In Ken Russell’s 1962 documentary Pop Goes the Easel, a quartet of young British artists are filmed dabbling in popular culture: they buy comics at a street market, ride dodgems, dance the twist. One, tall, blond and in a neatly pressed shirt and tie, pours milk into a bowl of cornflakes. “That’s where the infiltration of American culture begins,” he says, gloomily. “At breakfast.” This was Derek Boshier, who has died aged 87.
Boshier was then 24, and in his last year as a graduate student at the Royal College of Art in London. Among his contemporaries were RB Kitaj, Patrick Caulfield and David Hockney. The RCA class of ’62 would define second-generation British pop art. Where Richard Hamilton’s 1956 show This Is Tomorrow had celebrated consumerism, these younger artists would cast a more critical eye. In the days of Aldermaston and civil rights marches, that eye would also often be anti-American.
