Peter Phillips: prince of pop art

Dear readers, think "pop art" and it's likely the same old prints by Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein spring to mind. But Birmingham had its own purveyor of bubblegum bright paintings inspired by mass culture. Peter Phillips was raised in Bournville, trained at the Birmingham School of Art and Crafts, and studied in London alongside Pauline Boty, David Hockney and Allen Jones. In today's story, Ruth Millington writes about how Brum inspired him long after he left it behind for the bright lights of New York City.

But before that, your Brum in Brief.

Brum in Brief

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📽️ The iconic character of Bagpuss is returning to screens thanks to Birmingham-based production company Threewise Entertainment. The film sequel to the original 1970s series will feature a mixture of live action and animation and is expected to be released in 2027. According to the BBC, the film is being developed with the estates of Bagpuss's original creators, Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin. Firmin's daughter Emily, who was the girl in the original series, said that she is thrilled that Bagpuss’s “magic will live on and be shared with the next generation”.

📰 The New Statesman has interviewed government commissioner Max Caller about his recent stint in Birmingham, the bin strikes and the ‘future of local government’.

In Ken Russell’s 1962 pop-art documentary, Pop Goes the Easel, Peter Phillips speeds onto screen in the backseat of a chauffeur-driven Ford Galaxie convertible, his dark hair blowing in the breeze.

As the car comes to a stop, the 22-year-old artist steps out, striding self-confidently towards his west London studio at 58 Holland Park Road and looking every inch a main character in the story of British pop art. Inside, the camera finds a large and ambitious painting hanging on a wall. Painted in 1961, “The Entertainment Machine” features mechanical parts, targets and piano keys floating in an epic, grid-like composition of flat, primary colours.

Now part of Tate’s permanent collection, this early masterpiece is a blueprint for the radical new way in which Phillips transformed low culture into high art and made waves in swinging sixties London. But in both dynamic style and modern subject matter, he drew influence beyond the capital — namely, from his hometown in industrial Birmingham.

From Bournville to Biennale

Born in 1939 to working-class parents — his mother Marjorie was employed at the Cadbury’s factory in Bournville, while his father Reginald was a carpenter who later made frames for some of his son’s artworks — the young Phillips loved fast cars and girls. Not yet known as a pioneering British pop artist, in the 1950s his persona as a talented emerging painter was already becoming part of his charm. As a teenager, he’d spend evenings and weekends cruising from his home on Selly Oak Road, through the suburbs and towards the city centre.

“I started getting interested in cars because I couldn’t afford one myself”, he told me over email in 2018, when he granted me a rare interview. “I had friends in Birmingham whose family had car dealerships. And they always came around with fancy cars. Because I was an artist, they thought it was cool for me to drive around with them. So I drove around with them. I sat in the front seat… until we picked up girls — which was the whole gesture of it. That’s what you do when you have a car.”