Colin Gleadell in the Telegraph brings attention back to Joe Tilson:
Who is the best-known living British artist in Italy? Is it Lucian Freud, David Hockney or Damien Hirst? Wrong, wrong, and wrong again. The answer, according to Cork Street dealer Alan Cristea, is Joe Tilson, a first-generation British Pop artist, for whom Italy has been a second home for decades.
Cristea is mounting a retrospective of Tilson’s printed works to coincide with the annual London Original Print Fair and is well placed to judge. He has been working with Tilson since 1969 when, as a young art history graduate, he joined Marlborough Fine Art in London, then one of the most powerful galleries in the world, with a monopoly on artists of the stature of Henry Moore, Francis Bacon and Mark Rothko.
Tilson had been spotted for Marlborough in 1961 by John Kasmin, the dealer who later gave Hockney his first solo exhibition, and was the first of a group of young art stars to launch the gallery into the Swinging Sixties with a highly successful first show in 1962. “I was famous before the Beatles and Hockney,” Tilson says. However, fame, money and the machinations of the art market have never much interested him.
Joe Tilson: The Forgotten King of British Pop Art (Telegraph)