The Way Forward: Derek Boshier and the Sixties

Together with fellow RCA students David Hockney, Allen Jones, Peter Phillips and R. B. Kitaj, he participated in the landmark Young Contemporaries exhibition at R.B.A. Galleries London in 1962, which propelled Pop Art to public prominence. Among the first exponents of British Pop Art, Boshier distinguished himself from contemporaries such as Peter Blake and Pauline Boty through his unique brand of satirical social commentary. Two important paintings from this formative student period of Boshier’s work, Special K (1961) and W for Euthanasia (1962), represent twin poles of this art, though both combine narrative elements, references to moral dilemmas and to the human predicament as reflected in the news, advertising, consumerism and popular culture. Special K, one of Boshier’s key Pop works, takes its striking central motif from a popular American breakfast cereal manufactured by the multinational company Kellogg’s and combines it with a prescient reference to James Bond predating the first Bond film by a year - and the Thunderball movie by four years - and to the American-Russian space race in the rockets firing upwards into the letter K. Euthanasia, painted within living memory of the Nazi death camps active during the artist’s own early childhood, presents a sequence of generic figures alongside portraits of men protecting themselves with gas masks, as a caustic perspective on a subject that remains just as contentious today in the discussions now taking place about assisted dying.