re Nude etching

Benn Levy, the playwright and politician, and Constance Cummings, the film and stage actress, were keen collectors of contemporary art. Their collection of works by Richard Hamilton stemmed from a chance meeting with the artist and his wife Terry O'Reilly in Spain where both were on holiday with their families. It was the beginning of a life-long friendship and Benn and Constance collected works by Hamilton during the 1950s and 1960s.

Hamilton’s re Nude seems in part to reference Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 of 1912 and Eadweard Muybridge’s pioneering photographs of the study of motion, but in Hamilton’s work the seated figure is clearly in stasis, subverting the traditional role of the viewer in the depiction of movement on a flat surface. In Hamilton’s exploration of this theme he furthered the Cubist method of representing a subject from differing viewpoints by exploring a single frame of reference but superimposing different points of distance between the artist and subject along a straight line.

Lullin has suggested that the title ‘re Nude’ may in part refer to the artist’s reflections on the traditional art-school subject of the academic nude, but this simultaneous disruption of the traditional life-study culminates in a ‘renewal’ of the ‘nude’ through the concept of movement.