Richard Hamilton XLV Biennale di Venezia (British Pavilon, The British Council, 1993)

Richard Cork RICHARD HAMILTON CHRONOLOGY 1936 Left school. Worked for a year in advertising department of electrical engineering firm. Attended evening art classes Westminster Technical College and St Martin’s School of Art. 1937 Worked in display department of Reimann Studios (an art school and commercial studios), where he spent much time in life class. 1938 Studied painting at Royal Academy Schools to 1940. 1940 Took engineering draftsmanship course. 1922 Born February 24, London. 1934 Started to attend evening art classes at local adult education centre, Pimlico. 1951 Devised and designed Growth and Form, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. 1957 Began to teach Interior Design at Royal College of Art, to 1961. (Teaching appointments were never in painting, his principal professional involvement.) 1960 Received William and Noma Copley Foundation award for painting. The citizen 1981-83 Oil on canvas 2 canvases, each 200 x100cm Trustees of the Tate Gallery, London Flommage a Chrysler Corp 1957 Ink and gouache collage on paper 34.5x21.5cm Private collection RICHARD HAMILTON XLV BIENNALE Dl VENEZIA BRITISH PAVILION 13 JUNE - 10 OCTOBER 1993 THE BRITISH COUNCIL y f -'i Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different so appealing? 1956 Collage 26x25cm Kunsthalle Tubingen, Zundel Collection 1941 Employed as jig and tool draftsman until 1945. 1946 Resumed study at Royal Academy Schools: expelled in July for ‘not profiting by the instruction given in the Painting School’. Begin 18 months military service. 1947 Married Terry O’Reilly 1948 Student of painting at Slade School of Art to 1951; made many etchings. 1950 First one-man exhibition. 1952 Teacher, to 1953, of design to silversmithing, typography and industrial design students at Central School of Arts and Crafts. Fellow teachers included Paolozzi, Pasmore, Turnbull, Ehrenzweig. Member of Independent Group formed at Institute of Contemporary Arts. Other members included Lawrence Alloway, Reyner Banham, Paolozzi, Turnbull, Colin St John Wilson, Jim Stirling. 1953 Appointed lecturer King’s College, University of Durham (later University of Newcastle upon Tyne) to 1966. Taught Basic Design Course, which was eventually merged with Pasmore's design class, to all fine-arts students, regardless of their specialisation. Roots of this course were in experience at Central School in 1952, 1955 Devised and designed Man, Machine and Motion Hatton Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne/lnstitute of Contemporary Arts, London. Trade mark 1972 Ink and pencil on board 22x41 cm IVAM, Center Julio Gonzalez, Valencia The critic laughs-illustration 1972 Letraset on photo on board 21.6x19.7cm IVAM, Center Julio Gonzalez, Valencia Sign Vitreous enamel on steel (Ed. 36) 34.7cm X 80cm Courtesy Anthony d’Offay Gallery 12.07.80 a 1990 Oil on Cibachrome on canvas 75x75cm Courtesy Anthony d'Off ay Gallery 12.07.80 b 1990 Oil on Cibachrome on canvas 75x75cm Courtesy Anthony d 'Offay Gallery 04.03.81 a 1990 Oil on Cibachrome on canvas 75x75cm Private collection In 1956, a vintage year for anyone determined to subvert the accepted values of British culture, Richard Hamilton made a small yet densely elaborate collage called Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing?. Deploying images he had culled from a wealth of contemporary magazines, Hamilton gave the dominant role in the picture to a body-builder smugly flaunting his pumped-up pectorals. Clad in the briefest of swimming trunks, the beefcake stands out from an impeccably up-to-the-minute living room, equipped with a cornucopia of state-of-the-art appliances. Halfway along the extended length of Hoover tube, for instance, an arrow has been inserted with the proud claim that ‘ordinary cleaners reach only this far’. Hamilton's sly humour also informs his decision to place a fatuously outsize tin of ham on the coffee table, and frame a blown-up cover from Young Romance like a monumental painting on the wall. This comic­book image, uncannily anticipating the canvases which Roy Lichtenstein would produce in the early 1960s, is far grander than the ancestral effigy hanging next to it. And just below, the grinning face of a woman on a (relatively) big-screen, black­­and-white television set likewise seems to mock the dignity of the strait-laced man framed so pompously above her. The most outrageous conceit of all, though, is to be found in the giant lollipop, thrusting out like a phallic tennis-racket from the muscleman's Y-fronts with the words Tootsie POP' emblazoned on its orange wrapper. They neatly undermine his puffed-up virility, and at the same time announce the name that would soon launch one of the most influential of all post-war avant-garde movements. Hamilton’s collage is often viewed in this light, as a prophetic celebration of Pop Art’s imminent emergence. But the artist himself did not see it as harbinger at all. He made Just What Is It...? as a catalogue illustration and poster for the influential 1956 exhibition This Is Tomorrow at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London. And his collage should rather be seen as the culmination of the thinking pioneered earlier in the decade by the Independent Group, whose meetings he had frequented. This lively cluster of young artists, architects, photographers and critics began meeting on a regular basis at the Institute of Contemporary Art's former premises in 1952. United by their restlessness with official culture, the ‘small, cohesive, quarrelsome, abrasive’ assembly of malcontents warmed to the heady brew of popular imagery projected on the screen during Eduardo Paolozzi’s provocative lecture called Bunk. Derived in the main from magazines and technical manuals owned by American GIs in Paris, where Paolozzi had recently been living, these images catapulted their audience into forbidden territory. American mass culture was irresistible to many in the Independent Group. Having grown up in Britain during the Depression and war years, they regarded Hollywood movies, Chrysler cars and science-fiction magazines as manifestations of a glamorous consumerist dream which contrasted with the austerity still lingering at home. The key role played by science and technology in post-war society was analysed with marked intensity. Man, Machine and Motion became the title of an exhibition staged by Hamilton at the ICA in 1955, with enthusiastic contributions from the critic and architectural historian Reyner Banham. Indebted to Futurist ideas about the dynamism of a world where perceptions had been dramatically altered by speed, the show highlighted themes like man in flight and man in space. Some of Hamilton’s paintings from the period explored similar subjects, especially in Trainsition III where he charted the experience of viewing a passing car from a railway carriage. Hamilton had first been impressed with machine-age prowess when he was taken for boyhood spins in Bentleys and Jaguars, brand-new from the West End car showroom where his father worked as a driver. But alongside this instinctive fascination lay a discerning awareness of the European tradition. For the man who would play such a questioning and radical role in British art studied at the conservative Royal Academy Schools and, just after the war, at the Slade School of Art. Steeped in the history of western figure painting, and fascinated in particular by Van Eyck’s Arnolfini marriage portrait at the National Gallery, he attempted to bring about a complex synthesis of tradition and modernity. The ambition is announ­ced as early as 1954, when a female nude sitting on a stool like a life-class model at the Slade is subjected to a sequence of repetitions inspired by early Duchamp and the Futurists. Later, when he relied exclusively on collage in Just What Is It... ?, Hamilton’s involvement with the past was not so immediately evident. But the entire image could be seen as an allegory of the contemporary western world, with Adam and his equally well-endowed Eve on the Sofa revelling in an Eden-like abundance of desirable gadgetry. At the time, such a picture would have been widely regarded as vulgar and heretical, inhabiting a debased position far outside the proper territory of Fine Art. Hamilton did not succeed in exhibiting his collage until 1964, after trying for eight years to persuade London dealers to give him a one-man show. He felt very isolated, even after making contact with David Hockney and other young painters at the Royal College of Art. Fifteen years older than Hockney, he had failed to gain any substantial recognition for his singular achievement. And yet the work produced during this difficult period was defiantly original, exploring what Banham described as 'the rhetoric of persuasion’ in terms of the relationship between women and machines in glossy advertising imagery. The archetypally streamlined, de-luxe fittings of the Chrysler Corps run through many of these paintings. But there is nothing brash about the way this glamorous world finds itself presented. Hamilton's refined handling of paint is reticent, often blanched, and far removed from the billboard-like impact which so many of his American counterparts would favour. There is a cerebral, analytical strain in his work, helping to explain why he became friendly with Duchamp around this time. When a pin-up is incorporated in Hommage à Chrysler Corp, only her lips and a diagrammatic representation of her Exquisite Form bra are admitted to the picture. Everything else about her is inferred rather than stated, and even the chrome-plated car is fragmented into a sequence of gleaming, erotically undulating components. However celebratory these paintings may at first appear, Hamilton soon began to temper his optimism with satire and an under-current of darker concerns. The euphoria associated with President Kennedy and space travel is accompanied by witty, debunking references to ‘coming trends in men’s wear and accessories’. As for Hugh Gaitskell, the leader of the Labour Party, he is transformed into a bug-eyed, maniacal ‘famous monster of filmland’. But political polemic is rare in Hamilton’s work. Although he relied increasingly on photo­graphic sources as the 1960s proceeded, the references they provide invariably became mythic rather than reportorial. Take My Marilyn, a powerful work from 1965 based on the impulsive marks Monroe herself made on some publicity shots. The scoring and obliterations she inflicted on her own figure are disturbing in themselves, but Hamilton deepens the elegiac mood by transforming the image she approved and left unmarked into a blank, bleached phantom. The result intro­duced a new sense of loss to his work, reinforcing the preoccupation with death which had seemed so understated when he based his previous Interior series on a murderous moment from the 1948 thriller Shockproof. Hamilton has always been at pains to avoid predictability, and the mournful reflections on the human cost of media manipu­lation in My Marilyn soon gave way to irony. Fascinated by colour reversal, he applied its devious transformations to a frame from the 1954 film White Christmas. The figure of Bing Crosby may still remain faithful to the title of his song by appearing to dream in a hotel lobby, but he has been metamorphosed from white to black. Hamilton’s brushwork is at its most sensuous and seductive here, lending his racial game­playing the aura of a hallucination. Not that he was wholly averse to using topical images when the occasion arose. Like Sickert before him. Hamilton claimed the right to seize on a press photograph of a contemporary event when Mick Jagger and the art dealer Robert Fraser were arrested on a drugs charge. Handcuffed together in a police van, the two men raise their hands in an ambiguous gesture - half demonstrating their plight, half shielding themselves from the intrusive cameras. The smile on Jagger’s face suggests that his predicament is far from hopeless, and he was in fact conditionally discharged on appeal. All the same, Hamilton’s title for this series of seven paintings emphasised that London's mood seemed to have shifted from the ‘swinging’ cliché to a ’swingeing’ alternative. The decade was approaching its end on a sombre, disillusioned note, far from the optimism which had energised its middle years. Hamilton’s sustained sequence of Cosmetic Studies explores the idea of incipient disintegration through ’fashion-plate’ faces. Trapped among the apparatus of a photographer’s studio, these sliced, distorted and at times alarmingly daubed women appear at once expressionless and vulnerable. They define a malaise, undermining the glacial poise of the professionally serene model. And in two large paintings from the 1970s, juxtaposing ‘soft’ toilet paper with lyrically dappled woodland scenes, the evanescent forms seem on the point of outright dissolution. The turds disfiguring his otherwise fragrant flower-pieces and tourist-brochure sunsets go even further in assailing the whole notion of an inviolable paradise. The consumer Eden once inhabited with such aplomb by Adam and Eve in Just What Is It...? had given way to a far darker world. Always a barometer of the times, Hamilton realised by the latter half of the 1970s that the exuberance of the previous decade would never be regained. In an elaborate installation called Treatment Room he returned to open political engagement, transmitting Margaret Thatcher’s face on a television monitor hanging above a patient’s bed marooned in a mercilessly cold, dehumanised inspection chamber. The tragedy of Northern Ireland dominated much of his work in the 1980s. Having found his attention arrested by TV news film of the so-called Dirty Protest at Long Kesh prison near Belfast, where IRA inmates daubed their walls with excrement and wore blankets rather than prison clothes, Hamilton produced a diptych entitled The citizen. The Christ-like figure of a bearded protestor was coupled with a canvas where his smeared wall filled the surface with turbulent rhythms. They seem to announce the advent of an uncontrollable storm; and a similarly ominous swirl of light blazes out from the left panel of the later companion image, a diptych where an Orangeman in full ceremonial regalia strides defiantly through the street. No wonder that a feeling of precariousness even affects an ostensibly cheerful Mother and Child painting. The aura of an innocent family snapshot gradually gives way to a sense of unease: the parent, who sways unsteadily as she leans forward to support the infant, is robbed of identity by the cropping of her face. Hotel lobbies prove equally ominous, places of infinite, mirrored ambiguity where emptiness gives way, on occasion, to unexpected pairs of figures who look wan and furtive. As the 1990s proceed, Hamilton finds nothing to deflect him from his grave meditations. The television set which once appeared so innocent in Just What Is It...? now becomes a cold conveyor of reports from the killing fields of the Gulf. Or rather, the programme on the screen robs the war of reality by presenting it in terms of toy tanks in a sandpit. Between this trivialisation, and the tabloid newspaper headline echoing Saddam's rhetoric about ‘the Mother of Battles’ on the shelf below, Hamilton pinpoints the truth about human suffering by letting blood trickle down from the television set into the shadows. If he views the closing decade of the century with profound misgivings, the septuagenarian artist nevertheless retains his resilience intact. In an extended series of late self-portraits, the visual information initially supplied by Polaroid photographs has been invaded by impetuous, often aggressive strokes of oil paint. The pigment acts like a blizzard, threatening at times to obliterate the wrinkled features behind. But Hamilton manages to remain partially visible, gazing through the disruptions with eyes still as alert now as they were when he first committed himself to assessing the condition of the modern world. LIST OF WORKS War games 1991-92 Oil on Scanachrome on canvas 200x200cm The artist Testament 1993 Oil on Cibachrome on canvas The artist . Toaster 1966-67 (reconstructed 1969) Chromed steel and Perspex on colour photograph 81x81cm The artist The critic laughs-case 1971 Ink, Ben Day tints, and metalized acetate on mylar 46 X 65.5cm IVAM, Center Julio Gonzalez, Valencia The critic laughs 1971-72 Electric toothbrush with teeth, case and instruction book (Ed. 60) 27x 11X 6.5cm (cased) The artist The state 1993 Humbrol Enamel on Cibachrome on canvas The artist The citizen 1962 Death of wife in car accident. Carafe 1978 Glass 9x20x6cm Rita Donagh Lux 50-functioning prototype 1979 Aluminium support, cellulose, anodised aluminium 100x100cm Edward Thordén, Göteborg Ashtray 1979 Glass (Ed 36) 3.4x15.5x13.5cm The artist 04.03.80 b 1990 Oil on Cibachrome on canvas 75x75cm Private collection 05.03.81 b 1990 Oil on Cibachrome on canvas 75x75cm Courtesy Anthony d’Offay Gallery 05.03.81 c 1990 Oil on Cibachrome on canvas 75x75cm Courtesy Anthony d 'Offay Gallery

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