Richard William Hamilton was a British painter and
collage artist died he was 89. His 1956 collage,
Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?, produced for the
This Is Tomorrow exhibition of the
Independent Group in London, is considered by critics and historians to be one of the early works of
pop art.
[1]
(24 February 1922 – 13 September 2011)
Early life
Hamilton was born in
Pimlico, London.
[2]
Despite having left school with no formal qualifications, he managed to
gain employment as an apprentice working at an electrical components
firm, where he discovered an ability for
draughtsmanship and began to do painting at evening classes at
St Martin's School of Art. This led to his entry into the
Royal Academy Schools.
After spending the
war
working as a technical draftsman, he re-enrolled at the Royal Academy
Schools but was later expelled on grounds of "not profiting from the
instruction", loss of his student status forcing Hamilton to carry out
National Service. After two years at the
Slade School of Art,
University College, London, Hamilton began exhibiting his work at the
Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) where he also produced posters and leaflets and teaching at the
Central School of Art and Design.
[citation needed]
1950s and 1960s
Hamilton's early work was much influenced by
D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson's 1913 text
On Growth and Form. In 1952, at the first
Independent Group meeting, held at the ICA, Hamilton was introduced to
Eduardo Paolozzi's
seminal presentation of collages produced in the late 1940s and early
1950s that are now considered to be the first standard bearers of Pop
Art.
[1][3] Also in 1952, he was introduced to the
Green Box notes of
Marcel Duchamp through
Roland Penrose,
whom Hamilton had met at the ICA. At the ICA Hamilton was responsible
for the design and installation of a number of exhibitions including one
on
James Joyce and
The Wonder and the Horror of the Human Head that was curated by Penrose. It was also through Penrose that Hamilton met
Victor Pasmore who gave him a teaching post based in
Newcastle Upon Tyne which lasted until 1966. Among the students Hamilton tutored at Newcastle in this period were
Rita Donagh,
Mark Lancaster,
Tim Head,
Roxy Music founder
Bryan Ferry and Ferry's visual collaborator
Nicholas De Ville. Hamilton's influence can be found in the visual styling and approach of Roxy Music.
Hamilton gave a 1959 lecture titled “Glorious Technicolor,
Breathtaking Cinemascope and Stereophonic Sound", a phrase taken from a
Cole Porter lyric in the 1957 musical
Silk Stockings. In that lecture, which sported a pop soundtrack and the demonstration of an early
Polaroid
camera, Hamilton deconstructed the technology of cinema to explain how
it helped to create Hollywood’s allure. He further developed that theme
in the early 1960s with a series of paintings inspired by film stills
and publicity shots.
[4]
The post at the ICA also afforded Hamilton the time to further his
research on Duchamp, which resulted in the 1960 publication of a
typographic version of Duchamp's
Green Box, which comprised Duchamp's original notes for the design and construction of his famous work
The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, also known as
The Large Glass. Hamilton's 1955 exhibition of paintings at the
Hanover Gallery were all in some form a homage to Duchamp. In the same year Hamilton organised the exhibition
Man Machine Motion at the
Hatton Gallery
in Newcastle. Designed to look more like an advertising display than a
conventional art exhibition the show prefigured Hamilton's contribution
to the
This Is Tomorrow exhibition in
London, at the
Whitechapel Gallery the following year.
Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing? was created in 1956 for the catalogue of
This Is Tomorrow where it was reproduced in black and white and also used in posters for the exhibit.
[5]
The collage depicts a muscle-man provocatively holding a Tootsie Pop
and a woman with large, bare breasts wearing a lampshade hat, surrounded
by emblems of 1950s affluence from a vacuum cleaner to a large canned
ham.
[6] Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing? is widely acknowledged as one of the first pieces of
Pop Art and his written definition of what ‘pop' is laid the ground for the whole international movement.
[7] Hamilton's definition of Pop Art from a letter to
Alison and Peter Smithson
dated 16 January 1957 was - "Pop Art is: popular, transient,
expendable, low-cost, mass-produced, young, witty, sexy, gimmicky,
glamorous, and Big Business" - stressing its everyday, commonplace
values.
[8] He thus created collages incorporating advertisements from mass-circulation newspapers and magazines.
The success of
This Is Tomorrow secured Hamilton further teaching assignments in particular at the
Royal College of Art from 1957 to 1961, where he promoted
David Hockney and
Peter Blake. During this period Hamilton was also very active in the
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and produced a work parodying the then leader of the Labour Party
Hugh Gaitskell for rejecting a policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament. In the early 1960s he received a grant from the
Arts Council to investigate the condition of the
Kurt Schwitters 'Merzbau' in
Cumbria.
The research eventually resulted in Hamilton organising the
preservation of the work by relocating it to the Hatton Gallery in the
Newcastle University.
[citation needed]
In 1962 his first wife Terry was killed in a car crash and in part to
recover from this he travelled for the first time to the United States
in 1963 for a retrospective of the works of Marcel Duchamp at the
Pasadena Art Museum[9],
where, as well as meeting other leading pop artists, he was befriended
by Duchamp. Arising from this Hamilton curated the first and to date
only British retrospective of Duchamp's work, and his familiarity with
The Green Box enabled Hamilton to make copies of
The Large Glass and other glass works too fragile to travel. The exhibition was shown at the
Tate Gallery in 1966.
[citation needed]
In 1968, Hamilton appeared in a Brian De Palma film titled
"Greetings" where Hamilton portrays a pop artist showing a "Blow Up"
image. The film was the first film in the United States to receive a X
rating and it was also Robert De Niro's first motion picture.
From the mid-1960s, Hamilton was represented by
Robert Fraser and even produced a series of prints
Swingeing London based on Fraser's arrest, along with
Mick Jagger, for possession of
drugs. This association with the 1960s pop music scene continued as Hamilton became friends with
Paul McCartney resulting in him producing the cover design and poster collage for the
Beatles'
White Album.
[10]
1970s–2011
During the 1970s, Richard Hamilton enjoyed international acclaim with
a number of major exhibitions being organised of his work. Hamilton had
found a new companion in painter
Rita Donagh. Together they set about converting North End, a farm in the
Oxfordshire
countryside, into a home and studios. "By 1970, always fascinated by
new technology, Hamilton was redirecting advances in product design into
fine art, with the backing of xartcollection, Zurich, a young company
that pioneered the production of multiples with the aim of bringing art
to a wider audience."
[11]
Hamilton realised a series of projects that blurred the boundaries
between artwork and product design including a painting that
incorporated a state-of-the-art radio receiver and the casing of a Diab
Computer. During the 1980s Hamilton again voyaged into industrial design
and designed two computer exteriors: OHIO computer prototype (for a
Swedish firm named
Isotron, 1984) and DIAB DS-101 (for
Dataindustrier AB, 1986). As part of a television project Hamilton was introduced to the
Quantel Paintbox and has since used this or similar devices to produce and modify his work.
[citation needed]
From the late 1970s Hamilton’s activity was concentrated largely on
investigations of printmaking processes, often in unusual and complex
combinations.
[12] In 1977-8 Hamilton undertook a series of collaborations with the artist
Dieter Roth that also blurred the definitions of the artist as sole author of their work.
In 1981 Hamilton began work on a trilogy of paintings based on the
conflicts in Northern Ireland after watching a television documentary
about the protest organised by
IRA prisoners in
Long Kesh Prison, unofficially known as The Maze.
The citizen (1981–83) shows IRA prisoner
Bobby Sands
portrayed as Jesus, with long flowing hair and a beard. Republican
prisoners had refused to wear prison uniforms, claiming that they were
political prisoners. Prison officers refused to let "the blanket
protesters" use the toilets unless they wore prison uniforms. The
republican prisoners refused, and instead smeared the excrement on the
wall of their cells. Hamilton explained (in the catalogue to his
Tate Gallery
exhibition, 1992), that he saw the image of "the blanket man as a
public relations contrivance of enormous efficacy. It had the moral
conviction of a religious icon and the persuasiveness of the advertising
man's dream soap commercial - yet it was a present reality".
[citation needed] The subject (1988–89) shows an Orangeman, a member of an order dedicated to preserve Unionism in Northern Ireland.
The state (1993) shows a British soldier undertaking solitary patrol on a street.
The citizen was shown as part of "A Cellular Maze", a 1983 joint exhibition with Donagh.
[13]
Since the late 1940s Richard Hamilton has been engaged with a project to produce a suite of illustrations for James Joyce's
Ulysses.
[citation needed] In 2002, the
British Museum staged an exhibition of Hamilton's illustrations of James Joyce's Ulysses, entitled
Imaging Ulysses.
A book of Hamilton's illustrations was published simultaneously, with
text by Stephen Coppel. In the book, Hamilton explained that the idea of
illustrating this complex, experimental novel occurred to him when he
was doing his
National Service in 1947.
[citation needed] His first preliminary sketches were made while at the
Slade School of Art,
and he continued to refine and re-work the images over the next 50
years. Hamilton felt his re-working of the illustrations in many
different media had produced a visual effect analogous to Joyce's verbal
techniques. The
Ulysses illustrations were subsequently exhibited at the
Irish Museum of Modern Art (in
Dublin) and the
Museum Boijmans van Beuningen (in
Rotterdam).
The British Museum exhibition coincided with both the 80th anniversary
of the publication of Joyce's novel, and Richard Hamilton's 80th
birthday. Hamilton died on 13 September 2011.
[14]
Just the week prior to his death the artist, 89, was working to prepare
a major museum retrospective of his oeuvre that had already been
scheduled to travel to four cities in Europe and the U.S. in 2013-14.
[15]
Exhibitions
The first exhibition of Hamilton's paintings was shown at the Hanover
Gallery, London, in 1955. In 1993 Hamilton represented Great Britain at
the
Venice Biennale and was awarded the
Golden Lion.
[16] Major retrospective exhibitions have been organized by the
Tate Gallery, London, 1970 and 1992,
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1973,
MACBA, Barcelona,
Museum Ludwig, Cologne, 2003, and the
Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, 1974. Some of the group exhibitions Hamilton participated in include:
Documenta 4, Kassel, 1968;
São Paulo Art Biennial, 1989;
Documenta X, Kassel 1997; and
Shanghai Biennale, 2006. In 2010, the
Serpentine Gallery
presented Hamilton’s ‘Modern Moral Matters’, an exhibition focusing on
his political and protest works which were shown previously in 2008 at
Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh.
Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane
is currently showing a joint retrospective exhibition of both
Hamilton's and Donagh's work called Civil Rights etc., which will be
shown until January 2012. The Minneapolis Institute of Arts showcased
Hamilton's work in
Richard Hamilton: Pop Art Pioneer, 1922-2011 from November 19, 2011—March 18, 2012.
The Alan Cristea Gallery in London is the distributor of Hamilton's prints.
[17]
Collections
The Tate Gallery has a comprehensive collection of Hamilton's work from across his career.
[citation needed] In 1996, the
Kunstmuseum Winterthur received a substantial gift of Hamilton's prints, making the museum the largest repository of the artist's prints in the world.
[18]
Recognition
Hamilton was awarded the William and Noma Copley Foundation Award,
1960; the John Moores Contemporary Painting Prize, 1960; the Talens
Prize International, 1970; the Leone d’Oro for his exhibition in the
British Pavilion at the
Venice Biennale, 1993; the Arnold Bode Prize at
Documenta X, Kassel, 1997; and the Max Beckmann Prize for painting, 2006. He was made a Member of the
Order of the Companions of Honour (CH) in 2000.
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