Richard Hamilton

Richard Hamilton is regarded, with Peter Blake and Eduardo Paolozzi, as one of the originators of Pop Art in England, and his definition of the term in 1957 (in a private letter to the architects Alison and Peter Smithson) is arguably the earliest recorded.

His seminal excursions of the late 1950s into a semiological analysis of the intricate symbolism of advertisements and other material from the mass media – the perfect embodiment of the intellectual dissection characteristic of the Independent Group, of which he was a leading member – did not, however, become generally known until the time of his first one-man show at the Hanover Gallery, London, in October 1964. In contrast to Blake’s celebration of popular heroes, Hamilton took a more critical and ironic view of his chosen material in paintings such as Hommage à Chrysler Corp. 1957 or $he 1958 – 61; both these works, moreover, owed more in their form and methods to the late watercolours of Cézanne and to Cubism than to the graphic techniques of professional illustrators.

His ambivalence towards both fine art traditions and their apparent debasement in popular culture often led him to make connections between the two, as in the painting Adonis in Y fronts 1962, an essay on male beauty that conflates the Hermes of Praxiteles with muscleman photography by way of underwear advertisements. The female counterpart of this picture, Pin-up 1961, likewise combined ‘girlie pictures’ with conscious reference to Renoir.

Hamilton’s articulate texts on virtually all his major works have been so persuasive as to become inseparable from the pictures to which they refer. This has had the effect not only of dissuading critics from competing with Hamilton’s own analysis, but also of restricting interpretations that could be as instructive even if they rooted in subconscious impulses rather than in the artist’s conscious intentions. Hamilton’s technical wit and ingenuity both as a painter and printmaker led him to devise a variety of mixed-media techniques and to favour, in works such as Portrait of Hugh Gaitskell as a famous Monster of Filmland 1964, a photographic base as a support for the painted marks.

Unlike the American Pop artists, he remained resolutely attached to the small-scale easel picture of the European tradition. In paintings from the later 1960s such as I’m dreaming of a white Christmas 1967 – 68, based on the colour negative of a film still, and the Swingeing London series of 1968 – 69, silkscreened from a newspaper photograph of gallery owner Robert Fraser and rock star Mick Jagger after their arrest on a drugs charge, Hamilton is at his most glamorously Pop.

Courtesy of Marco Livingstone