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Property of a Private European Collector20Allen JonesProject for Fifteen Foot Womensigned, titled and dated 'Allen Jones Project for Fifteen Foot Woman 1967' on the stretcher oil and graphite on canvas 91.5 x 91.5 cm (36 x 36 in.) Executed in 1967. Full CataloguingEstimate £150,000 - 200,000 ♠ Place Advance BidContact Specialist Kate Bryan Specialist, Head of Evening Sale +44 20 7318 4026 kbryan@phillips.com
Overview'[Allen Jones] continues to posit the polarities of gender, exposing the contemporary masquerade of women as objects, women as bodies, women as auras, in contradistinction to that of men, creating artworks that compel their audience to question their own gendered presence. And for Jones, difference is to be celebrated.' —Natalie Ferris Allen Jones Hermaphrodite, 1963, oil on canvas, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. © Allen Jones Image: Bridgeman images. Since the early 1960s, Allen Jones has been a central figure of the British Pop art movement. The radical nature of his work became more distinct after he briefly relocated to New York City in 1964. There, Jones began exploring erotic motifs, which he had only discreetly alluded to in previous works such as Hermaphrodite, 1963, which captures a man and a woman’s tender embrace as they morph into a single being. Discovering that risqué imagery was more prevalent in American advertising and magazines than in his native Britain, Jones began developing an overtly sexualised visual language that questioned the conventional ideologies of his time. Allen Jones Wet Seal, 1966, oil paint on canvas, wood and melamine, Tate Collection, London. © Allen Jones Image: Tate, London. On the artist’s first visit to Los Angeles, Jones discovered the mail order catalogue, Frederick’s of Hollywood. ‘Fatal Footstep’, ‘T-riffic’, ‘Wet Seal’, ‘Drama’, ‘Sheer Magic’, ‘Gallery Gasper’, and ‘Evening Incandescent’ were some of the alluring shoe descriptions used in Frederick’s advertising to tempt female audiences with their range of sexually infused footwear; these shoe titles subsequently became the titles of Jones’s shoe paintings. ‘The “high street glamour” and cluttered layout of each page worked against the illusionism of the drawings’ Jones told Phillips in 2018, ‘making the sexiness of the products acceptable in the sunny suburbias of America’. Both ambiguous and instantly recognisable, the depiction of the female leg is an iconic and recurring theme throughout Jones’ work, from his eponymous series of the 1960s to more recent works. This immediacy, which provided Jones with great clarity, can also be seen in Tom Wesselmann’s Great American Nudes. Frederick's of Hollywood Catalogue, circa 1960s. Image: Alamy. Kunstmarkt Köln 1967 In the aftermath of World War II, at a time when a number of artistic figures were keen to see Germany’s re-emergence, the young art dealer Hans Neuendorf saw an opportunity to begin selling British and American Pop art to German collectors. With the help of Ileana Sonnabend, Neuendorf staged Germany’s first Pop exhibition and began selling works by Allen Jones Andy Warhol Jasper Johns Eduardo Paolozzi Richard Hamilton David Hockney and Robert Rauschenberg amongst many others. After opening outposts in Hamburg and Cologne, Neuendorf began seeing success specifically with the English Pop artists. Born out of necessity and with the help of Neuendorf, Cologne-based gallerists Rudolf Zwirner and Hein Stünke, launched Kunstmarkt Köln in 1967, with the hopes of promoting contemporary art and establishing a German art centre. At this landmark event, Project for Fifteen Foot Woman was acquired by the present owner directly from Neuendorf. The first edition of Art Cologne, in 1967. Photo courtesy of Hans Neuendorf. Image: Galerie Neuendorf Larger than Life In 1966, Jones returned to London from New York and immediately commenced a new series of paintings using shelves as a way of reinventing the objective nature of the canvas. ‘Despite the spirited response of Pop art during the 1960s, a central tenet of abstraction held sway, the importance of the brushwork and the canvas itself’ said Jones ‘and I became interested in exploring this dichotomy between pictorial illusion and pictorial fact.’ (Allen Jones in conversation with Phillips, September 2020). Another device to use was the Surrealist idea of the Exquisite Corpse, where an unexpected result could be achieved