ARTS EXHIBITIONS Object lessons

The Sixties star Allen Jones may be out of fashion these days, but is he a better artist?

WE'RE so used to thinking of Allen Jones as a wicked sexist that it's easy to forget the variety of his work. He's always been a painter and in the last decade has produced some interesting sculpture. But from the beginning of his career Jones most consistent activity has been in print-making. A retrospective of his graphic work is at the Barbican, and its extended look at the prints helps to make sense of a somewhat notorious personality.

The show is in the Concourse Gallery, the one with a long semi-circular shape and a surprising amount of wall space. It's a tricky gallery to fill. On the whole Jones does so very well. The prints don't feel repetitious, even when Jones has a gift that so many print-makers lack: he makes each sheet look like the result of a concentrated experience. He doesn't produce routine work. And in contrast to his buddies from the Royal College of Art - David Hockney, Ron Kitaj, Derek Boshier, Peter Phillips - he's obviously a better artist now than he was when he became famous a quarter of a century ago.

Granted Jones has none of Hockney's facility when drawing. He compensates with a good eye for an image. Mostly these are found rather than invented. At the entrance to the Barbican show is a cabinet of pix he collected in the 1960s, taken from sex mags, adverts, cinema stills, etc. I'm not sure why he shows this material. There's something train-spotterish about the collection. But it does explain his sources, and Jones has always been keen to let people know how his eye works.

Of course the question of sexuality is crucial. Many people will consider Jones's images offensive. The catalogue makes no mention of Laura Mulvey's article "You don't know what is happening, do you, Mr Jones?" - a famous polemic from the 1970s women's movement. No doubt the feminist critique is still relevant. However, this retrospective puts the sexual imagery in a slightly different perspective. Jones's images, it now occurs to me, are doubly dated. Surely these photos and drawings of women were significantly old-fashioned even when Jones began to collect them? They have a 1950s feel.

Maybe pictures of fem-dom fantasy are retard-ataire by their very nature, since they express a desire for childhood discipline. I'm no expert on this subject but have an interest in the stylisation of crummy originals. Much popular illustration of the 1950s and '60s tried to be flashy and ultra- modern yet ended in academic symbolism. Jones came close to the sci-fi mode, especially in his liking for statuesque girl officers in brief latex uniforms. But he wasn't nave. He emphasised the absurdity of his models, with their jutting torpedo breasts, bunny-girl hairdos and six-inch stilettos. Humour isn't far away.

If his models had been less ridiculous, more openly pornographic, they would not have suited Jones's art. When he discovered his fantasising style he entered a world without social reality. And no doubt he felt liberated: not only from dull jobs in art education but also from the dutiful emulation of minor fine-art masters. In the earlier part of this instructive retrospective are prints that derive from English neo-romanticism, in particular Ceri Richards, and from Dubuffet. Fast Car of 1962 and Airplane of 1963 are interesting. They go along with Jones's jolly paintings of buses from that period. But they do not have a special delight in doing what one wants to do. That kind of artistic pleasure belongs to the girlie pictures.

Jones's prints gained confidence as he became more adept in the techniques of colour lithography. His lithographs often take in discoveries made in his paintings, and vice versa. This confidence let him get away with very casual composition in both media. Motifs trail away, are left unfinished or, in the series Life Class, are split into two with no good reason. Yet this does not seem reprehensible. The personal verve and gripping nature of the imagery allow Jones to have his own way. I remain uneasy, however, about his colour. The vivid, artificial reds and yellows do their strident work so well that there's no opportunity for a more subtle palette. Jones's most successful prints have been in black and white.

The signs are that from about 10 years ago Jones started to think in grander, even panoramic and historical terms. Girls do not disappear - far from it - but they are much more in charge of their own affairs. Their doings are largely in clubs. Quite naturally, Jones sees the history of the modern world in terms of its entertainments. High Society (1985), a black and white lithograph made in Los Angeles, begins this tendency. No doubt the town affected its mood, but there are deeper influences too.

Once again we see Jones's instinctive desire for datedness. People in these prints belong to the rock'n'roll era, or to speakeasy days, or to glamorous cocktail nights of an even earlier decade.

One is never quite sure which. Maybe we are not in America after all. Some of the later prints have Polynesian or Caribbean motifs. Less clear but still pervasive are the many hints of Germany. Perhaps Jones has been considering German expressionist graphic art, with its jagged combinations of social life and political doom. I don't want to make him sound portentous but the best print in the show, Greasepaint (1988), has an epic quality.

! Barbican, EC2 (0171 588 9023), to 29 May.