Piccadilly Circus in art
Claes Oldenburg's 1966 collage 'Lipsticks in Piccadilly Circus' attaches a magazine image of lipsticks to a postcard showing Piccadilly Circus c.1964. I have viewed about 4000 different postcards of Piccadilly Circus but haven't yet found a copy of the actual postcard used by Oldenburg, though here is the image from a multi-view postcard published by the same company at around the same time:
In 1969 Dieter Roth started his Piccadillies project, making images based on a similar postcard image of Piccadilly Circus. Here are some of the images he made:
The postcard Roth used has been much easier to find:
The photograph can be dated to 1964 from the film playing at the Criterion, Dick Lester's A Hard Day's Night.
In 1959 Robyn Denny had included a postcard of Piccadilly Circus in a collage made with Richard Smith that was published in the Royal College of Art journal Ark, issue 24:
Denny told Alex Seago, from whose book Burning the Box of Beautiful Things I have taken the image above, that he collected postcards of Piccadilly Circus. 'I had a huge collection, over 200 of them ... I took Piccadilly Circus to be the symbol of an urban hub.' I think the postcard Denny uses is this one:
This is the postcard Morley used as a basis for his painting:
The photograph can be dated to 1965 or 1966 from the film advertised beneath the Coca Cola sign, Jack Cardiff's The Liquidator.
A 1964 episode of the TV arts programme Monitor showed RCA graduate Joe Tilson at work in his studio. He discusses a series of paintings and cutouts that refer to neon signs. Among the sources shown is the Coca Cola advertisement at Piccadilly Circus:
Here are images from David Crosswaite's 1971 film Choke:
(You can watch the film here.)
And here is a collection of various Piccadilly-based artworks, from Whistler in 1881 to Peter Blake in 2012: