Jann Haworth sets the record straight over her role in Sgt Pepper album

Who was responsible for the most famous album cover in pop history, that of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band? Most people think they know the answer – Peter Blake. The most devoted Beatles fans are sure they know the answer – Peter Blake. Virtually every Beatles biography, including the current and excellent one by Craig Brown, gives the answer – Peter Blake. But they are all wrong.

Pop artist Peter Blake was the co-creator of the 1967 album cover, with its colourful depictions of key characters from pop culture and from history. His fellow co-creator was his then wife and fellow artist, Jann Haworth. Rarely, I would venture, has someone been so thoroughly written out of history, or at least pop history.

When I first met Jann more than 20 years ago, I was astonished by this omission and championed her involvement in the pages of The Independent. But as the regular flow of books and articles naming Peter Blake and only Peter Blake show, her contribution to a pop-culture icon remains largely unacknowledged.

I particularly recall that she told me how with a wry smile she had been playing Trivial Pursuit and answered the question of who designed the famous cover. But she got it “wrong”. The makers of Trivial Pursuit, like everyone else, credited only her former husband. However, she had a hand in much of the concept, including the celebrities as cloth sculptures, that technique in which she specialised.

She remembered: “Peter and I were there at the time, talking to Paul [McCartney] and John [Lennon], and working out what the Pepper cover would be. I said I thought it would be very nice not to have real lettering on the cover, but to have something like clocks in civic parks, making the lettering an integral part of the piece. The old lady and Shirley Temple figure in the foreground were mine, and the idea of going for 3D figures in a setting was something I was doing at the time. The crowd concept was Peter’s.”

One can tell from that, and by looking at the album cover, that her contribution was not exactly insignificant. And it’s more than about time that she had her rightful place in that moment of The Beatles’ story.  

I should add that Paul McCartney does mention Haworth in the 1997 book Many Years From Now, which he authorised Barry Miles to write, and is effectively McCartney’s autobiography. In the four pages headed “The Sgt Pepper Sleeve” and in which Peter Blake features prominently, and in which Sir Paul refers to “the Peter Blake cover”, Jann does get a paragraph. Barry Miles writes how Paul visited the Blake household, saying: “Peter was then married to the American artist Jann Haworth. She made life-size stuffed figures of off-beat characters. Two of her waxwork dummies sat on the settee. One memorable show included a collection of oversize teddy bears, each with John Betjeman’s face, some of whom were having a teddy bears’ picnic. As Paul explored Peter and Jann’s house, he came across some of her Betjeman teddy bears in a drawing room filled with potted plants.”

Sir Paul then says: “Jann had a big Californian surfer, one of her models, standing there, but the Betjeman was the most memorable. I love Betjeman as well, he was so sweet. I would love to have hung out with him, but I never got to meet him.”

Well, I guess one might be able to deduce from that rather lateral mention in the four or five pages devoted to Peter Blake’s contribution that Jann was co-creator of the album sleeve, but it takes a fair old leap of deduction. Later, Barry Miles does write that “everything was done by consensus between Paul, the other Beatles, Robert [Fraser, the art dealer], Peter and Jann. And that is as near as pop history gets to crediting her.  

Depressingly, the lavish CD of the album, part of a complete Beatles album set in 2009, has a booklet with two pages by Peter Blake on the creation of the cover. The Shirley Temple cloth sculpture is mentioned. But Jann Haworth gets no mention whatsoever.

Fortunately, her role in the creation of the cover was far from the end of Haworth’s contribution to pioneering art. She has continued her strikingly innovative work during the half century and more since Pepper. And just before Christmas she gave an online talk for the Courtauld Institute of Art in London as part of the Courtauld’s “In Conversation” membership series to an adoring audience of young artists and fans eager to tell her how much she was appreciated. (Jann, born in 1942 in America, where she now again lives, studied in London at both the Slade art school and at the Courtauld). She told about her early work and that pivotal moment of the early Sixties in British art history.

Jo Applin, head of history of art dept at the Courtauld, is someone who does acknowledge Jann’s Pepper credentials, but also emphasises how important an artist she is beyond that. “She is an artist whose work I have been teaching to my students for many years. It is an incredibly rich, varied and important career. She was closely associated with pop art in Britain and was a pioneer of soft sculpture and the co-creator of the Sgt Pepper cover. Her work is exhibited in major museums and galleries across the world (recently with exhibitions in Britain at the Pallant House in Chichester) and at Gazelli in London.”

Jann was born in Hollywood. Her father Ted Haworth was an Oscar-winning production designer and art director, working on classics such as Strangers on a Train, Some Like It Hot, Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Longest Day. Jann came to Britain in 1961 when she was 19. She was in Europe to see her father who was working on the D-Day film The Longest Day. She decided to stay. And to pioneer an art form. Soft sculptures made out of cloth and other soft materials.

 As Applin says: “It was unlike anything that would have been shown at that time in London.”

Jann Haworth recalls: “The first soft sculptures I did – the flowers followed by the doughnuts, then a dog, then an old lady, then a man – built up into what I suppose was an installation, but to me it was a movie set. The idea came into my head when I was thinking about making flowers and I wasn’t sure how I was going to make them. I thought I could cast them or make them in wood or plaster and none of those things seemed to echo the form of flowers, the softness and the warmth. 

“And it suddenly burst into my head that I knew everything there was to know about sewing. I’d been making my clothes since I was eight years old. My mother taught me to sew, and that was completely welded to the idea of the softness of flowers. I was very interested in the metaphors that would throw up. You could do a snapdragon and have a zip on that. you could take gloves and make a flower out of that. It was a dam burst of dreams for me. I knew that I could make anything I wanted to in cloth.”

But the reception back then among the art establishment was not favourable. Jann says: “I would come into the Slade with a cloth dog under my arm. Some of the tutors chuckled. They probably thought it was insignificant. I had a conversation with [the celebrated sculptor] Paolozzi and Paolozzi said, ‘You know, you really ought to cast these in bronze’. It seemed to me that casting it in bronze would be an acknowledgement that it was fine art, that cloth was somehow inferior. And to me it was not inferior. It had the possibility of degradation which was quite interesting and it also was warm and soft to the touch. I still feel this way. I don’t like working on hard surfaces. I like things to yield. And I like them to be warm. I don’t like the cold, hard bronze thing. It’s very alien to the way I feel.

“The atmosphere was odd then. Women students were not appreciated at that time. And I was just an amusing object. When I submitted these works to the Young Contemporaries, [the famous critic and literary figure] Kenneth Tynan was part of the jury and he rejected them. He said these look just like things you would see in Selfridges windows so they’re not worthy to be called art.”  

She now rejects the notion that her work was pop art: “I never thought of myself as part of a movement. I always wanted to find something new, something original, a new challenge, with a little danger. The name pop art just trailed into people’s lives. David Hockney certainly feels his work wasn’t pop art.

“If I had a title that I got to choose I would say my work is flicks. It all relates to the motion picture industry in some way or other, which is where I grew up. I was a Hollywood brat on the sets and the back lots and the sound stages with my dad. Or eating clay in my mother’s studio.” (Her mother was a well-known painter, printmaker and ceramicist.) 

After the cloth sculptures her next departure was to make oversized charm bracelets, about nine feet long. She attributes the idea partly to looking “through the lens of Hollywood surrealism”. 

She says: “They were very much about something I had seen my dad do on a movie set. If he wanted to make Gene Kelly into a miniature man my dad would build a giant telephone and a giant pencil and Gene Kelly would come on the set and dance with them. Large makes the viewer small and I am always considering the viewer. The viewer is part of the piece for me. So I’m making the viewer into Alice and putting the viewer in front of a big object. The charm bracelets were autobiographical, each one representing a holiday I had had with my parents.”

The autobiographical element was significant. Applin says: “The big distinction between Jann’s [early] work and the rest of pop art is that it is infused with the personal. You could argue that it was the stirrings of a more feminist position, or at least artists who were women began to have more access to working with these materials and working with their own lives.”

The feminine and feminist elements became increasingly important. Jann says of the Old Lady sculpture on the Pepper cover: “I was very interested in the time element. So in the patchwork quilt  of the old woman with her wrinkles, her story is in her face. People have often said my work is sinister. I have never seen it that way. They said the Old Lady looked like Psycho. To me it was a celebration of old age… to say there’s a wonder here, there’s a magic here.

“And we should remember that in the Sixties emotion was still a dirty word. Sylvia Plath was marginally castigated because of the emotion that was evident in her work. It was said in the Sixties ‘Oh that’s too personal. You should stand back’.”

Jann has continued over the years to explore new processes, using collage but with fabric not paper, exploring womanhood with her series of corsets looking at women’s bodies and women’s restrictions within society.  

Then, in 2004 she began work on SLC Pepper, a 50ft x 30ft civic wall mural in downtown Salt Lake City, an updated version of the Pepper cover creating a new set of heroes and heroines. Local artists continue to contribute to it. Jann said at the time: “The original album cover, famous though it is, is an icon ready for the iconoclast. We will be turning the original inside out… ethnic and gender balancing, and evaluating for contemporary relevance.” The 100 new characters included in the mural ranged from Toni Morrison, Thom Yorke, Annie Lennox to the Dalai Lama, David Bowie, Billie Holliday, Maya Angelou and Felix the Cat.

Now she has done a giant collage, a 60 ft community mural titled Work in Progress, with her daughter Liberty Blake, with local people deciding who is in the mural, based on women they admire. The work was meant to have been a celebration of the first woman president in 2016. That didn’t happen and now Jann sees it as a protest mural.  

And those themes of protest, a celebration of women and championing the representation of women in art, have for nearly 60 years been at the heart of Jann’s work, a body of work that has seen her become an absolutely key figure in international art, and increasingly a role model for young, female artists in particular.  

As she once said of her early days at the Slade art school: “The assumption was that, as one tutor put it, ‘the girls were there to keep the boys happy’… I was annoyed enough and American enough to take that on. I was determined to better them, and that’s one of the reasons for the partly sarcastic choice of cloth, latex and sequins as media. It was a female language to which males didn’t have access.”