Does Allen Jones deserve a retrospective at the Royal Academy?

It has been a vintage season for mannequins. At the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, an exhibition called Silent Partners looks at the relationship between artist and mannequin, from function to fetish. In London, the Royal Academy is hosting a retrospective of the work of British artist and Academician Allen Jones. Jones, who is now 77, became obsessed with mass-produced imagery of eroticised women. As the show makes clear, he never really got over it.

During the 1960s, Jones emerged as a leading pop artist. His contemporaries at the Royal College of Art included Patrick Caulfield and David Hockney, but he was expelled after a year. His big break came in 1969 with his trio of fibreglass sculptures that portrayed women as pieces of furniture. Unsurprisingly, ‘Hat Stand’, ‘Table’ and ‘Chair’ (all of which are on show) didn’t exactly chime with contemporary feminist discourse. In 1986, ‘Chair’ had acid thrown on it when it was exhibited at Tate Britain.