ABSTRACT
In Blake's Girls with Their Hero, as the title suggests, the hero is Elvis Presley and the "girls" are ardent fans of the singer. Blake paints multiple images of Presley in various kinds of appearances along with a painted record. Peter Blake's Got a Girl teaches us how to look at and listen to a painting. Fan culture, too, often appears in Blake's works. His painting, The Beatles, used a fan magazine autograph page as his source material. Andy Warhol's 1963 silver Elvis paintings feature Presley in his role of movie star—Warhol used the press images from Flaming Star for the series. In addition to the silver Elvis paintings, Warhol made other images featuring Presley, showing him in repetition such as Elvis 49 Times in the fall of 1962. Presley would soon be replaced by the phenomenon of the Beatles, a subject of and explored in a few works by Peter Blake, and, later, the Rolling Stones.
