Jann Haworth - Life & Work - The 1960s

The 1960s

After two years at UCLA, she moved to London, England in 1961. There she studied art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art and studio art at the Slade School of Fine Art. Haworth reveled in being a rebellious woman artist within a conservative, male-dominated institution like the Slade.

I liked the Slade’s fustiness; it was another thing to push against...The assumption was that, as one tutor put it, “the girls were there to keep the boys happy”. He prefaced that by saying “it wasn’t necessary for them to look at the portfolios of the female students…they just needed to look at their photos”. From that point, it was head-on competition with the male students. I was annoyed enough, and American enough, to take that on. I was determined to better them, and that’s one of the reasons for the partly sarcastic choice of cloth, latex and sequins as media. It was a female language to which the male students didn’t have access. —Jann Haworth

It was in these formative years at art school that her aesthetic sense was first established. She began experimenting with sewn and stuffed soft sculptures. She made still life items (flowers, doughnuts) and quickly progressed to her now iconic "Old Lady" doll and other life-sized figures. Her work often contained specific references to American culture and to Hollywood in particular, as is readily apparent in her dummies of Mae West, Shirley Temple and W.C. Fields.

Haworth soon became a leading figure of the British Pop Art movement, and joined Pauline Boty as one of its only female practitioners in London. Her first major exhibition was at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1963, where she was selected to participate in 4 Young Artists (18 September - 19 October 1963) alongside British artists John Howlin, Brian Mills, and John Pearson. Three shows at the Robert Fraser Gallery in London followed, two of which were solo exhibitions. Her work was seen in Amsterdam and Milan and also was featured in the Hayward Gallery's landmark exhibition of Pop Art in 1968. That same year, she and her then-husband, Pop artist Peter Blake, won a Grammy for their album cover design of The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.