User:Poiuytrewq7/Dudley Edwards

David Mellor said in the book 'The Sixties' The young, male decorative design co-operative known as BEV (Douglas Binder, Dudley Edwards and David Vaughan), which came to prominance in the last months of 1965, revived the early modernist project of Roger Fry's Omega workshop of 1913. Their agenda of decorating ready-made furniture possessed the idyllic register Fry's Bloomsbury and accessed a similar range of sources: the circus, exotic 'ethnic' motifs and synthetic fauve colouring, for the entertainment of a liberal metropolitan elite- Anthony Armstrong Jones, David Bailey and Henry Moore -whose purchase of BEV decorations reached the gossip columns and feature articles of the national daily papers. BEV, like the Beatles, were Northern cultural insurgents, from where the relics of the industrial revolution (barge paintings) and Imperial legacies (the assertion of Asian immigrant community identity) were highly formative to them: "We all went to Bradford Art College and I think we have been influenced by the Pakistanis who live there. They like to paint their houses in bright colours,....they have a much better colour sense than most English people" [1] [1. '81, the story of a street number 10-feet high' The Sun 22 December 1965]. They became media celebrities in themselves, exhibiting an AC Cobra sports car which they had painted at the Robert Fraser Gallery and collaborating with Paul McCartney on his 'Million Volt Light and Sound Rave' at the Roundhouse in January 1967. It was at this point that Dudley Edwards decorated McCartney's piano with the trademark BEV mix of Art Deco, Peter Blake, bargee and circus motifs, painted with the speciality 'Flamboyant' paint used by fairground artists. In this proto-Sgt. Pepper style, BEV, like Peter Blake and the Beatles, were perceived as arcadians of the mythical 'Swinging London' metropolitan landscape, innovative cultural producers who could combine modernity and conservatism: one of their first patrons, an advertising boss, described them as "brash, arrogant, yet traditional" [2]. [2. ibid.] Possibly the most extraordinary performer of this moment, in 1967, was the musician Arthur Brown. Like BEV and Peter Blake, Arthur Brown effected that combination of urban folkloric sumptuary ornamentation with the decors of contemporary consumption and excess. Summer of Love: Psychedelic Art, Social Crisis and Counterculture in 1960s: Psychedelic Art, Social Crisis and Counter-Culture in the 1960s (Tate Liverpool Critical Forum) ISBN/ISBN13:   	  0853239193 / 9780853239192