I must admit to having been
ignorant of the work of Richard Hamilton prior to his death in 2011, so I was
somewhat surprised to hear him being described as “one of the most important
artists of modern times” and “arguably the most influential British artist of
the last century”. What about Hockney, Bacon and Moore? Wading through this
major retrospective at the Tate, with works spanning 60 years of Hamilton’s
life, enabled me to answer the questions: “why was I not aware of him?” and
“what made him such an important standard bearer for the artistic community?”.
Hamilton’s early career was
blighted by the Second World War. Born in 1922, his training was in commercial,
industrial and engineering design and this influenced his work throughout a
very long career and is evident in many of his works throughout the 18 rooms of
the exhibition. What becomes glaringly apparent from the first rooms of the
exhibition onwards is that Hamilton never liked to stand still. His techniques
covered a huge range, starting with colour etching and rapidly moving through
oil on canvas or panel and ink, watercolour or gouache on paper to multimedia
approaches for producing collages and installations using photographs combined
with paints and other materials. Overflowing with ideas, Hamilton was always
happy to embrace the latest technological advances in order to take his work to
completely different, interesting places. Although he referred back to and
re-invented some of his earlier work in later years he never stood still, never
got stuck in a rut and was always moving on to the next project. As a
consequence it was impossible to “pigeonhole” Hamilton. He had no obvious
“trademark” motifs that would enable his work to be clearly identified by the
general public. As a consequence, I might suggest that he could be described as
“the artist’s artist”.
Perhaps Hamilton’s best known
work, “Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing” was
created for a 1956 exhibition the Whitechapel Gallery in London. This collage, which
is populated by “Adam and Eve” characters in an interior that also incorporates
modern (for the times) consumables, is generally regarded as being the first
Pop Art work and Hamilton became widely known as “The Father of Pop Art”.
For a while the “Pop Art” world
of consumerism, youth, big business and glamour continued to influence
Hamilton’s work, although the techniques that he used to produce and display
his work continued to vary. Some of my favourite works in the exhibition, such
as the semi-abstract “Hommage a Chrysler Corp”, come from this period.
From the 1960s onwards, many of
Hamilton’s works were designed to make political statements. Some, such as
“Portrait of Hugh Gaitskell as a Famous Monster of Filmland” (Gaitskell was
opposed to unilateral nuclear disarmament), combine enlarged press photographs
with his own paintwork to create hybrids, whilst others, such as “Shock and
awe”, in which Tony Blair is dressed in a wild west outfit after sending
British troops into Iraq after wrongly claiming that Iraq was concealing
“weapons of mass destruction”, rely mainly on detailed paintwork. Whilst these
works sent out a clear message their impact at the time was perhaps limited,
firstly due to the fact that Hamilton was “preaching to the converted” and
secondly because he was also never a household name, so his art did not receive
much mainstream media attention. As is often true with protest works their
impact was restricted to a limited period before the world moved on. Perhaps
one exception is Hamilton’s map of a disappearing Palestine, comparing the 1947
United Nations partition plan to the map of Israel and Palestine in 2010. The
world’s most intractable dispute between nations and religions is still as
relevant today as it was throughout Hamilton’s career.
Hamilton continued to innovate
and improvise, using newly available technology and mixed media. I was
particularly interested in the way he enlarged photographs of crowds on beaches
and in cities until detail was lost and the figures started to become
unrecognisable. He would then paint on the enlargements, to produce works such
as “Trafalgar Square” (see below), which brings to mind French Expressionist
works. It would be interesting to see what results a similar treatment of
“pixelated” images taken by digital cameras could produce: maybe I should give
it a go! This work, produced 50 years ago, is a classic example of Hamilton’s
innovatory, imaginative mind and might still offer a way forward for today’s
art students.
Richard Hamilton:
“Trafalgar Square”
The variety of Hamilton’s works,
always underpinned by his knowledge of design and his understanding of
draughtsmanship, is staggering. His ideas were further expressed in
collaborations with other artists from around the world, many of whom were
household names. He was a champion of Marcel Duchamp in Britain and actually
recreated one of Duchamp’s works, “The Large Glass”, for an exhibition at the
Tate Gallery in the 1960s (this work is on display here). As a photographer, I
was particularly interested in the series of Polaroid images taken of Hamilton
himself by his many friends and collaborators, including Francis Bacon and Roy
Lichtenstein. Whilst it is necessary to stand quite close to the selection of
images on display here in order to appreciate them these small photographs,
which range from the bland and banal to the hugely inventive, offer a rather
splendid insight into the personalities, not only of Hamilton but also of his
many acquaintances. Some of these prints also offer advice and inspiration to
the budding portrait photographer. Bacon’s Polaroid portrait of Hamilton was
seen by Hamilton as resembling Bacon’s own art. Hamilton enlarged the image and
over-painted the resultant prints, again in the style of Bacon, to produce a
series entitled “Portrait of the artist by Francis Bacon”, which is on display
here.
Hamilton was still producing
visually and technically proficient works up to the time of his death, aged 89.
Indeed, my partner preferred his very late work to the early examples.
It is easy to understand why the art world held Richard
Hamilton in such high regard. He was a highly skilled draughtsman, designer and
artist. He was also a trailblazer, who never stood still. He is still regarded
as the founder of Pop Art, long before Warhol appeared on the scene, and was
hugely influential to generations of artists. However, his capacity for
constantly moving into new areas, deploying the latest technology and adapting
different styles meant that he never had time to perfect his work in a single
area or become a household name for deploying a “trademark” style. Furthermore,
his protest pictures would not have endeared him to the establishment and
apparently had little impact outside the artistic community within which he
resided. I believe that these comments help to answer the questions that I
posed in the introduction. Nevertheless I enjoyed and was regularly stimulated
by this comprehensive review of the work of one of the most innovative artists
of the last century.
Learning Points, Future
Work and References:
Hamilton’s imaginative use of
combining photographs with paint and, in particular, his over-painting of
enlargements such as “Trafalgar Square” (above) is worthy of further
investigation, using digital images, and may be applicable to my own work in
the future. His ability to constantly innovate and “think outside the box”
clearly separates him from more conventional, less successful artists.
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