The English Pop artist, now eighty-five years old, has bitterly boycotted New York since 1962, when a show of his frolicsome whimsies hit an iceberg of local cool and sank. Cherished at home—Blake was knighted in 2002—he is known here rather exclusively for his collaboration on the cover collage for the Beatles’ 1967 album “Sgt. Pepper.” Now he relents. But will we? He has transplanted, from London, his entire ultra-cluttered, several-room studio. It’s a challenge to identify the forty-six discrete art works from among the scads of stacked, strewn, and arrayed equipment, torn-out magazine pages, boxing gloves, bric-a-brac, Elvis memorabilia, and what may merely be trash—the harvest of a kitsch-adoring, proudly mad collector for whom more seems only a rest stop en route to everything. You are apt to enjoy this show a lot if at all.
– Peter Schjeldahl