Brit Pop and Identity Culture
The Mirror Steamed Over: Love and Pop in London in 1962
by Anthony Byrt
Auckland University Press, Auckland 2020
WYSTAN CURNOW
London. Diana Vreeland, editor of Vogue, declared London ‘the most swinging city in the world at the moment’. The moment being 1965.
‘Swinging’ didn’t yet denote casual sexual coupling and decoupling, so much as ’jazz inflected’ because —‘it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing’. Three years before that—in 1962, the year of Anthony Byrt’s book—her predecessor, Lady Clare Rendlesham, sent David Bailey and Jean Shrimpton to New York for ‘the fashion shoot that launched the Swinging Sixties’. Woohoo! you might say, but they were catching the wave of the country’s economic and cultural revival. As were the three young emerging artists who are at the centre of this book. That year two of them completed the Royal College of Art’s three-year graduate diploma course, members of a cohort dubbed the third wave of British pop art: Derek Boshier, Allen Jones, Pauline Boty, R.B. Kitaj, among them.
Art history as such is not mainly what Byrt is on about. He’s a magazine guy, and his book is long-form journalism. He writes less about art than about the work art does in the culture, more about the relations between the people and the ideas that drive them forward.
covers in detail the diploma years, starting in October 1959, of David Hockney, who was enrolled in painting, and Barrie Bates, who was in graphic design, at least to begin with. That same month, an
