Joe Tilson: Political Prints

While some Pop artists have ploughed the same furrow since the late 1950s, others have restlessly dug up new ground in pursuit of more personal visions. Joe Tilson is one such artist.

     Initially lauded as founding figure of Pop, he grew tired of its relentless consumerism. At one point, he drew up a list of things you shouldn't do in print making and ticked them off, one by one. By the mid-1970s he was spending more and more time in Italy, turning his hand to reliefs inspired by Greek and Roman mythology. 

     The Printed Works 1963-2009 shows how throughout all these artistic upheavals, he has cultivated a formidable reputation as a subversive printmaker, one who has remained engaged and fascinated by the modern world, no matter which part of it he was living in. 

     Chiming with the protesting spirit of the 1960s, revolutionary politics looms large in his earlier work. Is This Che Guevara? (pictured right) features the much-reproduced face of the Cuban leader while Jan Palach commemorates the student who set himself on fire in protest at the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia. Above all, it is his ability to take these events and turn them into striking, accessible and thoughtful images that makes this exhibition well worth a visit.

     Joe Tilson: The Printed Works 1963-2009 is at Alan Cristea, London, until May 30.

Ray Johnson: Unpopular Pop

New York artist Ray Johnson (1927-1995) might have relied upon popular culture imagery, yet on this side of the Atlantic at least, his work remains largely unknown. However, a retrospective of his work, Please Add To & Return, opened on Saturday at new East London gallery Raven Row and should hopefully introduce him to a new audience. 

     Johnson graduated from Carolina's liberal Black Mountain College in 1948, where his contemporaries included Willem de Kooning, Cy Twombly and Robert De Niro Sr - the actor's father and a noted abstract expressionist artist in his own right. On moving to New York the same year, he started producing Pop-style portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley (see the striking Elvis #2, 1956-57, pictured right) almost a decade before Warhol and co. got in on the act.

     During this period, Johnson worked in a bookstore on Manhattan's Lower East Side, where he developed his interest in Zen philosophy and the art of chance. This fed into his art practice, as he took up where Marcel Duchamp left off and began to mail unfinished compositions to his friends, with instructions for them to participate in the creative process and send them on. These instructions would often become part of the works themselves.

     Unfortunately he didn't remain so sociable. On the same day in 1968 that Andy Warhol was shot, Johnson too was mugged and attacked near his home in a separate incident. By all accounts, the experience shook the artist, as he withdrew from city life and became increasingly reclusive, even declining offers to show his work by the early 1990s. It is only now, following his suicide by drowning in 1995 that his work is finally beginning to take its rightful place among the 20th century's most challenging and influential names. A personal archive of unseen works were found at his home after his death, adding to his fascinating legacy.

     Ray Johnson. Please Add To & Return runs until 10 May at Raven Row, 56 Artillery Lane, London E1. Image courtesy of the Estate of Ray Johnson at Richard L. Feigen & Co.