used to play hide and seek there as kids,” he says. “What was there was an Aladdin’s cave. There was an original Peter Blake he’d done for Danad, and on the back of it ‘Lemonade – sixpence’ which we used as a sign at the end of the drive.
“The beautiful paintings and furniture were all packed in so tight, we hadn’t really looked at it. I’ve been trying to work out what do with it all ever since.”
How significant is this collection? Professor Jane Pavitt, professor of design and architectural history at Kingston University, says that Danad came about at an important point in postwar British culture, with the obvious impact of abstract expressionism and pop art from the US, acknowledging that pop art was also a very British phenomenon. “As a cottage industry, Danad’s objects were as much a product of lifestyle as they were a business idea. It’s a very British tradition really – artists experimenting with the decorative arts as a collective – living, working and partying together.”
Peter Blake thinks that what Danad invented was “the setting of art work into plastic – that was the breakthrough”. In the exhibition, there will be one of his earliest Tattooed Ladies made into a table and also a print. “You could select the hair colour of the girl – a redhead, a brunette or a blonde – and she was wearing a bikini, and you could choose from red, yellow, blue or green for the bikini. They were printed to order. That was a terrible failure,” he says cheerfully. “I think we only did one.”
Sir Paul Smith, the distinguished British fashion designer, sold some reproductions of Danad designs last year in his flagship Albemarle Street shop in London. The collective were dubbed “prophets of the revolution in the home” who wanted art off the walls to be functional and accessible “so that people could eat their fish and chips off it”, but their pieces were sold in Harrods, Liberty and Heals – not exactly emporiums for the masses. Smith had wanted to buy some of the orginals that were also on display but Mark Daniels was advised by invitees from London’s Design and V&A museums to keep the collection intact until it could be shown at a gallery.
A year after Danad’s 60th anniversary, that time has come.
