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Lot Essay
Glorious Techniculture is the first of a celebrated series of paintings by Richard Hamilton that are deliberatly not unified into a credible whole. The work takes its punning title from a lecture Hamilton gave in 1959 entitled "Glorious Technicolour, Breathtaking Cinemascope and Stereophonic Sound" (a title based on a line in a song from a Hollywood musical of the period).
Originally entitled "Anthology" Glorious Techniculture was conceived as a spectacular compilation of the principal myths of popular culture and the styles in which these were rendered. Here Hamilton has fused a wide variety of painterly styles and imagery into a constantly shifting play of visual information. Combining drawing and graphic styles he creates a collage of images from advertising and magazine illustration into a painterly style that in its disparity is somewhat reminiscent of his mentor Marcel Duchamp's last painted work Tu m' of 1918. In addition, in the depiction of the guitar belonging to contemporary pop musician Tony Conn, Hamilton recalls Cubist collage, and with the pasted photographs of machine parts, he reflects the early work of Francis Picabia and the photomontages of the Berlin Dadaists.
In this way Glorious Techniculture is as much a mixture of art historical references as it is of painterly style and popular imagery. This blend is appropriate given that Hamilton considered what he called his "Pop-Fine-Art" to be a necessary and positive mix of the earlier approaches of the Dadaists and Futurists. "The Pop-Fine-Art standpoint" he wrote, "is, like Futurism, fundamentally a statement of belief in the changing values of society. Pop-Fine-Art is a profession of approbation of mass culture, therefore also anti-artistic. It is positive dada, creative where Dada was destructive. Perhaps it is Mama - a cross-fertilisation of Futurism and Dada which upholds a respect for the culture of the masses and a conviction that the artist in the 20th century urban life is inevitably a consumer of mass culture and potentially a contributor to it." (R. Hamilton, 'For the Finest Art Try -Pop', Collected Words, London 1982, pp. 42-3).
Originally entitled "Anthology" Glorious Techniculture was conceived as a spectacular compilation of the principal myths of popular culture and the styles in which these were rendered. Here Hamilton has fused a wide variety of painterly styles and imagery into a constantly shifting play of visual information. Combining drawing and graphic styles he creates a collage of images from advertising and magazine illustration into a painterly style that in its disparity is somewhat reminiscent of his mentor Marcel Duchamp's last painted work Tu m' of 1918. In addition, in the depiction of the guitar belonging to contemporary pop musician Tony Conn, Hamilton recalls Cubist collage, and with the pasted photographs of machine parts, he reflects the early work of Francis Picabia and the photomontages of the Berlin Dadaists.
In this way Glorious Techniculture is as much a mixture of art historical references as it is of painterly style and popular imagery. This blend is appropriate given that Hamilton considered what he called his "Pop-Fine-Art" to be a necessary and positive mix of the earlier approaches of the Dadaists and Futurists. "The Pop-Fine-Art standpoint" he wrote, "is, like Futurism, fundamentally a statement of belief in the changing values of society. Pop-Fine-Art is a profession of approbation of mass culture, therefore also anti-artistic. It is positive dada, creative where Dada was destructive. Perhaps it is Mama - a cross-fertilisation of Futurism and Dada which upholds a respect for the culture of the masses and a conviction that the artist in the 20th century urban life is inevitably a consumer of mass culture and potentially a contributor to it." (R. Hamilton, 'For the Finest Art Try -Pop', Collected Words, London 1982, pp. 42-3).