In 1959 Allen Jones studied alongside David Hockney, R.B. Kitaj and Derek Boshier at the Royal College of Art. At this time, many British painters were experimenting with extending the traditional rectangular canvas by introducing text, creating reliefs, adding objects and, as in 2nd Bus, using shaped canvases to mimic their subject matter.
The series of bus paintings made by Jones in 1962 is his own response to a problem he posed to his students, asking that they relate the subject of the canvas to its identity as an object. In a letter from the artist to the curator Uwe Schneede in 1975, he describes his intentions:
“… 3rd Big Red Bus, 1962 (Birmingham City Art Gallery) contains elements important to my development and to art of that period… It was an attempt to identify the subject (Bus) with the object (canvas/picture). It was therefore not a picture of a bus, but it was a bus. The object quality of the painting is asserted within a figurative context not abstract… ”
Jones’ use of colour at this time, is more painterly than that of other more graphic pop artists such as Hockney and Blake, and he drew heavily from the ideas of Kandinsky and Klee in his own art and teaching. In the early sixties British artists were very conscious of developments in America following the highly influential 1956 Tate Gallery exhibition, Modern Art in The United States. In 2nd Bus Jones employs the large canvas and flat areas of colour seen in Abstract Expressionism but for his own ends, creating a delicate balance between abstract and figurative elements. These early paintings often began as purely formal experiments; first areas of pure colour were applied to create a sense of depth and movement; as the painting progressed, representational elements were then allowed to emerge from the composition. Jones derived these images less from pop culture, than from his everyday life, such as people observed while travelling around London on the bus. Nevertheless, the target-style wheels place 2nd bus firmly within the zeitgeist, as do the layered composition and the bus windows, which subtly imitate the layout of a comic strip.
In 2nd Bus Jones uses flat areas of contrasting colour and the literal tilting of the canvas to evoke the energy of a bus in motion. He made a number of versions of this subject over a period of six months, which taken as a whole can be seen as a sustained and ongoing inquiry into the depiction of movement in painting, a compositional problem first posed by Futurists such as Robert Delaunay. Jones often painted these canvases in a single day, and his imagery became increasingly abstract, anchored in the figurative, and to the ground, only by the motif of the two spinning wheels.