Hatstand, Table and Chair

Hatstand, Table and Chair are a group of three erotic sculptures by British pop artist Allen Jones, created in 1969 and first exhibited in 1970. They have been described in retrospect as "emblematic of the spirit of the 1960s" and an "international sensation." At the time they were met with angry protests, particularly from feminists who saw them as an objectification of women.

Hatstand, Table and Chair are three fibreglass sculptures of women transformed into items of furniture. They are each dressed with wigs, and are naked apart from their corsets, gloves and leather boots. Each is slightly larger than life-size. For Chair the woman lies curled on her back, a seat cushion on her thighs and her legs acting as a back rest. Table is a woman on all fours, with a sheet of glass supported on her back. For Hat Stand the woman is standing, 1.85 metres (73 in) tall, her hands upturned as hooks.

Each fibreglass figure was produced from drawings by Jones. He oversaw a professional sculptor, Dick Beech, who produced the figures in clay. The three female figures were then cast by a model company, Gems Wax Models Ltd, who specialised in producing shop mannequins. Each figure was produced in an edition of six.

Jones explained that they weren't illustrations of scenes, but rather that "the figure is a device for a painting or a sculpture. It’s not a portrayal of someone – it’s a psychological construction."

Allen Jones was one of the first of the 1960s British Pop artists, and produced paintings and prints. A 1968 set of prints, In Life Class, has been cited as an immediate predecessor of his chair, table and hatstand. Each print is made of two halves, the bottom being a pair of women's legs in tights, the upper halves drawn in a 1940s fetishist graphic style, representing "the secret face of British male desire in the gloomy post-war years". Jones enjoyed combining different visual languages to expose the historical constructions underlying them. He examined the cultural representations of the female body.

Because Jones felt unable to adequately recreate womanly curves on a flat canvas, he turned to sculpture, using non-traditional materials.

At the time of his 70th birthday Jones gave an explanation of his motives for creating the sculptures:

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