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It can take a generation to put right a wrong. For the American artist Jann Haworth it has taken half a century to correct a particularly high-profile piece of historical bias.
In 1967, Haworth and her then husband Peter Blake made one of the most famous commercial artworks of the modern age: the cover of the Beatles album Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Among the 65 different people it featured, from Albert Einstein, Fred Astaire and HG Wells to the occultist Aleister Crowley, there were only 12 women and, as Haworth admits, three of those were different images of child star Shirley Temple.
What is more, Haworth, a young female artist at the time, found her own key role in creating the cover was ignored for years.
Now Haworth and her daughter, Liberty Blake, are bringing to Britain a work they started together in 2016 to set straight the record of women’s achievements. Their Work in Progress mural – seven panels, 28ft long and 8ft wide – displays the faces of more than 100 influential women who have either been written out of history or marginalised.
“We have notable women there, like Twiggy, the judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the aviator Amelia Earhart, notorious spy Mata Hari, and Rosalind Franklin, the scientist whose crystallography enabled the discovery of DNA,” said Haworth, 77.
“Really the point of this project is that you will recognise some of the faces, but not others. The feeling of knowing and yet not knowing these women’s full stories is part of the meaning. It makes it distinct and it almost makes you shiver.”
The artist, who collaborated in workshops with volunteers from Salt Lake City, near her home in Utah, to make the artwork, believes it is important this project remains unfinished, a work in progress, because it would impossible to correct centuries of conventional history that have left women out.
“It is also significant that other people contribute, because I know very little about, say, astrophysics and women in other fields. And women’s real value in the world is not just about their place in history books. So the workshop process is almost more important than the outcome,” she said.
In 2009, Haworth brought another attention-grabbing feminist work over to Britain: her Mannequin Defectors series, which showed corset-wearing shop clothes dummies rebelling by carrying protest placards. It has always upset her that most of the female images on Sgt Pepper were decorative figures.
“We asked the Beatles to give us names of their heroes and none of them came up with women,” she said. “I take some responsibility though for the fact that Peter and I only used a few.” In her view the “only good one” they included was the sassy film star Mae West.
The Blakes had known the Beatles for four years when they were asked to design the front of their eighth studio album, the psychedelically-inspired LP that went on to spend 27 weeks at the top of the British charts and features songs such as Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, With a Little Help from my Friends, and When I’m Sixty-Four.
Paul McCartney has claimed he had the original idea for the image and John Lennon later sketched a final version, but Blake and Haworth created it together, choosing the characters and ruling out suggestions, including Lennon’s that Adolf Hitler should appear.
Neither Blake nor Haworth heard the tracks on the album until after they watched the cover photographed by Michael Cooper in his studio. Haworth constructed the figures on the cover like a stage set with full-size models she made, as well as waxworks borrowed from Madame Tussauds. The couple were paid only £200.
“We were all young and foolish at the time,” Haworth recalled. “Peter would have done it as a small-scale collage but I wanted the front row to be three-dimensional.”
After a painful divorce in 1984, Haworth returned to America. She now feels that the mural of women she has made with their 51-year-old daughter, which goes on show at Pallant House in Chichester from 2 November, is a powerful way of bridging that family “rift”: “Libby, like her father, is a detailed collagist and she is very much part of this project. So in some way this is a synthesis and a healing,” Haworth said.
There was a discussion about whether to include Princess Diana in the mural, someone only famous by marriage, and Haworth also admits to over-ruling the face of Margaret Thatcher. “It is my artwork after all,” she said.
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