Allen Jones had just turned 22 when he arrived on the MA course of the Royal College of Art in autumn 1959 as one of a prodigiously talented group of young students soon associated with the nascent Pop Art movement. The General and his Girl was painted following his expulsion for insubordination after a single year at the RCA, but it shares key aspects of the ‘Royal College style’. These include a swaggering confidence in quoting the work of other artists, combining notionally unrelated styles of depiction within a single picture; a fascination with pictorial signs drawn from areas outside of a conventional fine art framework, such as comic strips, graffiti, heraldry and maps; and an ability to strip a motif to its essence to produce a confrontational
and memorable image. Immersed at the time in Cubism, in Robert Delaunay’s Orphism, in the poetic inventions of Paul Klee, and in the first abstract improvisations of Wassily Kandinsky half a century earlier, Jones made no secret of his orientation towards Europe at a time when American art was in the ascendancy. Images were often ‘discovered’ through a process of sketching indebted to the Surrealist practice of automatic drawing, which sought to tap into the conscious. Immersed in colour theory, Jones displayed a natural intuition for the emotive power of particular hues, as attested by the passionate red that floods almost the entire surface of this picture’s four conjoined canvases.
There is great wit and humour in the ambiguity with which a shape can at once act as a representation, a formal device and an in-joke or oblique reference to the work of other painters. The constellation of stars placed against the girl’s head – representing the plough as it appears from London on the artist’s birthday – can be read, if one wishes, as a fashionable decoration or piece of jewellery, but also as a homage to the Constellations series of small paintings on paper made by Joan Miró, an artist he greatly admired, between 1939 and 1941. The shapes inscribed on the general’s medals evoke the timeless designs of mazes and labyrinths; they are suggestive also of badges worn by teenagers to mark their
affiliations. Around the general’s head is an irregular curved shape in a different red, suggestive of the comic strip ‘thinks’ balloon that Jones had incorporated in a key earlier work, The Artist Thinks (1960). Interacting both with erudite artistic references and popular culture, in the very year in which American Pop artists such as Warhol and Lichtenstein were making their first comic-book paintings, Jones displays the chutzpah that was to become a prime characteristic of the art with which he established his international reputation.

Text by Marco Livingstone