Richard Hamilton (artist)
Richard Hamilton sent a letter to architects Alison and Peter Smithson on the 16th of January 1957. It contained a definition. Pop art, he wrote, was "popular, transient, expendable, low-cost, mass-produced, young, witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous, and Big Business." The letter arrived a year after Hamilton made a collage that critics would later call one of the first works of pop art. Those two things together helped plant the seed of an international artistic movement. Hamilton was 34 at the time of the letter. He had grown up in London and first found a path to art as an electrical apprentice. His early career placed him at the edges of mainstream art institutions. How did that background produce someone so attuned to the age of consumer spectacle? And what drove a man who defined art by its disposability to spend fifty years on a single labour of love?
Richard William Hamilton was born in Pimlico, London on the 24th of February 1922. He left school without formal qualifications and took a job as an apprentice at an electrical components firm. There he found he had a talent for draughtsmanship. Evening classes at Saint Martin's School of Art and the Westminster School of Art followed. In 1938, he enrolled at the Royal Academy of Arts.
The Second World War cut his studies short. Hamilton spent those years working as a technical draftsman. He re-enrolled at the Royal Academy Schools after the war but was expelled in 1946. The official reason: "not profiting from the instruction." Loss of his student status triggered National Service. After completing it, he spent two years at the Slade School of Art at University College London. From there, Hamilton began exhibiting at the Institute of Contemporary Arts and making posters and leaflets there. He joined the Central School of Art and Design's teaching staff in 1952, a post he held until 1966.
D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson's 1917 scientific text On Growth and Form had taken a firm hold on his imagination. In 1951, that fascination produced an ICA exhibition of the same name: scientific models, diagrams, and photographs assembled together as a single unified artwork, an early form of what later generations would call installation art. Through the ICA, Hamilton had also come to know Roland Penrose, and that friendship would soon change the direction of his career.
At the first Independent Group meeting at the ICA in 1952, Eduardo Paolozzi presented collages he had been assembling since the late 1940s. Those works are now considered the earliest standard-bearers of pop art. That same year, Roland Penrose introduced Hamilton to the Green Box, Marcel Duchamp's working notes for The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. That work is also called The Large Glass. Hamilton's sustained study of those notes resulted in a 1960 publication: a typographic version of the Green Box. Penrose also connected Hamilton to the painter Victor Pasmore. Pasmore offered Hamilton a teaching post in the Fine Art Department of Durham University at Newcastle upon Tyne. Hamilton held that post until 1966.
In 1955, Hamilton showed paintings at the Hanover Gallery in London, works that were in various ways a homage to Duchamp. That same year, he organised the exhibition Man Machine Motion at the Hatton Gallery in King's College Durham. The show was designed to look more like an advertising display than a conventional art exhibition. That approach came to its fullest expression the following year. Hamilton made Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing? in 1956 for the This Is Tomorrow catalogue. The show was a group exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in London. The collage depicted a muscle-man holding a Tootsie Pop and a woman wearing a lampshade hat and little else. Around them lay vacuum cleaners, a large canned ham, and other emblems of 1950s consumer prosperity. The American magazines providing the raw material had been brought to Britain by John McHale and Magda Cordell. The collage was reproduced in black and white in the catalogue and also used in posters for the show.
Hamilton also incorporated plastic directly into his art. Pin-up, a 1961 mixed-media work exploring the female nude, used sculpted plastic for the figure. $he, made between 1959 and 1961, incorporated a plastic holographic eye given to Hamilton by Herbert Ohl. By 1964, when both works were loaned for a solo show at the Hanover Gallery, the plastic elements were already cracking. Hamilton worked alongside conservators over many years to develop better techniques for preserving plastics in artworks.
The success of This Is Tomorrow brought Hamilton a teaching appointment at the Royal College of Art, which he held from 1957 to 1961.
David Hockney and Peter Blake were among those Hamilton supported at the Royal College of Art. His deeper influence as a teacher, though, had already taken root in Newcastle. Among Hamilton's students there were Rita Donagh, Mark Lancaster, Tim Head, and Bryan Ferry, who would go on to found Roxy Music. Ferry's visual collaborator Nicholas de Ville was also among them. Hamilton described Ferry as "his greatest creation." Ferry returned the compliment in 2010, naming Hamilton as the living person he most admired. Ferry said Hamilton had "greatly influenced my ways of seeing art and the world." Hamilton's effect on Roxy Music's visual styling and overall approach is evident in the band's work.
In 1959, Hamilton gave a lecture titled "Glorious Technicolor, Breathtaking Cinemascope and Stereophonic Sound." The title came from a Cole Porter lyric in the 1957 musical Silk Stockings. The lecture used a pop soundtrack and demonstrated an early Polaroid camera. Through it, Hamilton dissected how cinema technology manufactured the glamour of Hollywood. A series of paintings based on film stills and publicity shots developed that investigation in the early 1960s.
Hamilton was also active in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. He made a work parodying the then-Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell for his rejection of a policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament. In the early 1960s, an Arts Council grant took Hamilton to investigate the condition of the Kurt Schwitters Merzbau in Cumbria. That research eventually led to Hamilton arranging the relocation of the work to the Hatton Gallery at Newcastle University.
In 1962, Hamilton's first wife Terry was killed in a car accident. To recover from that loss, Hamilton made his first trip to the United States in 1963. A retrospective of Marcel Duchamp's work was showing at the Pasadena Art Museum. Hamilton met leading pop artists there and was befriended by Duchamp himself. His familiarity with the Green Box enabled him to make copies of The Large Glass and other glass works too fragile to travel. That encounter led to Hamilton curating the first British retrospective of Duchamp's work, which opened at the Tate Gallery in 1966.
From the mid-1960s, Hamilton was represented by Robert Fraser, a London dealer whose circle bridged the worlds of fine art and rock music.
Robert Fraser's arrest for drug possession, alongside Mick Jagger, gave Hamilton one of his most striking subjects. Hamilton produced a series of prints titled Swingeing London drawn directly from the spectacle of that arrest.
Through Fraser's circle, Hamilton became friends with Paul McCartney. That friendship led to Hamilton designing the cover and the poster collage for the Beatles' White Album.
In 1968, Hamilton appeared in a film by director Brian De Palma titled Greetings. He played a pop artist showing a "Blow Up" image. The film was Robert De Niro's first motion picture. It was also the first film in the United States to appeal an X rating.
In 1969, filmmaker James Scott made a documentary in which Hamilton discussed the Swingeing London series. It also examined Hamilton's preoccupation with mass media through a selection of his own work.
In 1981, Hamilton began a trilogy of paintings rooted in the conflict in Northern Ireland.
Hugh Rooney, the IRA prisoner at the centre of Hamilton's first Northern Ireland painting, was depicted as Jesus, with long flowing hair and a beard. The citizen was painted between 1981 and 1983. Republican prisoners had refused to wear prison uniforms, claiming status as political prisoners. When warders refused to let the blanket protesters use the toilets unless they wore uniforms, the prisoners smeared excrement on their cell walls. Hamilton wrote in the catalogue to his 1992 Tate Gallery exhibition that he saw the image as "a public relations contrivance of enormous efficacy." He continued: the image had "the moral conviction of a religious icon and the persuasiveness of the advertising man's dream soap commercial." It was, he added, "a present reality."
The second painting in the trilogy, The subject, was made between 1988 and 1989. It depicted an Orangeman, a member of an order dedicated to preserving Unionism in Northern Ireland. The third, The state, completed in 1993, showed a British soldier on a foot patrol in a street.
The citizen was first shown publicly as part of A Cellular Maze, a 1983 joint exhibition with Rita Donagh at the Orchard Gallery in Derry. Hamilton and Donagh also created a yellow pamphlet for the occasion. It borrowed the visual style of 17th-century political leaflets distributed by the Diggers and Ditchers. The aim was to link the cause of Republican strikers to earlier historical struggles.
In 1988, the Orchard Gallery mounted an exhibition of Hamilton's copper-plate etchings for James Joyce's Ulysses.
The idea of illustrating Ulysses had come to Hamilton during his National Service in 1947. He made his first preliminary sketches at the Slade School of Art shortly after. Over the following fifty years, he returned to the images again and again, reworking them in many different media. Hamilton felt that process of continual revision produced a visual effect analogous to Joyce's own verbal techniques.
An earlier attempt to show the etchings alongside Joseph Beuys had fallen through. Beuys had authored two additional chapters of Ulysses for the project. The proposed exhibition was to take place on the 7th of July 1977 at the lighthouse in Sandycove. That date carried particular significance in Joyce's thinking. The property owners' worries about the fragility of Joyce's original manuscripts brought the project to an end before it began.
In 2002, the British Museum mounted an exhibition of the Ulysses illustrations titled Imaging Ulysses. A book of the illustrations was published simultaneously, with text by Stephen Coppel. The exhibition coincided with both the 80th anniversary of Joyce's novel and Hamilton's own 80th birthday. The illustrations were subsequently shown at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin and the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam.
In 1996, a substantial gift to the Kunstmuseum Winterthur made it the largest repository of Hamilton's prints anywhere in the world.
A 1987 BBC television series called Painting with Light introduced Hamilton to the Quantel Paintbox. He bought one for his studio and used it to produce and modify his work. Earlier in that decade, Hamilton had designed two computer exteriors. The OHIO prototype was made for a Swedish firm called Isotron in 1984, and the DIAB DS-101 for Dataindustrier AB in 1986. From the late 1970s, his practice had concentrated heavily on printmaking, often in unusual and complex combinations of processes. In 1977-78, Hamilton collaborated with the artist Dieter Roth. The collaboration challenged conventional ideas about the artist as the sole author of a work.
Rita Donagh, whom Hamilton had taught at Newcastle, later became his companion. Together they converted a farm called North End in Oxfordshire into a home and studios. In 1992, the BBC commissioned Hamilton to remake his 1956 collage for the present day. The male body-builder of the original was replaced by an accountant at a desk. The female icon gave way to a world-class female body-builder.
In 1993, Hamilton represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale and was awarded the Golden Lion. In 2000, he was made a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour.
Hamilton died on the 13th of September 2011, at the age of 89. Just the week before his death, he had been working with the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid. The retrospective was scheduled to open first at Tate Modern on the 13th of February 2014. At his death, a painting in three parts called Le chef d'oeuvre inconnu was still unfinished. It comprised large inkjet prints composed from Photoshop images, visualising a moment of crisis from Balzac's novel The Unknown Masterpiece. For the 2014 retrospective, Spain's Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports insured 246 Hamilton works at a combined value of 115.6 million euros.
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Common questions
What was Richard Hamilton's definition of pop art?
Richard Hamilton's definition of pop art is contained in his letter of the 16th of January 1957 to architects Alison and Peter Smithson. He described pop art as "popular, transient, expendable, low-cost, mass-produced, young, witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous, and Big Business." The letter is considered one of the founding statements of the international pop art movement.
What is depicted in Richard Hamilton's collage Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?
Hamilton's 1956 collage depicts a muscle-man holding a Tootsie Pop and a woman wearing a lampshade hat. Around them are vacuum cleaners, a large canned ham, and other symbols of 1950s consumer prosperity. The American magazines providing the raw material had been brought to Britain by John McHale and Magda Cordell.
Who were Richard Hamilton's most famous students?
Bryan Ferry, founder of Roxy Music, was among Richard Hamilton's students at Newcastle. Hamilton also taught Rita Donagh, Mark Lancaster, Tim Head, and Ferry's visual collaborator Nicholas de Ville. Hamilton described Ferry as "his greatest creation," and Ferry named Hamilton in 2010 as the living person he most admired.
How did Richard Hamilton collaborate with the Beatles?
Richard Hamilton designed the cover and poster collage for the Beatles' White Album through his friendship with Paul McCartney. The connection came through his representation by the London dealer Robert Fraser, whose circle linked fine artists with rock musicians.
What are the three paintings in Richard Hamilton's Northern Ireland trilogy?
The citizen (1981-1983), The subject (1988-1989), and The state (1993) are the three paintings of Richard Hamilton's Northern Ireland trilogy. The citizen depicts IRA prisoner Hugh Rooney as a Christ-like figure; The subject shows an Orangeman; The state shows a British soldier on foot patrol. Hamilton wrote of The citizen that it had "the moral conviction of a religious icon."
How long did Richard Hamilton work on his James Joyce Ulysses illustrations?
Richard Hamilton worked on illustrations for James Joyce's Ulysses for approximately fifty years. The idea came to him during National Service in 1947, and his first sketches were made at the Slade School of Art. The British Museum exhibited the completed works in 2002 in an exhibition titled Imaging Ulysses, which coincided with Hamilton's 80th birthday.
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41 references cited across the entry
- 2NewsRichard Hamilton obituaryNorbert Lynton — 13 September 2011
- 3Book20th Century Painters and SculptorsFrances Spalding — Antique Collectors' Club — 1990
- 5JournalRichard Hamilton's Plastic ProblemRoksana Filipowska — 2016
- 8Tributes paid to Hamilton, the artist who 'created' Bryan Ferry14 September 2011
- 9NewsQ&A: Bryan FerryRosanna Greenstreet — 23 October 2010
- 17JournalThrough The Large Glass: Richard Hamilton's Reframing of Marcel DuchampBryony Bery — 2016
- 18BookAmerican film now : the people, the power, the money, the moviesJames Monaco — Zoetrope — 1984
- 19BookHollywood bloodshed : violence in 1980s American cinemaJames Kendrick — Southern Illinois University Press — 2009
- 29The citizen 1981-3Tate Collection
- 30Richard HamiltonDaily Telegraph — 13 September 2011
- 32Richard Hamilton - Protest PicturesRoyal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh — 2008
- 33NewsPop art pioneer Richard Hamilton dies at the age of 8913 September 2011
- 38Search resultsTate