Happy Birthday to the Pop Pioneer, Peter Blake

Since the 1960s, Peter Blake has aspired to bring pop music to the canvas—first “aiming for the fans of Elvis Presley” and later reaching Beatles fans in his now iconic album cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. “What I was attempting to do was make an art that was an equivalent to pop music,” he said. “So in music, if you think of the classics, and then you think of pop music, it was a different phenomena; and I wanted to do the same in painting. You had classic painting and classical painting, and I wanted to make an art that was a pop equivalent of that.”