‘Princess Margaret was unpredictable - friendly with you one second, cold the next’

The artist Derek Boshier remembers being invited to Kensington Palace one night in the early 1960s. Princess Margaret and her husband, the Earl of Snowdon, were hosting a soirée, towards the end of which a marijuana joint was passed around in a circle. Boshier, who had the princess to his right, took the joint from his left and passed it immediately to her. “Please,” he insisted. “Royals first.”

The anecdote gives a sense of the fame and high company Boshier once enjoyed. Alongside his good pal, David Hockney, he was one of the golden boys of British pop art.

“Those were good times,” Boshier says. Now 84, he’s talking to me via Zoom from the California home he shares with his long-term partner, Thelma, ahead of a new exhibition at Gazelli Art House in Mayfair. The show consists of two separate painting series: one inspired by the Greek myth of Icarus, the other by South Korean “K-pop” music.
Boshier’s career is now into its seventh decade, and, throughout, he has remained an astonishingly well-connected and influential figure. Boshier often found himself at parties with the Beatles, particularly hitting it off with Lennon, who himself had been to art school in Liverpool. “At heart, he was an artist as much as he was a musician,” Boshier says. “We often hung out late into the night at his [Kensington] flat talking about painting. Like me, he adored Hieronymus Bosch.”

He also sold Lennon his first car. In a wonderful long-form audio interview with the Tate research fellow Hester Westley, Boshier relates in detail how the Beatle said he needed one. Boshier said he’d sell him his own, a green Triumph Herald convertible, for “a hundred quid”. Lennon went upstairs to get him the money, and Boshier caught a taxi home.

Later, David Bowie became a big fan and collector of his work, as well as a friend. It’s Boshier’s painting that is projected onto the bare chest of Bowie in boxing gloves on the album sleeve of Let’s Dance (1983), which the artist designed, as he did the cover of Lodger (1979). Boshier also designed the stage sets for the global phenomenon that was the Serious Moonlight tour. Bowie sent him an email shortly before he died, he tells me, saying farewell.

Hockney, too, has remained a friend. Boshier once took a road trip with the Yorkshireman and fashion designer Ossie Clark all the way from Los Angeles to New Orleans. He relocated to LA himself at the turn of the millennium.

His upbringing, though, was conventionally working-class. Born in Portsmouth in 1937, Boshier was the son of a former Royal Navy seaman, later a caretaker at Sherborne School for Girls, who would regale his son with tales of serving on the British ship sent to aid the Tsar during the Russian Revolution.

As a teenager at grammar school, Boshier considered becoming a butcher (his best friend’s dad ran the local branch of Dewhurst and promised him a job). However, with his interest in art growing, he chose to continue in education.

He applied to the Royal College of Art in London, where – after national service – he studied from 1959 to 1962. It’s where he first met Hockney, in the life-drawing test that prospective students had to take as part of their application. Along with Pauline Boty, Allen Jones, RB Kitaj and Patrick Caulfield, they were part of an outstanding generation of RCA students. “We didn’t know that at the time, of course,” Boshier says. “We were just kids having fun.”

Soon, these kids – working in a bold style called Pop – were helping define the look of the 1960s. Boshier took a special interest in the Americanisation of British culture. “It was noticeable that you’d start the day under American influence, with your cornflakes at the breakfast table, and then find yourself going through the rest of the day in the same vein,” he says.

One of Boshier’s best-known paintings, Special K (1961), features a large letter K lifted from the packaging of the eponymous Kellogg’s cereal. The letter opens wide, like a mouth, before a spoonful of breakfast: a metaphor for the way Britons consumed whatever America had to offer.

“What’s funny is that the wheel has now turned,” says Boshier. “These days I’m in the US, and foreign cultures such as Korean are infiltrating here.”

The second of his two new series addresses this. Each work features the Kellogg’s letter K of old – a shorthand for the United States – yet the canvases are dominated by colourful characters from South Korean “K-pop” talent shows that Derek and Thelma watch on television. “You could say there’s a tension as to what the letter K now stands for,” he says. (Boshier is a particular fan of the singing contest King of Mask Singer – which spawned ITV’s The Masked Singer – and calls the whole K-pop phenomenon “great fun”.)

As an emerging artist, Boshier had a string of London shows in the early 1960s. Participation in Ken Russell’s still-admired BBC documentary Pop Goes the Easel in 1962, though, brought a new level of recognition. This followed a day in the life of four British pop artists then making waves (the other three were Boty, Peter Blake and Peter Phillips, who filled in because David Hockney was in New York at the time of filming).

Fame and fashionable friends followed. He got to know Princess Margaret through Snowdon, her photographer-husband, and remembers her as “very unpredictable: friendly with you one second, cold the next”.

Despite seeming to be living the dream, Boshier soon grew restless, however, and took what he now calls “the worst career move in history”, namely, leaving Swinging London behind and moving to India for a year. When he returned, he had to a certain extent been forgotten.

Over the coming decades, Boshier twinned an artistic career with one as a teacher, including long stints at his alma mater, the RCA; the Central School of Art and Design (where he taught the future frontman of The Clash, Joe Strummer); and between 1980 and 1992, when he lived in Texas, the University of Houston.

He has now retired, but how does he think he would fare teaching today, in the age of cancel culture?

“It’d be difficult,” he says. “There are some complicated issues, around race and gender and so on, and I’m all for moving with the times. But my inclination – and the inclination of many people – when someone tries to shut you up, is to want to shout louder. So I really don’t think censorship is an answer. You’re not dealing with a subject in any constructive way if you just cancel it.”

He cites the recent postponement by Tate Modern and three US museums of a retrospective for the late American artist Philip Guston for fear that his cartoonish images of Ku Klux Klansmen might offend. “It’s just insane,” Boshier says. “Guston was vehemently anti-Klan.”

Since the 1960s, Boshier’s artistic career has been one of highs and lows. The highs include the paintings he did in Texas of emasculated cowboys, subverting the stereotype of horse-riding machos. Among the lows were some rather one-dimensional works indicting US militarism in the 1980s – but, then, over the course of a multi-decade career, nobody’s going to be perfect.

Boshier has two daughters, both in their early thirties, from his only marriage, to fellow artist Patricia Gonzalez. He will be in London for the opening of his new exhibition, and hopes to pop over and visit Hockney (now based in Normandy) shortly afterwards.

“David has this reputation for being a bit of a curmudgeon, but that’s never been my experience of him. When I got diagnosed with cancer [of the tongue in 2006], he immediately sent me a cheque for $25,000 for the medical treatment.”

Thankfully, Boshier has long since had the all clear and is currently working with Wolverhampton Art Gallery on a mini-retrospective and with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on a prints and drawings show, both scheduled for 2022.
Does he ever get nostalgic for the Sixties? “Not really,” he says, “I’m too busy”.

David Boshier: Icarus & K Pop is at Gazelli Art House, London W1, from Oct 7 to Nov 13; gazelliarthouse.com, 020 7491 8816