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AMERICA
Boshier is a senior British artist who has lived and worked in the United States for
many years and American culture has provided him with subject matter since the
1960s. A brief survey of his career is followed by an appreciation of recent anti-war
drawings and exhibitions.
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What I admire about Derek Boshier (b. 1937, Portsmouth) as a man and as an artist
are his charm, creativity, vitality, versatility, humour, international outlook, mobility
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While attending Yeovil School of Art, Somerset, from 1953 to 1957, Boshier
demonstrated the graphic abilities that have characterised so much of his work via a
sketchbook of pencil and ink drawings, some coloured with crayon or gouache, of
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local scenes and European townscapes. These images, based on direct observation,
Derek Boshier
The Identi-Kit Man 1962
Credit: Tate Britain
© Derek Boshier
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During the early 1960s, he achieved fame in Britain as one of a generation of Pop
painters who studied at the Royal College of Art. Like so many British Pop artists,
he was attracted to the iconography of consumerism and the American mass media:
Ballistic Missiles, President Lincoln, Buddy Holly and so on. However, besides
affection there was also a critical edge to his use of American iconography in his
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paintings because the process of Americanisation that was changing British society
concerned him. Nevertheless, he was eventually to live, work, teach and exhibit in
Along with three fellow RCA students, Boshier was the subject of an innovative
television documentary entitled Pop goes the Easel directed by Ken Russell for the
http://www.screenonline.org.uk/tv/id/1275788/].
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When Russell later made a film entitled Dante’s Inferno for television about the Pre-
actor to play the role of the painter John Everett Millais (BBC1, Omnibus,
December 22, 1967). Thus, television was one means by which Boshier became more
widely known.
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In addition, during the 1960s, Boshier spent a year in India where he mixed
mainly with writers who were left-wing and they influenced his thinking.
mythology of the sacred Hindu texts The Upanishads, were accidentally destroyed.
Some drawings, however, survived.) A seasoned traveller, he has also spent time in
Boshier claims always to have been more interested in life than in art and the gap
Minimalism - and ordinary Britons distressed him. His ambition was to make art
with content that was accessible to non-specialists. Even so, in all his works, Boshier
is aware of, and calls attention to, the materials and mechanisms of visual
world. He also sees no reason – other than a commercial one - why he should have to
remain wedded to one medium – painting – and one style – Pop; hence his life-long
ideas and styles from new art movements. However, his refusal of ‘consistency’ has
probably hindered his career. For example, he has never been granted a thorough
After his Pop phase, Boshier produced completely abstract illusionistic paintings
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Derek Boshier, Plaza (1965). Copyright the artist.
Oil on two shaped canvases, attached by metal struts Size 205.20 x 205.20 cm;
106.00 x 106.00 cm. National Galleries of Scotland. Purchased 1976.
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(Some paintings from the 1990s involved a combination of abstraction and
figuration.) He then gave up painting for more than a decade and turned to artist’s
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Recurrent themes at this time were the way in which the scale and significance of an
object could be changed merely by placing it in different contexts (see his photo-
booklet 16 Situations) and the metamorphosis of one object into another by a series
of steps. These works were not just formal exercises because the content was often
political – apartheid in South Africa and the representation of the British police in
the tabloid press, for instance (Some examples of Boshier’s 1970s’ political art are
discussed in my book Left Shift: Radical Art in 1970s Britain, London: I.B. Tauris,
2002).
Boshier has explained that even when he was employing static imagery he wanted
to evoke the ‘continuing image sense of cinema’ because the medium was familiar to
the majority of the populace and he hoped this would aid their appreciation of his
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work. Boshier’s concern with politics, the role of the mass media, especially
newspapers, and with making art more accessible to the public (but without
pandering to popular philistinism) was to continue throughout the rest of the 1970s
and was to culminate in the mixed exhibition Lives: An Exhibition of Artists whose
Work is based on Other People’s Lives, which he curated at the Hayward Gallery in
1979.
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Some items he selected proved so controversial that Arts Council officials censored
them.
illustrations for a songbook by the punk rock group The Clash and by designing a
cover for David Bowie’s 1979 album Lodger. (Bowie was photographed from above
as if falling in space. Since 1962, a falling man has been one of Boshier’s favourite
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motifs. It signifies ‘Everyman’ and was originally borrowed from a William Blake
In 1980, he also painted a full-length portrait of Bowie in his New York stage role as
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The Elephant Man.
From 1980 to 1992, and in 1995, Boshier was an artist-in-residence and teacher at
satirise the State’s grandiose office blocks, oil industry and cowboy myths in
colourful, exuberantly executed paintings whose style was borrowed from the then
has resided with his wife and children in Los Angeles, which serves as a base for
His projects and exhibitions are usually thematic. For example, the
Museum in Houston in 1998 documents the journey of the Jewish people from
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Auschwitz to Israel. In 2002, following a commission from the National Football
lividly coloured acrylic paintings depicting laptops and books on shelves and flying
or falling in space. Boshier was reading or viewing a wide range of titles, which
resulted in random juxtapositions. Books, of course, enabled him to exploit texts and
those with illustrations enabled him to ‘quote’ images from the worlds of art,
military hardware and the history of Nazism. In one painting, Picasso’s famous
Demoiselles d’Avignon was depicted but the women had mysteriously transformed
into men.
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Derek Boshier, America Afraid, (2002). Acrylic on canvas, 24 x 30”. Copyright the
artist.
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mosquitoes to attack the United States was juxtaposed against a stack of books
whose titles included Ambient Fears, How to Meditate and The Age of Anxiety. These
paintings, which were intended to contemporise the still-life genre, were literally
‘literary’ pictures.
environments. In LA, for example he has produced drawings and paintings about
the City’s freeways, its architecture, main newspaper, local art collectors and
and cutout photographs, which he had defaced and personalised by drawing and
painting over.
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Derek Boshier, Unsuccessful Transsexual, (2003). Mixed media and collage.
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The show, entitled ‘Extreme Makeover’, consisted of images with disparate subjects
ranging from Saint Francis to the United Nations. Naturally, the war in Iraq and its
In November 2004, Boshier mounted an installation, called ‘99 Cent War’, of 100
kitsch objects – tanks, guns, helmets, model soldiers, plaster statues of cute children
and so on, bought for ten dollars from a 99 Cent store - at the Iron Gate Studios in
Austin, Texas.
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Derek Boshier, 99 cent war. (2004). Mixed-media installation. Photo courtesy of the
artist.
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The objects were clustered on a table in centre of the space and spot lit while on the
Indian ink, which feature a pair of bewildered and innocent children, a boy and a
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Derek Boshier, 99 cent war (2004). Ink drawing, 8 x 5’. Copyright the artist.
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There were also be six drawings/collages (14 X 11 inches framed) from the ‘Extreme
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Derek Boshier, two drawings/collages from the Extreme Makeover series. Copyright
the artist.
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Finally, on display was ‘a wall object’, that is, a copy of Thrilling Book for Boys – a
British children’s adventure book by William Bawden and others published by Dean
& Sons Ltd in 1937 - whose illustrated cover depicted an aircraft and parachutist.
Boshier imposed the silhouette of a dark sinister figure on the cover design.
black Indian ink drawings and hand-printed text plus some photographic images,
which morph from page to page. The questions it poses at the outset include: ‘what
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Buying a car?’
and events, which range from mundane personal matters to military conflicts
reported in the news media. Just as there is no limit to the images and information
impinging on our senses, there seems no limit to this artist’s fecundity and
imagination. As the critic Rosetta Brooks has remarked: ‘Boshier’s art is an ongoing
www.derekboshier.com/ -
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This article first appeared in the magazine Jamini: An International Arts Quarterly,
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John A. Walker is a British painter and art historian. He is the author of Art in the
Age of Mass Media, Art and Outrage and Art and Celebrity.
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