Was 1964 one of those years in which the world turned on its axis and changed for ever?  Did the people living at the time (like me) realise the changes that were happening they hung around the juke boxes in cafes or sat up in their bedroom with friends playing the latest pop music?

In February 1964, the Beatles invaded the USA, arriving at JFK Airport in New York to the loud screams of a crowd of adoring fans, with an estimated 73 million viewers watching them on the Ed Sullivan show later in the week.  On April 4^th, the lads from Liverpool held the unprecedented top five positions in the Billboard Top 40 singles in America with “Can’t Buy Me Love”, “Twist and Shout”, “She Loves You”, “I want to Hold Your Hand” and “Please Please Me”. 

It wasn’t just the Beatles that were changing the music world – in the same month the Rolling Stones released their first album while, in October, the Kinks did likewise and the BBC, realising that they needed to respond to these changes, started broadcasting a new programme at the start of the year: “Top of the Pops”. 

In 1964, Bob Dylan perhaps set the mood of the times with his new release “The Times, They are Changing”.  They were indeed changing.  In  the same year, Terence Conran started a transformation in the interiors of homes with his first Habitat store and Andy Warhol shook the art world with his exhibition of 100 “Brillo Soap Pads” sculpture boxes at the Stable Gallery in New York.  If reproducing such commercial images was art, then Warhol opened the door for the wide variety of new art which has developed over the last fifty years. 

“Is this an art gallery or Gristede’s warehouse?’ said a viewer when pop artist Andy Warhol’s new show opened at the Stable Gallery April 21. Stacked from floor to ceiling were some 400 plywood grocery cartons, painted to resemble cardboard and bearing big-as-life replica trademarks – Brillo, Heinz Ketchup, Campbell’s Tomato Juice, and so on. That was the show. As one observer said, ‘Anti-Art with capital A’s.’  (Grace Glueck “Art Notes: Boom,” New York Times, 10 May 1964)

At the Gargosian Gallery in Britannia Street, London, the political, cultural and society life of the era is shown with Andy Warhol’s work alongside photographs by Richard Avalon, enabling a contrast between two artists who recorded the people of their times in their different ways.  A question lingers – there are photographs here of Warhol by Richard Avalon, along with self-portraits. Did Warhol ever paint Richard Avalon?

Both artists captured the individuals of the new political, pop, and cultural world of the 1960’s and also moved outside the mainstream– Avalon with his mural of Andy Warhol and members of “The Factory”, and Warhol with his images of drag queens - “ambulatory archives of ideal moviestar womanhood”.

Whizzing up the M40, to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, to find over a hundred of Warhol’s works from the Hall Collection in the USA on display plus films from the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.  Here are works which are not well-known such as the films, his pencil portraits and the Oxidation paintings with an exhibition that spans Warhol’s entire career from the early 1960’s when he aimed to show the real character of people such as Marcel Duchamp and Bob Dylan, along with his first experiments with dollar bills and cars depicting wealth and consumerism and with screen printing, right through to the 1980’s with a focus on black and white with “negative” and “positive” versions of the same image and then, in his last year, religions subjects such as details of the “Last Supper”, taken not from the original but from a cheap shop model.  In these he almost provides a foretaste of street art and the higher profile of tattoo art.

Two exhibitions showing different aspects of the new era and ending with Warhol’s final religious paintings which hint at new art movements to come.