Derek Boshier (born 1937, in Portsmouth) is an English artist, among the first proponents of British pop art. He works in various media including painting, drawing, collage, and sculpture. In the 1970s he shifted from painting to photography, film, video, assemblage, and installations, but he returned to painting by the end of the decade. Addressing the question of what shapes his work, Boshier once stated "Most important is life itself, my sources tend to be current events, personal events, social and political situations, and a sense of place and places". His work uses popular culture and the mixing of high and low culture to confront government, revolution, sex, technology and war with subversive dark humor.
He has been commissioned by David Bowie, The Clash, and The Pretty Things.
Education and Profession
Derek Boshier attended Yeovil School of art in Somerset, England from 1953-1957 (B.F.A.). He attended the Royal College of Art in London, 1959-1962 alongside David Hockney, Pauline Boty, Allen Jones and Peter Phillips, receiving his M.F.A. in 1962.
The boredom of the previous few years of National Service in the [Royal Engineers] had been alleviated by reading the works of Marshall McLuhan. During his college years, his work was didactic, commenting on the space race, the all-powerful multinationals and the increasing Americanisation of English culture.
After graduating, he spent a year traveling in India on an Indian government scholarship. Boshier served as an instructor at the Central School of Art and Design, London from 1963-1979 and concurrently at the Royal Collage of Art London from 1973–1979. Boshier moved to Houston Texas in 1980, after accepting a one-year visiting artist position at the University of Houston, and then joined the faculty there from 1981–1992. He moved back to England 1992-1997 and later joined the faculty of the California Institute of Arts in Los Angeles in 1997, where he has lived ever since. Though associated with the art and culture of both London and Los Angeles, Boshier has also lived in Houston, Somerset and Wales.
Career
Royal College
Pop Goes the Easel
While still at the Royal College of Art Derek Boshier appeared with Peter Blake, Pauline Boty and Peter Phillips in Pop Goes the Easel (1962), a film by Ken Russell for the BBC's Monitor series. A pioneering program, Monitor's editors encouraged Russell to be ambitious and the resulting film can also be seen as a collaboration, taking inspiration from the formal aesthetics and themes within work of its artist-subjects. Like the work of Boshier, the film was a spliced and shuffled collage that startled its viewers. Pop Goes the Easel established the similarities that united this group of pop artists while also establishing their differences. Boshier emerged as relatively articulate and concerned with social issues and critical writings on the impact of advertising on social identity and democratic politics. Though he used the materials of pop art such as flags maps and comics, we can see in his early work a marked political concern, especially with current events and expansion of American power. Boshier believed that, "The world's at peril," and that it was impossible to avoid being political.
Royal College notable works
Notable works that came out of Boshier's time at the Royal College show his differentiating concern with political action and discourse.
Special K
I Wonder What my Heroes Think of the Space Race
Man Playing Snooker and Thinking of Other Things
The Identi-Kit Man
The film forever placed Boshier at Pop Art's origins and anointed him one of its British kings. As is a theme within Boshier's life and work, he and Russell became friends and Boshier later played the role of John Everett Millais in Russell's television film Dante's Inferno (1967); his girlfriend Gala Mitchell played Jane Morris.