POP ART PIONEER PETER BLAKE

He enjoyed the company of like-minded artists on the West Coast like Ed Ruscha, Billy Al Bengston, but wasn’t so impressed with the New York Pop artists. Lichtenstein he actually made a point not to meet. ‘I thought he was just in art for the business, for the money, that he didn’t actually like comic books.’ He met Warhol about eight times, but they never became friends: ‘Each time he’d kind of forget that we’d met already. ’Unlike his contemporaries and friends Richard Smith and David Hockney, he never wanted to move to the US permanently. The final nail in the coffin of any kind of American dream was the critical mauling he, and other British and West Coast Pop artists were given by the New York press for a show they did in 1963. ‘They were so nasty I made a vow that I would never ever have a show in New York, which was crazy, of course. The Museum of Modern Art asked me to do a drawing show in the mid-Sixties and I declined that. That was a bad move.’

-The Telegraph
May 29 2009