As a child, Hamilton later recalled, "I suppose I was a misfit. I decided I was interested in drawing when I was I saw a notice in the library advertising art classes. The teacher told me that he couldn't take me - these were adult classes, I was too young - but when he saw my drawing he told me that I might as well come back next week.
On the merit of these early pieces, he was accepted into the Royal Academy the age of However, in the school shut because of the outbreak of World War II. Hamilton, too young to be enlisted to fight, spent the War making technical drawings. This collage was created by Hamilton for the catalog of the seminal exhibition at London's Whitechapel Gallery, "This is Tomorrow. Adam is a muscleman covering his groin with a racket-sized lollipop. Eve perches on the couch wearing a lampshade and pasties.
Hamilton used images cut from American magazines. In England, where much of the middle class was still struggling in a slower post-war economy, this crowded space with its state-of-the-art luxuries was a parody of American materialism.
In drawing up a list of the image's components, Hamilton pointed to his inclusion of "comics picture information , words textual information [and] tape recording aural information. The tone of his work is lighter. He is poking fun at the materialist fantasies fueled by modern advertisement.
This whole collage anticipates bodies of work by future pop artists. The painting on the back wall is essentially a Lichtenstein. The enlarged lollipop is an Oldenburg. The female nude is a Wesselman. The canned ham is a Warhol. Fun House , a collaborative work, was one of the greatest critical successes of the Whitechapel exhibition, "This is Tomorrow.
The architect John Voelcker created a structure which Hamilton then covered with oversized images from advertising and other popular culture sources.
The huge sci-fi robot, with its flashing eyes and grinning switchboard mouth, was taken from a film set. Superimposed on it is the iconic shot of Hollywood film star Marilyn Monroe in a billowing white dress. A large three-dimensional model of a Guinness bottle accompanies these 2-dimensional images. Pop music played loudly from speakers, and a recording of a robotic voice, accompanied the installation, producing an environment of sensory overload, unlike what most of the gallery-going public in England had seen.
Like Hamilton's Just what is it that makes today's homes Here, however, in place of a domestic cornucopia, an anarchic and potentially sinister mood prevails. Whatever the robot's intentions are for the unconscious woman, they cannot be good. The only quotation from "high art" is a blaring image of sunflowers by Van Gogh, the notoriously mentally unstable genius known for cutting off his own ear.
Though Hamilton was a multi-media artist, the elegant lines of this composition remind us that his way into art was through drawing. His command as a draughtsman underlies the complexity of much of his work, including this one, which at first glance appears to be totally abstract. On closer inspection yet very hard to see , one can make out the form of a woman with large breasts wearing red lipstick and a fashionable bra leaning over the bonnet of a car.
The woman and the car are inseparable, woven together in a single form. This is one of a series of works that examine the visual language of the auto industry, in which the bodies of women and cars are frequently compared. Hamilton highlights the fetishization and conflation of these "objects" in the post-War economy.
In its abstraction and in the subject itself, it recalls de Kooning's series of women inspired by cigarette advertisements, which shocked audiences of the early s.
The ghost-like lines of the female body in contrast with the definitive graphic presence of the mouth anticipates the work of Tom Wesselman. Whether or not such works condemn or celebrate fetishization is beside the point.
Hamilton was picking up on a theme that persists today in auto shows and car advertisements, where scantily-dressed temptresses invite us to try the latest sports car.
Such domestic appliances as a hoover, a television showing a woman talking on the phone on its screen, and a tape recorder that would have been considered state of the art in the s now appear extremely out-dated. A framed comic strip on the wall, sandwiched between a traditional nineteenth century portrait and a window onto a movie theatre, also belongs to a passed era.
Representations of interiors have preoccupied Hamilton for many years. In he wrote that the objective of his collage:. As its title indicates, this print is an upgraded version of an earlier image, already itself a remake. In Hamilton created an edition of colour facsimiles of the collage, printed by laserjet, altering the title to reflect on a retrospective view of the past.
Tate P , an image that satirises the world of the collage and contemporary culture in relation to it, using a Quantel Paintbox application to collage digitally for the first time. Expanding the possibilities of using digital technology to create art has become a central preoccupation for Hamilton since the s and he is always looking for improvements in ink and printing quality. In he released a more long-lasting version of the image in an upgraded edition intended to replace the first.
Both versions of the print were distributed by Alan Cristea, London. Valencia Does this text contain inaccurate information or language that you feel we should improve or change? We would like to hear from you. Read more. Main menu additional Become a Member Shop. Not on display. His incisive essays on the artist figure importantly in the Duchamp literature as well.
Our propensity to see Pop as an American invention is to blame here, too. Hamilton was also akin to Duchamp temperamentally: Witty and wry with an occasional dash of acerbic , he was paradoxical, too, in his combination of refined tastes a gourmand, he was the toast of El Bulli and plebeian commitments forever dressed in workaday denim and cap, he consistently refused royal honors.
His greatest achievements, however, remain precisely the Pop paintings that did not sell initially. A pastiche of different techniques, marks, and signs painterly, photographic, collaged, abstract, figurative, modernist, and commercial , the tabular picture presents a hybrid space at once specific and sketchy in content, broken and seamless in facture, subtractive and additive in composition, and collaged and painterly in medium.
Like the flatbed picture, the tabular picture might appear horizontal both in the practical sense of how it is assembled in the studio sometimes flat on a table or floor and in the cultural sense that it scans images and texts across the continuum of high art and mass media. Nevertheless, Hamilton insists on the pictorial whereas Rauschenberg disrupts it: For all its horizontal tabulation of found images and texts, the tabular image remains a vertical picture of a semi-illusionistic space, even though this orientation is associated with the magazine layout or the media screen as much as with the painting rectangle.
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