"Paris Escapades" is a beautiful book of Paris collages by Sir Peter Blake. A follow-up to his infectiously entertaining and highly successful "Venice Fantasies," Blake demonstrates his unerring sense of felicitous and unexpected juxtapositions, a gift for visual story-telling and an eye no less acute for having a permanent twinkle. As with the Venice images that preceded them, Blake features many familiar monuments in his Paris pictures but submerges them in extraordinary events that turn them into the stuff of dreams. There is enough air of reality in some pictures, such as the Seine freezing over, to entrap the unwary spectator. But as elephants are hoisted above Notre Dame cathedral and crowds gather for a charabanc outing or for a mass kiss-in that even festival-going hippies would have found a bit extreme, the beauty and allure of Paris becomes populated by the overactive mind of one of the great imaginative artists of our time. Each of the 28 images in" Paris Escapades" is accompanied by the artist's wry commentaries, and the book is preceded by an interview with Marco Livingstone in which Blake discusses his lifelong involvement with collage. Hugely entertaining as a visual voyage of discovery, "Paris Escapades" ends up a window into the methods and thought processes of a much loved artist.
About the Author: Peter Blake is one of the best-loved artists of his generation, working as a figurative painter, collagist, sculptor and printmaker. He was born in 1932 in Dartford, Kent, and attended the Royal College of Art in London from 1953 to 1956. By the time he featured in Ken Russell's BBC Monitor film "Pop Goes the Easel" in 1962 he was already a key and influential member of the Pop Art movement. After living from 1969 to 1979 in Avon, where he and his first wife were founder members of the Brotherhood of Ruralists, he returned to London, marrying the artist Chrissy Wilson. He was elected an RA and a Royal Designer for Industry in 1981, and two years later was awarded the CBE. He was made associate artist at the National Gallery in 1994 and was knighted in 2002. Retrospectives of his work have taken place in Amsterdam (touring to Hamburg, Brussels and Arnhem in 1973-4), at the Tate Gallery in London (1983) and at Tate Liverpool (2007, touring to the Museo de Bellas Artes in Bilbao in 2008). He curated an exhibition titled "About Collage" for Tate Liverpool in 2000, and his own highly inventive collages have reached an audience of millions, most notably for the cover art of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band."