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Richard Hamilton
 Richard Hamilton

The Tate Gallery

12 March - 19 April 1970

Al5042 3520640
Contents

Foreword (page 5)
Introduction (page 7)
Commentary (page 16)
Catalogue (page 90)
Biographical outline (page 97)
Selected bibliography (page 98)
Index to lenders (page 100)

Cover:
Toaster (version for reproduction)
Frontispiece :
Self-portrait photograph, 1969

London exhibition setting designed by Michael Brawne

Exhibition tour:
The Tate Gallery, London 12 March — 19 April 1970
Stedelijk van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven 15 May — 28 June 1970
Kunsthalle, Bern 25 July — 30 August 1970

Published by order of the Trustees 1970

Copyright © 1970 The Tate Gallery, London

Catalogue designed and published by the Tate Gallery

Publications Department, Millbank, London SW1 and printed in
Great Britain by The Hillingdon Press (Westminster Press Ltd),
Uxbridge, Middlesex (cover printed by Beric Press, Crawley)
Foreword

The Tate Gallery is privileged to show the first major retrospective

exhibition of a leading British painter whose work has not hitherto
been as widely exhibited as its influence and importance merit.
Following the Arts Council's large survey of Pop Art at the
Hayward Gallery in 1969, we are glad to give the fullest possible
showing to an individual body of work of pioneering significance
in the development of that field. The exhibition also shows for the
first time for fifteen years Hamilton’s work of the early 1950s
which, looking perhaps even more interesting now than it did in
1955, must be entirely unfamiliar to a majority of visitors, as will be
his remarkable most recent work. By revealing a sensibility
preoccupied with aspects of perception explored over a very wide
range of subject matter, the exhibition should establish definitively
that Hamilton’s importance extends far beyond the cliché of his
paternity of British Pop Art.

The idea of the exhibition was first proposed by Mr John Leering,

so it is appropriate that its first showing after London should be at
his museum in Eindhoven. The final showing of the tour will be at
the Kunsthalle, Bern.

We greatly regret having had to refuse the exhibition to several

other major museums, but felt unable to call further on the already
considerable generosity of lenders, who will be parted from their
works for over six months. To all of these, whose names are listed
on page 100, we extend our warmest thanks. Our particular thanks
go to Mr Edwin Janss Jr, who in lending his collage to both the
Hayward Gallery Pop exhibition and the present retrospective will
have been without it for over a year, and to the Peter Stuyvesant
Foundation for withdrawing a major work, My Marilyn, from the
Australian tour of their collection, in favour of this exhibition.

We are most grateful to the Galerie Hans Neuendorf and to Art

/nternational respectively for providing a colour ektachrome and
for assistance over colour blocks, to the BBC and James Scott
for providing unpublished transcripts, and to Reyner Banham and
William Turnbull for very helpful discussion of the period before
1958. Finally we are specially grateful to Richard Hamilton himself
for endless patience in answering questions and for invaluable help
at every stage in the preparation of the exhibition.

Norman Reid
Director
Ee pacstak artes
Introduction
by Richard Morphet

The range of subject-matter and technique in this exhibition is

unusually wide. Paint is laid down in delicate washes, dripped and
smeared with calculated crudity, atomised into minuscule particles
and opposed in bold optical contrast. Other materials used include
photographs, many synthetic and metallic substances, children’s
toys, an electric toothbrush, and cosmetics. Subjects range from
traditional figure painting to pure lettering, from the South Downs
to a scene of murder. The artist represents himself as a girl fashion
model and as a compound of biological symbols from the
laboratory. One painting took three years’ intimate involvement to
complete, another took less hours, while a third was not seen by
the artist till it was finished. Certain works reflect a fierce hostility
or a transparent affection towards their subjects, while others
deceptively suggest a clinical detachment. In every case, however
open or inscrutable a work’s appearance, it sets in train a complex
interchange of implication and denial, which operates on several
levels — perceptual, intellectual, allusive, emotional.

Yet among many surprising impressions on seeing Hamilton's

work in retrospect are its unity of mood and attitude and its
consistently personal handling of paint. Both aspects emphasise
the unbroken continuity of his development from the forties,
making divisions into pre, actual and post pop phases academic in
terms of the work’s intense individuality. Conceptually it embraces
an obsession with analysis, wit, and a guiding principle of
controlled and calculated process. Physically, it shows a touch
delicate yet sharp and particular, concerned with distinctions, both
obvious and minute, of tone and texture, even as Hamilton
demonstrates the unreliability of objective visual experience. Its
spirit is constructive, affirmative and essentially poetic.

The originality and importance of Richard Hamilton’s work

throughout the two decades here reviewed is now so apparent
that the readiness with which it was overlooked in the fifties and
early sixties is at first sight difficult to understand. All art, and
certainly Hamilton’s, is concerned in some degree both with ideas
and with the expression of subjective insights. Perhaps what
primarily obscured any Hamilton painting from general
understanding at that time was the fact that a higher degree of
intellectual involvement with a work than was then common was
the necessary preliminary to experiencing its inner richness of
feeling. Moreover as intellectual process was for Hamilton one
vehicle for the expression of sensibility, the technical and visual
means of his paintings were drawn as readily from the processes of
their subject-matter (and were influenced by its purposes) as from
those of fine art. Thus to many in those years, works which today
seem almost classically unified and which fit with obvious authority
into the mainstream of art, did not look like art at all, for they fell
beyond the limits defining the appearance of the work of art as
generally experienced. A painting such as $he (40) could then
seem like a dislocated and chance grouping of elements of work in
progress at a commercial studio or school of industrial design.
While Hamilton was clothing an imaginative response to postwar
urban culture in coolly objective visual forms, a flaunted
subjectivity determined the appearance of most concurrent
non-academic British art, whether in the introspective
improvisation and large gestures of informal abstraction, in the
extensive carry-over from the moody landscape metamorphoses
of the forties, or in the images of struggle, anguish or melancholy
shown by artists as diverse as Moore, Bacon, Paolozzi, Bomberg,
Davie, and the Kitchen Sink painters. Pasmore, and the English
constructivists, who came closest to Hamilton in the degree of
their visual expression of an outward emotional objectivity,
showed a considerably intellectual orientation, but were
developing a visual language whose distinguished history already
covered five decades. Nothing about their work carried the
confusing non-art associations which made the combination of
Hamilton’s objectivity with his subject-matter seem so aberrant. It
was the predominance of idea in Hamilton’s work, and the fact
that this led inexorably to an imagery which (particularly when
treated so much on its own terms) had hitherto been alien to art,
that concealed from many people its real content.
Much has been written’ to show how important roots of British
Pop Art lie in the anti-elitist attitudes of a generation whose daily
life in their formative years steeped them exceptionally thoroughly
in their eventual source material, the admass culture of urban life.
Resenting the efforts of some more educationally-advantaged
artists and art historians to perpetuate attitudes to art and style
dependent on a finite body of knowledge and on received
standards of taste, they sought to make art more accessible (and
hence more democratic) by opening it to the immediacy and
intensity of daily experience which in popular culture lay ready to
hand. Hamilton played a major role in this expansion of the scope
of art. It is important to recognise, however, that the integrating of
images and techniques from popular culture into fine art was only
one aspect of his determination to break category-enclosure and to
involve the spectator more immediately in the work of art. These
aims were of course not exclusive to Hamilton or to pop artists,?
but Hamilton’s means were multiple, and were all of increasing
influence in the sixties. They included :
1 means of its own making. Between 1957 and 1962, Hamilton’s
A habitual pragmatism and an aversion from predetermination of
the character of a work by fidelity to style as such.
The crucial statement (reprinted here, p. 29) was Hamilton’s
catalogue text for This is Tomorrow, 1956 (‘We... reject... rigid
formal concepts ... What is needed is... to accept and utilise the
continual enrichment of visual material’.) Before as well as after
1956, Hamilton had painted each work in the style best suited to it,
however sharp an idiomatic shift this might entai!. The stylistic
contrast between the assemblage fhe (40), the straight oil on
panel AAH! (51), the delicate linear network of Five tyres
abandoned (65), the sign-like biatancy of Epiphany (69), the
impassivity of St///-/ife (90), and the fragmented organisation and
pin-like figures of Bathers // (120) would be difficult to paralle! in
any oeuvre of comparable importance. Yet paradoxically, the unity
of Hamilton’s oeuvre is as marked as that of Barnett Newman or
Edward Hopper; it is a unity of idea. (‘Anything that | respect in art
is for its idea rather than for its handling or any other quality...
this is an obsession I’ve had ever since | was a student’ — Bibl.
A18). Art teaching, Hamilton stressed, should not be about a
method, a given academic system, but about solving problems. He
points in Bibl. A12 to Malevich, Klee, Moholy-Nagy, Albers and
Bill in this connection, and practised his beliefs for fifteen years as
teacher (see Bibl. A3).
2
Treatment of other artists’ work as available material.
Hamilton’s use in art of the previously devalued products of the
mass media implied the acceptability of material from any source
without a sense that any category of source material had greater or
less validity or inviolability than any other. Hamilton thus quotes
directly from others’ art — from Duchamp (24), Lichtenstein (70,
166) and Johns (129-131) — and repeatedly from himself. This
last fact is, like the optical ‘enlarged readymade’ Epiphany (69), an
indirect quotation from Duchamp. Alloway correctly likened the
general scheme of the early pop paintings such as Hommage a
Chrysler Corp. (28) and Hers js a /ush situation (35) to Duchamp’s
Large Glass, as enigmatic gatherings into single works of many
discrete elements from esoteric sources. The essence of Hamilton's
assimilation of Duchamp lies however at the level! of idea — in the
primacy of the conceptual, the detachment, the obsession with
correspondences, the acceptance of chance as a determinant, the
interest in the inexorable complementing of an object or quality by
its opposite (or the indication of its presence by its absence), and
the serial preoccupation (especially with the number 3 and its
multiples).
3
Maximising the objectivity of the spectator’s awareness of the
content of a painting
Hamilton is one of the most illusionistic painters, but he is as
insistent as Stella on constant assertion of the physical,
two-dimensional facts of any work. From the earliest painting in
the exhibition (5) there is emphasis in an unusual degree on the
fact that a painting is composed of marks on a flat surface, and a
determination that the painting itself should demonstrate the
method of disposing many separate items fairly widely over the
picture surface had a built-in tendency to evince the autonomy (of
source and substance) of each element, but this was a factor
Hamilton could either have accentuated or have smoothed over.
Typically his method was on the one hand to stress illusion by
establishing a unified perspective to which all elements related,
while on the other enlarging on the tendency of the mass media
to multiply distinct and even contradictory visual languages in any
given immediate area. Thus we repeatedly find (eg : 28, 80, 158)
the most illusionistic passage in a work adjoining the most
diagrammatic, an opposition complicated by a third category of
mark — gratuitous in terms of a figurative theme, but primary for
painting — a passage of concrete, self-advertising abstraction. This
opposing of modes in any single work increases in concentration
after 1964, even as the relation of work to source becomes less and

54
less fragmented, and even one-to-one. In seeking for the spectator
an experience of maximum ambiguity, Hamilton adopts the
opposite standpoint from many Surrealist painters (though the
movement in general has been a stimulus to him), by facilitating a
state of maximum self-awareness and objective perception of the
complex contrivance he confronts. Hamilton extends his analytical
approach to popular culture, beyond its integration into fine art, to
a self-revelation by each work of its own mechanics. As he said in
1960, ‘an ideal culture in my terms is one in which awareness of its
condition is universal’ (Bibl. A7).
Many of Hamilton’s means of heightening awareness are personal
inferences from two obsessions of the London art world of the
fifties, a concern with the expression of visual ideas on an
environmental scale, and the cinema. Hamilton made pioneering
environmental contributions in Growth & Form (p. 20), and an
Exhibit (p. 34), and in his section of This is Tomorrow (p. 28). In
the cinema he had many levels of interest, seeing in it for painting
more than a rich source of imagery ;throughout popular culture he
looked ‘for the kind of technical advance which can contribute
something new to the understanding of the artist’s relation to his
10
environment’ (Bibl. A27). Carried over from both these fields into
his painting are his use of relief (which narrows the gap with the
spectator)? ; his manipulation of effects of contrasting focus; and
his contriving of interiors, which give a greater psychological
intensity and complexity, enhance spatial ambiguity (especially
when one space leads into another), replace a narrative reading of
pictorial elements by the overall logic of an internal perspective,
and offer another means of sharpening the spectator’s
consciousness, even as he is drawn into the inner activity of the
picture, of being outside the work itself.
4
A wish to ‘undermine belief in absolute values’
Hamilton uses the phrase in Bibl. A16 to describe a central theme
of Duchamp’s work, but in his own it was equally centrally
established before’ his close involvement with Duchamp; there is
no work in this exhibition to which it is not crucial. Hamilton
questions not only a whole range of aesthetic dogma, but also the
validity of every system of seeing, and the concept of ‘hard fact’ in
any visual medium. Moreover, the type of ‘reality’ implied by any

81
one aspect of a given work is itself contradicted by another with
which it is interdependent.
One of Hamilton’s most effective means of undermining absolute
identities is his persistent concern with merg/ng distinct elements —
human with machine, pigment with emulsion, front with back,
even spectator with art-work; a painting such as People (97)
merges clear figuration with complete abstraction without relying
on hand interference. A tendency towards pun in his titles, though
characteristically witty and detached, reflects the element of dual
or multiple function central to every work (typically, while
reflecting a basic ambiguity, it makes it explicit, and objectivises
the spectator’s experience). Examples are Carapace, Trainsition
/I/1, re Nude, $he, Epiphany, Swingeing London 67. A definition
of a pun as something in which two otherwise unrelated
expressions are held together in mutual support would be an exact
description of the relation between paint and image in /’m
dreaming of awhite Christmas (127), where varied types of paint
deposit largely determined by the motif are equally susceptible of a
reading as an autonomous abstraction with its own complex
internal relationships. Hamilton’s titles reflect a quality in the works
{4
themselves for which (in relation to structural systems)
Buckminster Fuller uses the word ‘synergetic’, meaning that the
whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Perhaps a reflection of the degree to which idea predominates over
style in Hamilton’s work is the marked idiomatic dissimilarity of the
work of the few contemporary artists with whom he shares a
significant degree of general orientation.® In the late fifties Hamilton
and Oldenburg independently developed approaches to the
everyday world of mass urban culture, and it is perhaps Oldenburg
who shares, more closely than any other American or British pop
artist, Hamilton’s obsession with merging separate identities and
states. Both artists were radical in situating their transformations
in a passionate and widely misunderstood integration of art with
‘unacceptable’ but generally-experienced (ie anti-elitist) material ;
both identified themselves sufficiently closely with their material to
project themselves as part of it (92, 155; see also 10) ; both have
made extensive use of disorientating scale-change; in his Bedroom
sculptures, Oldenburg combines obsessions, shared with
Hamilton, with the interior, with period nuances of popular taste,
and with the ironies of perspective ;both seek to objectivise the

spectator’s understanding of a work by accentuating
anti-illusionistically its constituent physical facts, while making it
embody an essentially poetic experience of multiple allusion and
ambiguity. One does not wish to push the analogy too far;there
are many points of contact between Hamilton and other pop and
non-pop artists and there are equally fundamental differences
between his work (and source material) and Oldenburg’s. But it
seems relevant finally to note how far in Hamilton’s work of
1954-62 the merging of forms is either actually or by analogy
erotic, how pervasive is a pinkish flesh tone, and how marked the
concern with bodily protrusions and with transformation of
personality through clothes, all factors of importance in
Oldenburg’s translations from the utilitarian world. The fact that
moments of fusion are for Hamilton moments of epiphany, of
spiritual insight experienced in however mundane a context,
makes the comparison still more direct.
The changed climate of opinion in the sixties made possible
appreciation of key qualities of Hamilton’s art which had
previously been difficult to discern. The vigorous brushwork and
obviously aesthetic purpose of modes of abstraction dominant in
2
the fifties had made the crucial physical and intellectual properties
of each Hamilton painting imperceptible to many. Hamilton was in
the forefront of those artists who demonstrated that an image that
remains highly recognisable when transposed from a non-art
source should be appraised in fresh physical and conceptual terms
when it becomes part of a work of art; the art work imposes modes
of seeing and associations of its own while continuing to draw on
those particular to the image in its earlier context.
Secondly, the cool, methodical contro! and marked apparent
detachment of mood in each work, which once impeded
appreciation, can now be recognised as positive means towards its
richer communication conceptually. They have been very
influential in the sixties. The careful planning of a painting, in
which physical and conceptual process and their interrelation are
exposed as an important part of the work’s content, is one
distinguishing feature of the art of the last decade. Moreover,
Hamilton shows an obsession with demonstrable sequence, an
illuminating dismemberment of idea. In his oeuvre as a whole there
is a systematic progression of theme and method, and new work
has an unusually integral origin in the snowballing compound of
cmmnmmmmee ce
mec

ideas which earlier work has proposed. Since 1964, Hamilton has
had a particular interest in the sequential or layered construction
and reading of actually cumulative but at first sight unreinforced
images. The serial repetition of an image, either in single works
(18) or in positive series (26, 27; 77 et seq. ;109 et seq. ; 142 et
seq. ;170) is only a literal exposition of an instinctive pattern of
thought. Hamilton’s repetitions or reinterpretations do not so
much repeat as reconjugate given material or a given theme. Thus
a further aspect of his serial obsession is his invariable projection,
once he has interpreted a particular quality, of its opposite. An
interest in movement leads to one in stasis ; convexity to concavity ;
vulgarity to elegance ; enlargement to contraction ; impassioned
hand-marks to imperceptible surface modulation ; woman to man ;
paint over photograph to photograph over paint; the list could be
considerably extended.
Just as an analogy with Oldenburg may seem at first surprising, so
initially it may sound curious to suggest that Hamilton’s work from
1954 will in retrospect increasingly be compared with Francis
Bacon’s. The two artists are active in a similar field and have a
number of methods in common; the appearance and the mood of
their work contrast, but they have the intimate connection of
complementaries. From early dates,® both were introducing
photographic imagery into painting, and were combining in single
works images from previously unconnected sources. Both quoted
from films, from Muybridge’s photographs and from art of past
centuries, and both were interested in transparency, the erotic, the
representation of movement, and the peopling of enclosed space.
Ambiguity and the merging of originally distinct forms were
central in the work of both, yet both also maximised the spectator’s
awareness of the objective physical facts before him (Bacon by
unusually marked exposure of the substance of paint). Both have
repeatedly questioned the possibility of an objective figurative
reading of any kind of mark. Finally the work of both is concerned
profoundly, if often through oblique expression, with the emotional
experience and spiritual condition of man.
While Bacon projects conditions of unbearable psychological
strain and physical suffering, Hamilton—whose subject-matter, too
can reflect distress (60, 68, 80, 81, 86, 137, 138, 142 et seq.) —
seeks to express in his art ‘a white as opposed to a black magic. |
should like to see the intense spirituality of man reappear more
strongly in present-day art’.’ That it is fully consistent with this
view for some artists to work with mass media material is implied
by a recent observation of John McHale's about the effects of an
increasingly technological environment: ‘... there is a
revolutionary shift to a society in which the only unique and
irreplaceable element is man. This is one of the main points about
automation’.®
The sophisticated cross-referencing and the artifice underlying
much of Hamilton’s source material, and his fascination with the
ambiguities of perception, demand the analytical approach which
yields so many kinds of revelation in his work. But Hamilton insists
that revelation should extend beyond a technical level, and his
work communicates a deeper imaginative dimension not only
14
through layers and devices but directly, in the force and resonance
of the images he transposes and transmits by particular means. In
re Nude (18), Hommage a Chrysler Corp. (28), /nterior (80, 81),
the Guggenheim reliefs (109 et seq.), and the expressive
symmetrical image of fluttering hands in Swingeing London 67
(142 et seq.), to cite widely-spaced examples, Hamilton gives
striking evidence that ‘the classical approach can be revived in
figurative art without being academic’.? Plucked from the
bewildering pictorial continuum we experience both outside and
through the mass media, each of these images condenses a range
of allusion and experience far exceeding the level of information.
As Hamilton explained recently :‘The interesting thing for me
about painting is that it is static. | like the fact that [it] presents a
moment of time. [It] ... has to project very forcibly a significant
instant in the ideas of the artist .. . Informing existence in a visual
experience... can be an epiphany, which produces an
understanding of the relationship of human beings to the whole
experience of living’ (Bibl. A27).
1 Including Bibl. B35, p. 31; and Reyner Banham, ‘Who Is This “Pop” ?’ in Motif,
No. 10, 1962, and ‘The Atavism of the Short-Distance Mini-cyclist’, in Living
Arts, No. 3, 1964.
2 Other examples from the fifties are the continuum between constructivist work
and architecture, and constructivist use of standard industrial materials ;and the
influence of New York School painting in giving a new directness of handling
and enveloping scale to British abstraction. Even Kitchen Sink tried to restore a
lost contact, in the wish — perhaps shared by ‘Angry Young’ novelists and
playwrights — to look clearly at the realities of ordinary life. Above all Bacon
combined startlingly immediate images with paintwork of very physical force.
3 Alloway had observed in the fifties that 3-D in the cinema — then very novel —
created a space not so much ‘behind’ the screen as projecting out towards the
spectator, a kind of aggression.
4 See the U/ysses drawings of 1949 (1—4) and his ironical examinations of
perspective (8, 11-12, and more generally all works since).
5 The converse is also true. In the period c. 1948-51, Hamilton’s work overlaps
remarkably in terms of motif and often of appearance with William Turnbull's.
Chromatic Spiral (7) is paralleled by Turnbull's paintings of criss-crossed black
lines on a plain ground, and a torque-sculpture of the same period; both artists
used marine biological imagery. The outward simplicity of their work sprang
from a shared objective and intellectual approach which, in conscious
distinction to opposite tendencies in much British art of the day, sought the
rational and effective organisation of verifiable elements into however small and
undemonstrative a work. Hamilton’s and Turnbull’s subsequent developments
clearly reveal, however, the contrasting implications in their use of these shared
vocabularies, just as Hamilton’s use of an imagery, widespread around 1950, of
spikes, stalks and open-form linear structure, connects him only tentatively with
such figures as Sutherland, Butler and Chadwick.
6 Bacon as early as the forties, Hamilton from 1951. Paolozzi’s early marriages of
contemporary images from the mass media, with and without more traditional
material, are rightly stressed in Bibl. B9.
7 Author's notes on statement by RH during discussion of exhibition The
Obsessive Image, |CA, 15 May 1968.
8 ‘The Plastic Parthenon’, in Dotzero Magazine, Spring 1967, reprinted Bibl. B35.
9 RH at ICA discussion cited in Note 7.
15
Commentary Hamilton’s work before 1956
by Richard Morphet

Hamilton’s work from the late 1930s to 1955 displays an

extraordinary range of idiom. Visually his output is unified only in
its delicacy of touch and hue and in its tonal subtlety — qualities
which characterise his work to the present day and are aspects of
an inherent lyricism in handling (against which he has often felt
the need to fight). More indicative of his subsequent development
is the primacy in all his work from earliest student days onwards
of idea over stylistic affiliation. It is this predilection for the setting
and solving of specific problems (in terms particular to the art of
painting) which both explains Hamilton's stylistic variety and
constitutes the essential unity of an oeuvre so outwardly diverse.

As a student Hamilton was less interested in refining the mastery of

received methods of painting than in questioning the effectiveness
of the techniques proposed and in demonstrating the wider
potential of familiar media. In a portrait of 1939, for example,
changes of hue are indicated by a curious system of sharply-
defined contours Hamilton had devised as one rationalisation
(most methods being equally arbitrary) of the process of locating
colour areas in representational painting. As in so much of his later
work, systematisation produces an image which adds a direct and
surprising power of its own to the intellectual interest that
produced it. Eleven years later in his series of engravings on the
theme of a (mechanical) reaper, he used eight distinct techniques
in various permutations to produce seventeen prints, almost none
of which repeated the combination of means used in any other.

oie.
sp
 7

Hamilton re-read James Joyce’s U/ysses while he was in the

army ; he started the drawings based on it at that time, for his own
pleasure. A later proposal for the publication of an edition of
Ulysses using etched versions of the illustrations exhibited and
others proved abortive. Hamilton intended that the drawings as a
group should follow in visual terms the verbal principle of the
book, by changing the style of drawing (not always to echo the
style of writing used in the scene illustrated) from one drawing to
the next, no style being repeated.

1, notionally the frontispiece of the book is styleless. The

foreshortened perspective of 2 reflects Bloom’s anticipation of the
pleasure of lying in his bath ; it is his mental image of his own body
as seen by himself (Joyce describes the scene in a single
paragraph, (Bodley Head editions, p. 79). 3 illustrates a passage
(Ibid ; begins p. 366) in which Joyce paraphrases, chronologically,
many contrasting types of language including archaic,
Chaucerian and Shakespearian English, slang, and baby talk.
The fragmented visual treatment attempts to evoke a ‘slow coming
to birth of language’ (RH). Bloom is seated at far left and the
figure at top right is that of a nurse who is in the house to assist in
an actual birth. 4 illustrates the Nighttown episode; Bloom is
assuming changing personalities in order to ingratiate himself
when on trial in court. In the text (Ibid ; begins p.410) Joyce gives
Bloom different attributes (of clothing, behaviour, or association
with an object) each time he is mentioned. The drawing reflects the
random way in which these references occur in U/ysses. Nearly
forty separate attributes, each of which occurs in the text, are
represented.

Hamilton’s interest, in these drawings, in an equivalence between

word and picture already shows his preoccupation with the
juxtaposition of different visual languages, a major theme of his
career. In implying the interchangeability of modes it also
foreshadows his continued obsession with an imperceptible
shifting from one state to another (from human to automobile
bodywork ; from photographic to painted mark ; from relief to
recession), an interest already overt in 4.

Joyce also influenced Hamilton’s use of words themselves, both in

his titling procedure between 1949 and 1955 (in which several
separate meanings are communicated in a single word or phrase),
and on occasion in his own prose Style, as in the text ‘Urbane
Image’ 1963 (Bibl. A 15), a verbal equivalent for his painting style
of 1957—64 (in which separate images and ideas are so related as
to be experienced alternately as distinct and as fused into new
wholes). ‘Urbane Image’ follows Joyce also in the deliberate use
of a separate literary style for each paragraph. For the influence of
Joyce’s concept of ‘epiphany’, see introductory essay, and 69, 80
and 135.

Though Hamilton's concerns in his post-U/ysses work till 1956

may appear at first glance arbitrarily diverse, his development
actually forms a coherent and even programmatic succession of
idea and means. The highly original objectivity with which the
relationship between artist, subject, picture and spectator is made

explicit in these works is steadily maintained, while the directness
of involvement between the work of art and the (equally) real
world in which it exists grows increasingly close. For these
reasons Hamilton's adoption in the mid-fifties of ‘pop’ subject
matter, superficially his most decisive change of direction, was
actually more of a turning point for others than for Hamilton
himself. On the levels both of analysis (of figurative meaning and
of visual device) and of technique, Hamilton’s pop work is a
logical continuation of his earlier examination of the ways in which
mark and idea in a work of art can have a relationship of absolute
necessity in terms both of the artist's own development and (in
the art situation of the time) of a recall to certain fundamentals. In
all his work of the 1950s Hamilton, very far from trying, as some
thought, altogether to jettison painting as a fine art, was seeking to
revive it by openly deploying its essential elements in terms
relevant to its own day.
It is ironical that despite Hamilton’s determination to sustain the
role of fine artist in the face (particularly after 1956) of pressing
non-art subject-matter, so many (including sometimes the most
avant-garde) should have failed either to recognise his works as
art or to be aware of painting as his central activity. One reason was
the impact of his contributions within a space of seven years
(1951-58) to five major exhibitions four of which (though each of
the first three summarised a whole phase of his preoccupations as a
painter) fell outside the confines of art as such. Each of these
exhibitions is discussed in the following commentary at the
appropriate point.
The starting-point for the abstract works 5-7 was a consideration
of the bare unmarked canvas and its character as a flat surface.
Hamilton determined to approach the process of making a
painting entirely without conscious preconceptions as to the
content of a painting in terms of style or theme. He set himself the
task of making a viable work using only the most primitive and
fundamental elements of which a painting might consist, and
letting the articulation of the canvas result from the relationships
naturally developed as one mark led to another. It is indicative of
Hamilton’s course during the next twenty-one years that at this
very early moment in his career he should reconsider from first
principles the essential nature of the activity in hand, and then
proceed to construct his painting from premises so predominantly
intellectual. Just as the U/ysses drawings had implied that idea
must determine style, so in their different way paintings like 5 and
7 eliminate style deliberately, emphasising that the life of the
picture lies within itself as an autonomous, self-explanatory
organism and container of ideas.
5 and 7 each began with the simplest mark that can be made, a
point, its own location directly determined (as were those of all
subsequent marks made) by whatever given elements already
existed, in this case the size and shape of the canvas. Each mark
made had to be‘... meaningful at any level... 1 took a blank
canvas and... put one mark on it...and then | added another
mark and found some justification for the relationship ... With
each mark | had to be able to say there was a reason... through
18
some kind of systematic relationship over the picture surface.’
(Bibl. A18).
In 7 the systematic principle of these works is carried through
particularly clearly. Around one isolated mark (a point) nine
further points make a simple spiral. Each point is part of a group of
criss-crossed straight lines, which increase in number from group
to group, from one with the first point to nine with the last. The
line which extends upwards from the first point leads the eye to
the second point, and in each subsequent group one line points the
direction to the group that follows. The lines are in seven colours
(in sequence red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet)
plus black and white, one colour being added in each group.
Black starts the sequence; with white, which ends it, the linear
articulation merges back into the ground against which it has
taken form. Each group of lines is both distinct as a unit and
seemingly interwoven, through the multiplicity of geometric
figures which fractured linear continuities form and re-form in eye
and mind, with the structure and substance of the picture as a
whole.
The presence of a rudimentary but unmistakable horizon line in
these three works acknowledges that despite their two-
dimensional character (which 5 and 7 actively assert) even a
single mark on a flat surface brings into play the illusion of the
third dimension. 6 therefore stresses a spatial quality, latent in the
medium and supported by perspective illusion. Its medium also
leads to more pronounced investigation of the nature of line, not
only as it traverses space. Moving across a surface it has an organic
life of its own, here indicated by the marked expansions and
contractions along its length; its property of enclosing space and
bounding form is implied where shading occurs, a device achieved
in the etching process by a type of modelling in relief (an activity
that has since preoccupied Hamilton increasingly, in many media).
Hamilton first titled all paintings of this phase Vcrocosmos, to
affirm the analogy between the visual quality of works of this type
and certain music of Bartok. Bartok’s Mikrocosmos are
instructional pieces for the piano some of which are intended to be
so simple as to be played by anyone; these works of Hamilton
equally follow an open, step-by-step development. The ideas in
Klee’s Pedagogical Sketchbook, in which Hamilton was
interested, also have a clear connection. In these abstract works,
as at all periods since, Hamilton is already consciously employing
banal elements as the means to sophisticated ends.
19)
 20

Growth & Form

The contribution of the ICA to the Festival of Britain was the

exhibition Growth & Form which was held there from 4 July to 31
August 1951, and was organised by Hamilton. The theme of the
exhibition, which was inspired by D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s
book Growth and Form (first edition 1917), was the way in which
function (principally biological) in nature produces particular
forms, and the presentation of these forms which, often beautiful
and surprising, are almost all invisible to the naked eye. Hamilton
was particularly interested in the exhibition’s scientific and
presentational aspects.

The causative relationship between form and function (function

determines form) is one of the key themes of Hamilton’s work,
whether he is examining the structure of the bi-plane (1955),
commercially motivated car styling (1957-8), a spiral-form
museum (1965-6), or photo-tinting in the holiday postcard trade
(1965-7) and this is a list almost at random. Growth & Form, like
much of his work ever since, was a revelation (going far beyond
the merely analytical) of exactly what we are seeing and exactly
how we are Seeing it.

Secondly, the form of the exhibition itself, which Hamilton

designed, anticipated aspects of his subsequent development as
both painter and exhibition designer. Growth & Form was opened
by Le Corbusier (another painter), whose earlier development of
the exhibition as an art form in its own right Hamilton admired,
particularly in his concern with making a synthesis from disparate
sources, and with creating an environment specifically modern in
character. Each of Hamilton’s five contributions between 1951 and
1958 to the art of exhibition-making fulfilled these twin aims.
Growth & Form \uxtaposed actual scientific specimens with
diagrams and with photographs taken by a wide variety of means.
The methods by which these images were transmitted included
cinematic projection onto horizontal surfaces above and below the
spectator, split-second illumination by high-intensity strobe
flashes, and infinite multiplication by means of mirrors.
Preoccupation with technical devices which in transmitting in
some degree form the images they convey runs like a thread
through Hamilton’s whole oeuvre. Of these, the most indispensable
to Growth & Form was photography, which revealed in most (and
equally) immediate images forms otherwise invisible through vast
distance, microscopic proximity or actual visual obstruction (eg:
bone structures). It is notable that already at this date Hamilton
was using this essentially photographic imagery as a direct source
for paintings and prints (8, 9,10, 11).
 Z|

pies

10

The simple lines and points in works like 6 and 7 already suggested
rudimentary plant life, as seen, however, by the naked eye.
Involvement with Growth & Form suggested a more diagrammatic,
less purely visual notation. Hamilton’s work of 1951—53 employs
markedly diagrammatic means to develop the sophistication both
of his figuration and of the spectator’s relation with the picture.
In the abstract works of 1949-51 Hamilton had deliberately
refrained from representing life or particularising space. 8
introduces both (at a simple level, though ambiguity is their
conscious effect). Elementary life is indicated by the sea-urchin at
lower right and the anonymous cell-like organism (painted from a
photograph) towards top right. Spatial location is indicated by
both colour and the distribution of non-figurative marks. Each
discrete mark, itself standing for something more substantial,
conforms to one of several lines leading towards a central
vanishing point, in the simplest of perspective systems. Thus
despite the spareness and delicacy of the notation and its
fluctuating legibility (’... the involvement of the spectator seems
to be an almost exact function of the uncertainty of the position of
the vanishing point...’ — Banham in Bibl. B12), Hamilton’s
intention here is to denote not only a definite but even a solid
location of elements in space. Location is reinforced by the use of
colour, green and yellow denoting proximity (and also the ground)
and blue distance (and sky). Into this Particu/ar System,
Hamilton introduces an encircled black disc — a diagrammatic
22
eee oyCae
x Fou oS
Dl 23
@ 4
es ee
WZ
symbol meaning ‘centre of vision’. Its particularity removes it from
the perspective illusion and its properties as a mark on a plain
ground accentuate the ambiguity of its location. As will be seen
again in 16 and 18, any point which exists on a line between the
eye and a central vanishing point on the horizon cannot be
distinguished in its location by means of linear perspective. Here,
as he will do repeatedly throughout his career. Hamilton recalls
the spectator from the essential contrivance of a pictorial system
to its physical facts as paint marks on a surface; he does this also
by blocking in with flat colour, in marked contrast to the rest of
the painting, the front edge of the pedestal depicted at bottom left.
The tall glass vessel that stands on it has no particular source,
though as a displayed object seen in conjunction with biological
organisms it reflects the preoccupation with museums (especially
those of Science and Natural History) and exhibitions then current
in Hamilton’s circle, (for Hamilton especially through Nigel
Henderson, and including Paolozzi and Turnbull in whose work of
this period complexes of rods as seen here often occur). A painting
of 1952, Refraction (coll: Reyner Banham) develops the theme of
the distortions which occur when one sees through water in glass
containers.
The etchings, 9 (which was reproduced on the cover of the
exhibition catalogue) and 10, are compendia of Growth & Form-
type imagery. In 9, a different technique is employed for each of
 23

the seven symbols. In 10 Hamilton’s mouth is a sea-urchin, his ear

a shell, his tie a flat worm regenerating after section, and one side of
his face is defined by a bull-sperm. The Arcimboldesque principle
points up the fact that in all Hamilton’s self-portraits (see also 93
and 155) the artist becomes one with the substance of his current
obsessions, another illustration of his preoccupation with the
fusion of distinct entities, one of his major themes. The
pendulum-like object which the artist contemplates in 10
symbolises his growing interest in movement, a continuing
preoccupation, which in twenty-three of the next twenty-five
works shown is of fundamental importance.

Hamilton’s interests, already seen, in systems for representing the

presence of objects (style; technique ;photography; by analogy)
are brought together in 11. Taking further the arbitrariness implicit
in any system of seeing, Hamilton established three perspective
viewpoints by using the Golden Section, and, by designating
three, rather than six, vanishing points to correspond to them,
compelled a curious dual or multiple orientation for any mark ik
occurring within more than one of the 90°-angle viewpoints
created. The marks also function in a two-dimensional grid of
squares and Golden Sections. As in 8, the marks made are again
exceptionally unemphatic though precise ;even more than there
they construct, paradoxically, a location (in this case of marked
complexity). Between these perspective systems and the spectator,
Hamilton interposes an object — part of a jellyfish — which is both
natural (by contrast with the device of perspective) and outside
the perspective systems (to emphasise their contrived nature
which requires conceptualisation rather than straight vision). By
contrast with the lateral organisation of 11, 12 situates successive
perspective viewpoints in a progression in depth from interior to
exterior space, and from a lower to a higher point of vision,
yielding three different horizons. The successive views are
superimposed, so that numerous elements recur.

In two works of 1953 (13, 14), Hamilton continued the use of

superimposition in a more overt examination of movement. Both
based on photographs taken by Muybridge (in order, like
Hamilton's painting, to analyse the working of the thing seen)
they depart from Muybridge’s presentation by superimposing 14
images originally seen as separate exposures. They represent a
pictorial approach to the problem, already treated schematically in
11 and 12, of depicting movement (there by the spectator, here
by the picture’s subject). The results come closer to Marey’s
continuum-images than to Muybridge’s, partly because of
Hamilton's keen interest at this time in Futurist devices for
representing movement (he was aware of Duchamp’s also, but less
so than he would become). Hamilton’s images differ from all these
in their degree of compression.

The perspective paintings had populated Hamilton’s conceptual

pictorial world with forms of life, had examined the question of
spectator movement, and had commented on the painter's own
role in making a two-dimensional analogy for three-dimensional
facts. In several works of 1954-55 (15, 17, 18, 19, 20), Hamilton
brought his growing need for pictorial expression, already
 24

demonstrated in 13 and 14, to bear on all these problems

simultaneously. These works, the earliest in this exhibition to be
executed from life, mark Hamilton's (so far definitive) return to
figurative art at a moment when abstract painting in Britain was
growing exceptionally in both scope and reputation.

The earliest, 15, already employs a Cubist motif and spectator

movement in relation to a static object, to produce a serial image
outwardly more akin to those of Futurism, and deliberately
preferring a systematic, analytic notation of movement (cf:
Duchamp, Balla) to that of analytical Cubism (which, in Hamilton’s
view was less analytical). The engraving (20) on the same theme,
another investigation of transparency, is an essay in the technical
range of the burin. re Nude (18), the climax of this phase of
Hamilton's work, integrates the substance of the painting with the
process of movement towards the motif in a remarkable degree.
Moreover, the study (17) and the painting are so interdependent
that neither can be fully understood without the other. Hamilton's
procedure was to work on the watercolour from the seated model
and to transfer the information gained to the painting. The painting
itself became an integral part of the subject, for it stood behind the
model. The double image appearing in the study would then be
transferred to the painting, and then the painting was again set up 15
behind the model. There were three stages of movement in line
towards the model, rendered as a triple exposure on the painting.
The three moves are multiplied by three again in the painting seen
in the painting. The movement of spectator or artist in Sti//-/ife ?
and re Nude is not the notional circumambulation of Cubism, but
a movementfrom or towards the motif, alwaysina straight line.Itis a
prescribed tracking, comparable with that of the movie camera, or
with the movement of a train, which Hamilton was examining
concurrently (see 16 below).

These works have an expanding character, in that one point, the

model's left shoulder, remains at a fixed position (though one
which is also ambiguous, like the centre of vision in 8), while
every other observed detail moves out over sheet and panel.
Hamilton set himself the task of carrying through the
predetermined process without deviation. His fidelity to its basic
principle survived the daunting experience of having twice, mark
by mark, to move the whole image achieved to date across the
panel. Fidelity to objective method, though indispensable to the
painting's character, has never been, however, Hamilton’s main
aim, and re Nude is immensely more than an experimental exercise.
Though systematic in essence, it has a spatial and atmospheric
subtlety, enhanced by Hamilton’s deliberate failure to note each
detail in full every time it recurs; thus in its own way this painting,
like 16, echoes the abstracts of 1949-51 and the perspective
paintings in convincingly adumbrating more particular and
complex space and volume than are actually seen. The lips in re 20
Nude, indicated once only, form a point of particular visual
concentration. As 20 is for its medium, so the etching (19) on the re
Nude subject is a demonstration of the technical resources of relief
etching and colour intaglio ; the border, with which the image has a
most ambiguous relation in depth, helps determine the textural
character of the rest of the sheet.
25

Concurrently with re Vude, Hamilton worked on a series of
paintings concerned with the problem of representing simultaneous
movement both of the spectator and (both actual and virtual) of
the subject. In the four 7ra/ns/tion paintings, the spectator is in a
moving train; in Il and III he gazes in the direction of travel, while
in |, and in III (16) (the less familiar variant on the Roman IV is a
pun on the structure of railway tracks), he looks out at 90° to it. In
(16), because his gaze is fixed on one point (a tree in the middle
distance), the entire landscape is in apparent motion around it.
Everything seen between train and tree appears to be moving from
left to right (the opposite direction to the movement of the train),
and everything beyond it from right to left. Arrows, characteristic
of Hamilton's recurring juxtaposition of the diagrammatic and the
illusionistic, affirm this virtual movement. The tree stands at the
apex of a cone of motion, the width of which at any given distance
from the spectator is a measure of the lateral distance which any
object at that distance will appear to have travelled. Every mark in
the painting except at the point of focus is thus duplicated at a
given distance along a notional parallel ;inevitably some marks
which appear duplicate other marks outside the field of vision
while the duplicates of others that are seen lie beyond the panel in
the opposite direction. The pebble-like cluster along the lower edge
of the painting is too dense for legibility by reason of its proximity
and illusory speed. The two figurative elements in motion are a
single telegraph pole of which the motion is apparent, (it is thus
seen three times in the short space of time represented, with
16
26
particular clarity when it intersects the point of attention) and a car
which, being in actual motion, (in the opposite direction to the
train) is duplicated at an interval double that which would have
applied had it been static. Here again, though schematic
predetermination is a major element in a painting, the very marks
which give form to Hamilton’s analysis yield an effect which is
poetic in its apprehension of landscape and in its feeling.
Made at a time when Hamilton had just begun travelling very
frequently between London and Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the
Trainsition paintings represent a yet further stage in Hamilton's
integration of art with day to day experience. In addition, in both
feeling and imagery they reveal, as compared, for example, with re
Nude, a growing involvement with subjects peculiar to the
accelerating, ever more technically sophisticated life of the 1950s.
As Alloway pointed out at the time (Bibl. B4), they are concerned
for one thing with classic situations of the Hollywood movie of the
day — the speeding car seen from a moving train, and (in Carapace
1954) the view through the windscreen of a moving car. Thus
already in 1954 Hamilton’s work directly anticipates not only his
exploration in exhibition form of the imagery of motion but also the
overt integration into his art from 1956 of the imagery and
techniques of mass popular culture.
 72H

Man, Machine & Motion

Designed and organised by Hamilton over a two-year period,

Man, Machine & Motion was shown in the summer of 1955 at the
Hatton Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and the ICA in London. It
was a pictorial review, in over 200 exhibits, of the ‘machines
which extend the power of the human body ... [by increasing] a
man’s capacity for autonomous movement’. The machines
illustrated ranged in function from under-water to outer-space
exploration, and in date from 1200 BC to projections of the first
moon landing. The emphasis, however, was very much on the
seventy years preceding 1955 because, as Reyner Banham (who
also wrote the catalogue commentary) wrote in Bibl. B14,
‘photographic images were preferred since photography is more or
less coeval with mechanised transport and belongs to the same
technological environment’. He added that ‘the basis of the
selection of... material... was that each image should showa...
machine... and a recognisable man.’

As Growth & Form was concerned with natural evolutionary

processes, Vian, Machine & Motion was about mechanical
evolution, specifically those machines made by man to extend and
adapt his own organism. Like Growth & Form, Man, Machine &
Motion was concerned with the generation of forms beautiful and
extraordinary in themselves as the non-aesthetically-motivated
product of particular functional needs. Also like Growth & Form,
the form of the exhibition, which was designed on a modular
principle producing semi-architectural spaces, was interconnected
with Hamilton’s work as fine artist (see discussion of an Exhibit
below, p. 34). The exhibition stressed that not only were machines
essentially part of the men who used them, to the extent that the
scope of man’s activities was in many respects defined by them,
but also the degree to which the machine had become part of man’s
personality, altering (like clothes) his character. Man and machine
were in fact shown as a single organism or persona, a theme which
Hamilton would develop in his painting in the years ahead, not
only in relation to humans and artefacts in general but, at a more
pervasive level, in the merging of separate and even contradictory
elements into single entities, as substance and image. Media
transposition, another major theme of the exhibition, is also central
in Hamilton’s painting. Just as in Man, Machine & Motion man is
seen inserting himself from his natural habitat of earth and air into a
watery or a weightless ambience, so Hamilton in his painting from
1957 onwards will transform images and techniques formulated
for one purpose by treating them in a new context. Hamilton’s
appreciation of Duchamp’s and Picabia’s ironical interpretations
of the machine, especially when (as in Nude Descending a
Staircase or the Large G/ass) its functions become one with those
of human beings, cannot have been absent from his approach to
Man, Machine & Motion, but its principal revelation was the
dimension of the fantastic inherent in even the most practical
pursuits. Demonstration that in the elements of mid-twentieth
century everyday urban life lie aspects of myth and epic as powerful
as those of history and antiquity which had inspired painters for
generations is a key factor in Hamilton’s work from this point on.
 28

This is Tomorrow

Held at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, in August and

September 1956, This is Tomorrow was intended by the organisers
as a demonstration of the possibilities of integrating different arts.
Each of twelve groups, notionally consisting of a painter, a
sculptor and an architect, worked to produce an environment. A
space near the gallery entrance was allocated to Hamilton working
with John McHale and the architect John Voelcker. Their section,
contrasting startlingly in visual and aural force with the rest of the
exhibition, was widely dismissed or misunderstood.
Understandably it seemed to many at the time a reversion to Dada.
Several avant-garde artists of the time, including Paolozzi (who in
another section, in collaboration with Alison and Peter Smithson
and Nigel Henderson, exhibited deliberately battered and
primitive imagery) were associated, like Dubuffet, with
aggressively anti-art gestures ; the profusion of (actually
carefully-chosen) images from popular magazines, comics and
film publicity in the Hamilton section appeared to many like a
deliberate flaunting of the coarsest, most despicable aspects of
American-influenced culture, the very antithesis of fine art;
Voelcker’s structure in the Hamilton section was consciously that
of a crazy house (of which Hamilton contributed to the catalogue
a topologically-orientated cut-and-fold diagram) ; and of the
highly-amplified sounds which competed for attention, the one
which greeted the entering visitor was the voices of earlier arrivals,
instructed to speak at random into a microphone further into the
section and unable to hear their noises being broadcast. It is not
surprising that, to some, this section had the character of a
provocation.

Far from being regressive it was, however, astonishingly prophetic.

The theme of the section was the direct juxtaposition of popular
admass imagery with demonstrations of the ambiguities of
perception (a theme concentrated in the particular double-page
spread of the catalogue for which Hamilton was responsible,
where his collage Just what /s it... ? (21) faced an alternating but
equally-balanced positive-negative image in harsh black and
white). Not only were two of the distinguishing preoccupations of
the art of the 1960s precisely anticipated, but the presentation
postulated (as American and British pop painting would embody)
ambiguity as a function of the experience of pop imagery extracted
from its source. Popular images ranging from a robot 16 feet high*
to items smaller than playing cards were disposed in reverse
perspective, and a screen of small-scale images intermingled
different modes of visual communication.

The collage (22), an advance visualisation, illustrates not the

actual appearance of the section (for which see Bibl. B18, B22,
B23) but its basic layout and conception. The corridor at left was
itself an optical illusion, implying undulation below and to one
side of the visitor ; the whole corridor, which ended with several
Duchamp rotoreliefs in motion, contradicted the hard facts which
defined it as a space. The popular imagery to the right, amid which
the juke box played continuously, included examples from fine
 29

(Van Gogh's Sunflowers) and industrial art as well as more

obvious sources. An opening speech written by Lawrence Alloway
was read by a demonstrator inside a working model of Robbie the
Robot, star of Forbidden Planet. The huge image in Hamilton's
section of a robot with flashing eyes had been used as publicity
outside the London Pavilion cinema in Piccadilly Circus, while the
life-size still of Marilyn Monroe standing over a pavement air-vent
in The Seven Year /tch recognised what remains a central moment
in the popular film history of the 1950s almost immediately after it
occurred. The also prophetic 6 foot-high close-up of spaghettiseen
in 22 reflected John McHale’s obsession with the popular
imagery of food. (The trunkfull of American domestic market
magazines which McHale brought back from a visit to the States in 22
1955 was a big stimulus, in the sense of a confirmation or
expansion of existing curiosity, to Hamilton and others).

The indications of the senses superimposed on a face (in the end

Tito’s rather than Mendes-France’s) at the entrance to the
section’s enclosed central shaft symbolised the aim of making a
‘concentration of the sensory effects of (the) current environment’.
In this inner space, the visitor saw cinema projections, breathed
scents, entered the cabin of a science fiction space capsule with
monsters peering through the windows and a floor of dribbled
fluorescent paint seen in black light, and walked on soft floors. The
effect throughout the section was of continuous but shifting
disorientation.

The section’s foreshadowing of major imminent modes in art

should not be seen apart from its equally important anti-dogmatic
stand. Hamilton’s part of the section’s catalogue statement
read : ‘We resist that kind of activity which is primarily concerned
with the creation of style. We reject the notion that “tomorrow”
can be expressed through the presentation of rigid formal concepts.
Tomorrow can only extend the range of the present body of visual
experience. What is needed is not a definition of meaningful
imagery but the development of our perceptive potentialities to
accept and utilise the continual enrichment of visual material’.
Hamilton viewed the component elements of his section at
Whitechapel not as the basis of a programme but as the raw
material from which new kinds of art might be made. It was a
presentation of his interests at that moment, in answer to the
notional question ‘what is important now ?’ The kind of painting
which emerged from this position in 1957 extended on the
insights of his pre-1956 work, after a characteristic taking-stock
(see below, commentary on Hommage a Chrysler Corp. (28)).

The collage Just what /s it that makes today’s homes so different,

So appealing ? (21) was made by Hamilton to be reproduced on
the poster and in the catalogue of This /s Tomorrow. It is a
tabulation in pictorial form of the elements which answer the title —
a title which (though it did not originate the work, for it was
discovered in a magazine as collage proceeded) shows Hamilton
again analysing the working of an important phenomenon. Just as
in devising their section at Whitechapel Hamilton had first drawn
up with McHale a list of the necessary areas to be covered, so now

he typed a list of categories as the programme for the collage. It
read : ‘Man Woman Food History Newspapers Cinema Domestic
appliances Cars Space Comics TV Telephone Information’. With
this list as guide, Terry Hamilton and Magda Cordell spent some
days clipping possible images from magazines, while Hamilton
selected those most susceptible of integration into the collage
(there might, for example, be as many as 30 television sets to
choose between). As with so much of his work before and since
the resulting configuration represents a fusion of his own vision
with a strict and detailed controlling specification. Practical
necessity played a large part in the choice of each image, it being
extremely difficult to sustain credible relative proportions
throughout, to make a realistic space (for example, with the
available material the only ways to incorporate the telephone and
the comic page were to treat them as television picture and
framed painting respectively ; given hindsight, Hamilton’s
willingness to make this last transposition is interesting). There are
other dual roles; the ‘ceiling’ is a photograph of the earth taken by
an early high altitude research rocket, while the ‘carpet’, directly
anticipating Hamilton’s investigation of this imagery nine years
later (see 97 et seq.), is a photograph of hundreds of people ona
beach, deliberately symbolising the mass of humanity. (Hamilton's
work since 1951 had grown steadily more populated ; this symbol
is introduced at the moment when mass popular culture becomes
his principal source.) The use of the word ‘POP’ on the lollipop is
possibly the first use anywhere in a corresponding work of art of the
word that would come to designate a major new tendency in art.
Relevant categories additional to those listed by Hamilton, but
included in this collage, range from trendily exotic plant life to sex
and sound. The collage is moreover a compendium of different
ways of communicating information, ranging from words, printing,
painting, symbols, photography, film, television, telephone and
diagram to recorded sound (the tape recorder in the foreground was
the last item added). Finally, Just what /s it... ?, beautifully
balanced in terms of both colour and composition, is already a
confident statement of the theme, of central importance in
Hamilton's work in the 1960s, of ambiguous interior/exterior space.
* The scale of the section is well conveyed in a photograph (showing Hamilton,
McHale and others erecting it) in Reyner Banham, ‘Not Quite Architecture, Not
Quite Painting or Sculpture Either’, in The Architect's Journal, Vol 124, No 3207
16 August 1956, pp. 217-221
30
Pop
In Hamilton's circle the subject-matter of his post-1956 paintings
was highly familiar well before this date. His originality lay not in
focusing attention on the imagery of mass commercial culture but
in doing so in the context of fine art, and in persisting in doing it in
ways which many of his fellow researchers into this source
material regarded for some time as puzzling or pointless.
The Independent Group (see p. 97 for its membership), an
unofficial sub-group of members of the ICA in London, met
intermittently at the ICA’s premises between 1952 and 1955 with
the purpose of opening up in discussion new areas of investigation
of mid-century culture in the widest sense. As early as 1952 one
1G event was Eduardo Paolozzi’s epidiascope projection (to
unfamiliarly large scale) of images and advertisements many of
which came from (then rare in England) American magazines such
as Life. In the first phase of the |G the emphasis was on technology,
but after Alloway and McHale became conveners in 1954, it
changed to the characteristic features of mass commercial culture,
meaning, unavoidably, American culture, since it was in the States
that industrialisation was farthest advanced. At that time the term
‘Pop Art’, already in frequent IG use, did not denote, as it later
would, fine art employing pop source material (see Bibls. B8,
B10). But the enthusiasm of this circle for the vitality of many of
the products of mass commercial culture combined with their
healthy distaste for the exclusivist ethos of much art and art
appreciation led them naturally first to a much less rigid
discrimination in terms of quality or importance between the
products of popular and fine art and then to an acceptance that the
two veins could actually merge without compromising either. The
analytical character of much British pop painting (none more so
than Hamilton’s) was thoroughly consistent with much IG
thinking, and with a view, like Alloway’s, that ‘acceptance of the
[mass] media... as entries in a descriptive account of a society's
communication system is related to modern arrangements of
knowledge in non-hierarchic forms. This is shown by the
influence of anthropology and sociology on the humanities’
(Lawrence Alloway, ‘The Long Front of Culture’, in Cambridge
Opinion, 17,1959, pp. 24-26). Major subjects of Hamilton’s
painting after 1956 had been explicit topics for |G discussion
before that date, among them the cinema (including monsters),
domestic appliances, car styling and clothes.
Nevertheless, Hamilton's role in the genesis of a type of painting in
which mass commercial material is used with quite open
attention to the sophisticated character of the processes that
produced the material, is unique in its early date, its clarity of
approach, and the resolved completeness of even the first
examples. Well before 1956, Paolozzi was employing imagery
from sources related to Hamilton’s in work in several media; but
while intellectually its non-fine art sources remained an important
factor for the spectator, physically and emotionally the material
was transformed into a more muscular or consciously primitivist
expression. (Equation of machines and humans was another link

between these two crucial figures). In 1956, before Hamilton had
begun pop painting as such, McHale exhibited at the ICA
collages of food imagery made from American and US-influenced
magazine sources ; the feel of this work was, however, perhaps
closer to Dubuffet than to its artificial and elegant sources. One
British pop painter, Peter Blake, was already farsightedly producing
work in which the context and feel of imagery from popular
culture was actively asserted, but from the point of view of the folk
cultures of its users rather than from Hamilton’s obsession with the
highly conscious styling and production by sophisticated
specialists of particular artefacts aimed at a mass audience.
Possibly the closest forerunner, albeit not in painting, of
Hamilton’s approach, was Alison and Peter Smithson’s ‘House of
the Future’, shown at the 1956 Ideal Home Exhibition in London
(and illustrated in detail, with models dressed to complement the
architecture, in ‘Th/s is a House ?’, Mechanix ///ustrated, Vol 5, No
73, Dec 1956, pp. 37-39). This suggested intriguing possibilities
of a pop architecture, derived as much from the advertisement
pages of US domestic consumer magazines as from architectural
precedent. (Ironically some years later at the ICA the Smithsons
and Paolozzi sought formally to repudiate any suggestion that they
had furthered the Independent Group’s drift towards pop).
Shortly after This /s Tomorrow, Alison and Peter Smithson
discussed with Hamilton how its achievements might be extended.
His considered reply was the letter of 16 January, 1957, in which
he formulated a (by now much-quoted) definition of ‘Pop Art’ as:
Popular (designed for a mass audience)
Transient (short term solution)
Expendable (easily forgotten)
Low Cost
Mass Produced
Young (aimed at Youth)
Witty
Sexy
Gimmicky
Glamorous
Big Business
By ‘Pop Art’ at this date was meant mass commercial culture itself,
but Hamilton’s proposal in the Smithson letter was that artists,
designers and architects, working in teams as for 7his /s Tomorrow,
should, each within the terms of his own discipline, produce work
conforming to this definition. The new exhibition would thus be
unified, being pop throughout, while still giving as much room for
individual expression as had its highly diverse predecessor.
Hamilton received no reply to this letter, but began almost at once
to consider what type of painting he could evolve which would
fulfil his own definition. If ‘Transient (short term solution)’ is seen
as meaning that the painting arrived at springs from the situation
peculiar to its moment in time, then the works which resulted filled
all the criteria except expendability, which Hamilton could not
bring himself to build in to a work of art, and mass production,
which in principle he could. All eleven criteria are, however,
central subjects of Hamilton’s paintings from this date on.
31
Girl and Machine
Five of Hamilton’s first six pop paintings (28, 35, 40, 47, 51) show
what can accurately be described as intimate relationships
between a girl and a (typically 1950s) machine. The precedent for
this genre of relationship in Man, Machine & Motion is obvious,
especially considering Hamilton’s interest there in the images of
fantasy resulting from developments in the movement industry.
Banham’s research into US automobile styling underlay 28, 35 and
51, both in his discovery of a sophisticated car-styling subculture
with its own critical literature and in the pool of images he and
Hamilton had assembled, only some of which were used in the
exhibition. One passage in Banham’s catalogue commentary
foreshadows the girl-car relationships in Hamilton's paintings in
detail: ‘The source of the stylists’ and ad men’s precision and
sensitivity is the continuous testing of the public response to
“dream-car’’ projects which dramatise improvements and
developments which could be built into production models. As
presented to the public the dream-car has much in common with
the concept of ‘‘dream-boat” (eg: the strapless photographer's
model behind 60) —a vessel of almost-realisable desire.’ (p. 14)
Hamilton's paintings are composite works, built up from a
multitude of separate magazine photographs and sketches
individually supporting each painting's predetermined programme.
Though he aimed to make each component remain distinct in
itself, an even stronger motive was to accentuate the
correspondences — of shape, colour, function and /dea — between
separate elements with different origins, so that a painting's
imagery as a whole should read as a continuous system. 28 and 35
are anthologies of dual-source orifices and curves.
Essentially the subject of these paintings is not so much the girls
and machines themselves as the artifices and techniques by which
advertising makes us see them. (‘One wasn't just concerned with
the car and the idea of speed, but [with] the way it was presented
to us in the mass media... presenting a glamorous object by all
the devices that glamorous advertising can add...’ — RH in Bibl.
A27). Hence they are anthologies also of the mechanics of
visualisation. Hamilton explained in 1964 how: ‘having made the
decision that this world was the one that was going to be
important to me at the visual level, the world of advertising ... and
mass media, | looked at the quality that this ... material had and
found that it was eclectic. You would geta photograph of an object
which would be perhaps heavily retouched . . . to make the
meaning clearer; overlying that might be a diagram... and then
because the idea couldn't be communicated sufficiently forcefully
with these means they would have, say, across the picture in
writing that this ... was happening. So the meaning was
hammered home with many layers of different mediums of
communication. ... This was very influential in the attitude |
adopted. | said it’s possible to mix a diagram with something that is
purely pictorial... 1can puta photograph into my paintings... | can
put words in, and so a picture can have a balloon coming out of a
mouth saying ““AAH !" and it’s not only concerned with the
 32

message “AAH !”, but... with the fact that it is a lettered image’
(Bibl. A18).

An important aspect of Hamilton’s originality at this point is his

achievement, in using these devices from the world of mass
media, in assimilating their real mood and real appearance into
traditional painting (‘I’ve always thought of myself as a fine artist,
my training and background has led me to accept that...
wholeheartedly’ — RH in Bibl. A27). His first pop painting openly
celebrates this historic marriage.

Hommage a Chrysler Corp (28) was a title chosen for its high art
associations — with the Parisian Cubist milieu of fifty years before.
Hamilton has said that he ‘invented the title and the idea first and
then made the picture’ (Ibid.). In an interior (a car showroom), a
girl is caressing a car. An emphatic horizontal black bar at top right
(the same motif recurred in the same position on the catalogue
pages of Man, Machine & Motion) denotes an architectural
setting of specifically modern style, and enhances (as Hamilton
will repeatedly do (80, 81, 127) the spectator’s sense of looking
into the picture’s illusionistic space over or past a close-up plane.
Continuity with Hamilton’s pre-pop work is abundantly evident —
in the inclusion of a rudimentary horizon line with suggestions of
cloud (the cloud in 24, not retained, is a direct quotation of the
Blossoming in Duchamp’s Large G/ass), in the ‘plus’ symbol for
‘centre of vision’, and in two direct quotations from re Nude (18),
the floorboards parallel to the picture plane and the lips suspended
in space. Moreover, the dotted line at lower right is a diagrammatic
indication of movement, compensating for the picture's static
theme, while the spiral form in the centre is a diagram (cf: Growth
& Form) of the structure of the Exquisite Form bra (the copy in the
advertisement from which it is derived spoke of its properties, such
as smooth suspension, as if advertising a car).

All the studies develop the painting's principle of diversity of

means (including the extension outwards of the illusionistic space
by collaged reflecting silver) ; this is maintained in 26 and 27 by the
employment of proofs (contrasting in orientation and density) of
an abandoned lithograph as the ground for a series of collaged and
coloured marks varying. within strict iconographical specifications,
from one to another of the five known examples. Of these the
earliest two, 26 and another (coll. Ronald Hunt), correspond in
orientation to the finished painting (28). In the other three, 27
(executed in the 1950s) and its two versions (coll: Victoria &
Albert Museum and the artist), both executed in the 1960s, the
orientation is reversed. The artist’s inscription ‘2/2’ on 27 was made
in error in 1964, Hamilton having forgotten at the time that prints on
this theme were pulled from two separate stones, and that he had
augmented more than one example of the first version. 33 is a
version specially made as a piece of ‘artwork’ for (line)
reproduction in a magazine (thus returning the use of the
now-transformed devices to their original function). It appeared in
Bibl. A1, with Hamilton’s commentary on the painting:

‘The painting ‘Hommage a Chrysler Corp” is a compilation of

themes derived from the glossies. The main motif, the vehicle,
 33

breaks down into an anthology of presentation techniques. One

passage, for example, runs from a prim emulation of in-focus
photographed gloss to out-of-focus gloss to an artist’s
representation of chrome to ad-man’s sign meaning ‘‘chrome”’.
Pieces are taken from Chrysler’s Plymouth and Imperial ads, there
is some General Motors material and a bit of Pontiac. The total
effect of Bug-Eyed Monster was encouraged in a patronising sort
of way.

‘The sex-symbol is, as so often happens in the ads, engaged in a

display of affection for the vehicle. She is constructed from two
main elements — the Exquisite Form bra diagram and Voluptua’s
lips. It often occurred to me as | was working on the painting that
Fe
this female figure evoked a faint echo of the Winged Victory of
Samothrace. The response to the allusion was, if anything, to
suppress it. Marinetti’s dictum “‘a racing car... is more beautiful
than the Winged Victory of Samothrace” made it impossibly corny.
In spite of a distaste for the notion it persists.’

28 is the first of Hamilton’s works in which paint and an actual

photograph are used together. Typically (see below, p. 62) the one
photographic passage, which should in theory recall the
appearance of the object represented more clearly than the fallible
marks of the human hand, is the most misleading element of all.
Apparently of a headlamp, it actually shows the jet intake on the
first American car to have this device. The area around the right
headlamp demonstrates particularly well Hamilton’s blunt
opposition of idioms: the diagrammatic line adjoins the most
realistically painted passage of all, while behind them are loose
paint marks representing nothing, but referring to the
contemporary abstraction of, for example, Sam Francis and Paul
Jenkins.

28

26 27
 34

‘an Exhibit’, and an interior design merging of ideas which in Hamilton’s and Pasmore’s sections at
This is Tomorrow had taken opposite (but in each case strongly
environmental) expressions. After an Exhibit, Hamilton adopted
Among the other aspects of the exhibition, Hamilton had devised 4’ 2’ 8” as the determinative dimension for his paintings (as
the display system of Man, Machine & Motion, in which large hardboard, like acrylic sheet, was manufactured to a 4’ width) —
photographs were fixed at various levels in a slender modular examples are 28, 35, 40, 47, 51, 4x 2’ 8”; 54 et seq., 2’x 2’ 8”;
framework (the system is described and reproduced in 7he 69, 4’ diameter; 80, 81, 4’x 5’ 4”; 98, 28” x8’.
Architect's Journal, 15 September 1955). Spaces were as
important to the effect as in-fill, and the arrangement permitted the To an exhibition of interiors by five designers at the Daily Mail
spectator to see photographs of different subjects and periods in an Ideal Home Exhibition of 1958, Hamilton contributed a ‘Gallery for
infinite number of permutations. a Collector of Brutalist and Tachiste art’. Works exhibited included
a battered humanoid sculpture by Paolozzi, an Yves Klein and a
In 1957 he refined this spacial concept to create a vehicle for Sam Francis. The room, of extreme simplicity and elegance, all its
an Exhibit, an abstract work of art on an environmental scale. The storage and appliances concentrated in a single slender mobile
framework, in nylon, was now even more slender; the articulation unit, was maximally functional as a gallery for the type of
was thin panels of acrylic in several colours and in varying degrees large-scale art that was just emerging in Europe. In Hamilton’s
of transparency, suspended at varying heights. As these were sketch a floor-to-ceiling window enables a streamlined car to be
manufactured to a standard width of 4’, Hamilton established a appreciated on equal terms with the works of art; integration with
standard panel-size of 4’x 2’ 8” (since three panels 2’ 8” wide popular culture is further represented by the equally streamlined
align with two panels 4’ wide), and worked to a module of 1’ 4”. chairs, which, Reyner Banham explained in Bibl. B16, were ‘the
The system permitted immense freedom of choice to anyone work of that great fashion-maker Harley Earl, chief stylist of
determining the disposition of the panels. General Motors, and would not have been known to [Hamilton]
had they not been published in the popular magazine Look, which
an Exhibit was a collaboration with Lawrence Alloway, and with gave the chaise-longue version the full pop-art treatment’.
Victor Pasmore, who by 1957 had for eight years been producing
increasingly geometrical abstractions in two and three dimensions.
The panels were arranged by joint decision, then Pasmore placed
cut paper shapes on them wherever he chose. an Exhibit had a very
free and open quality in which the character of the acrylic sheets
was strongly planar. A year later, a fresh version, shown only at the
Hatton Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne and entitled Exh/b/t 2, was
evolved. Using the modular framework from Man, Machine &
Motion, an open box measuring 8 x 16 x 16 feet was constructed,
inside which the verticals and horizontals of the framework again
permitted an infinitely flexible arrangement. Spectators were
discouraged from entering the ‘box’ but could walk all round it and
the fluctuations of transparency simulated penetration. Small
abstract strips were added to the sheets by Pasmore and Hamilton
jointly ; the effect was more disciplined and linear, and also more
busy and flickering in rhythm, than an Exhibit.

Hamilton and Alloway conceived an Exhibit as a game, in which

the final form (its moment of completion determined by the er setonseseest eae

planned opening date) would develop through a self-expressive

process of improvisation (a parallel with concurrent informal
abstraction). The game would re-commence each time the system
was set up within a new space (which would also guarantee a
different end-result). an Exhibit was also intended to break down
the conventional experience of an exhibition as a series of finite
objects, and to dissolve the sense of separation between spectator
and art-object by integrating him with it environmentally and
making his experience of its form radically dependent on his own
decisions and movement. A parallel with aspects of large-scale
American-influenced British abstract painting of the late 1950s is
clear, and would be taken further by the Denny/Rumney/Smith
exhibition P/ace at the ICA in 1959. an Exhibit represented a
 35

In Hers is a /ush situation (35) the girl and car theme is envisaged
in a mobile situation. The basic source was a sentence in the
analysis of the 1957 Buick in the annual review of automobile
styling in the American magazine /ndustria/ Design: ‘The driver
sits at the dead calm center of all this motion: hers is a lush
situation’. The painting aims to merge three interconnecting
spaces — the girl in the car; the car among others in a traffic jam;
and the traffic against the wider space and features of the city (New
York in the vicinity of the United Nations building which, collaged,
doubles as windscreen). Again, lips (here those of Sophia Loren,
collaged) hang in space.

Hamilton approached the situation implied in /ndustria/ Design as

a problem in composition. ‘| thought of elaborate complex
movements and a dead calm centre in the middle of the painting
and | used the formal language that this critic .. . was concerned
with — car styling —... and built up within my mind a picture of an
elaborate complexity of cars all impinging on one another in a
street...’ (RH in Bibl. A27). Hamilton’s text ‘Urbane Image’ 1963,
an evocation of all his paintings from 28 to 51, included the
following commentary on 35: ‘In slots between towering glass
slabs writhes a sea of jostling metal, fabulously wrought like
rocket and space probe, like lipstick sliding out of a lacquered
brass sleeve, like waffle, like Jello. Passing UNO, NYC, NY, USA
(point a), Sophia floats urbanely on waves of triple-dipped,
infra-red-baked pressed steel. To her rear is left the stain of a

“a RTT

35
 36

prolonged breathy fart, the compounded exhaust of 300 brake

horses.’ (Bibl. A15).

The first sketch, 29, is very exploratory, but already in 30 the

general disposition and compositional limits, clarified in 31, are
indicated. Simplified in 32, this forms the basis for the etching, 34.
As is often the case with Hamilton, a print is a working study for
the culminating version of a theme, and not a later recapitulation.
In this instance it was the painting’s immediate antecedent as it
embodied two crucial features, a pronounced linear emphasis and
the effect of relief. The linear quality enhances the sense of open
forms continually merging, and enables a single line to have
multiple functions; relief, accentuated in 35 where it is sprayed and
sanded to a high finish, simulates the quality of pressed steel car
bodies. In 63, made for magazine reproduction (it illustrates Bibl.
A15) Hamilton again doubles the function of his principal means
(here letters), and trebles it at those points (‘turbulence’,
‘reflections’, ‘dead calm centre’) where not only location but also
activity of an element is implied.

y “—
ie
a | San

Ly ES +

30

32 34
 37

Hamilton painted $he (40) as the outcome of an investigation into

consumer goods for an independent group lecture (published
Bibl. A5). Lawrence Alloway wrote of this painting in Bibl. B7:
“$he extends the most elliptical sign language of the art world
(minted by Marcel Duchamp) to consumer goods. The painting is
characterised by the cool, clean hygienic surface of kitchen
equipment and the detailing has the crisp, fine point of ads or
explanatory booklets on the products that Hamilton is painting.
Sources of imagery candidly exposed by the artist (in the proud
spirit in which Constable could point to Suffolk and say ‘these
scenes made mea painter’) are American ads. ... $he, tall, pale, and
two-sided, is derived from an Esquire photograph of Vikky (the
back) Dougan. Hamilton has made the cleavage of the dress
resemble an apron, topped by an airbrush-smooth shoulder/breast.
In this image the codes of fine and the messages of pop art are
meshed. Toaster confronts refrigerator, sex-dress becomes apron,
and a nipple looms in the kitchen: hot or cold ? The latest
sociological and fantastic content of ads and girlie photographs
are stressed by Hamilton in his ironic and polished treatment.

‘Hamilton's position is that of a knowing consumer, a role typical of

other English painters, abstract and figurative. This is a drastic
departure from both the bohemian tradition of distrusting
possessions (being a bad consumer) and from the high spiritual
aims declared by early modern artists.’

In Bibl. A13 (reprinted, with its illustrations, in Bibl. B35),

Hamilton published a detailed account of the genesis of She, of
which the following is a part: ‘ ‘Women in the home” was a
possible title for ‘$he’, which is a sieved reflection of the ad man’s
paraphrase of the consumer's dream.

‘Art's Woman in the fifties was anachronistic — as close to us as a

smell in the drain; bloated, pink-crutched, pin-headed and
lecherous ; remote from the cool woman image outside fine art.
There she is truly sensual but she acts her sexuality and the
performance is full of wit. Although the most precious of
adornments, she is often treated as just a styling accessory. The
worst thing that can happen to a girl, according to the ads, is that
she should fail to be exquicicely at ease in her appliance setting —
the setting that now does much to establish our attitude to woman
in the way that her clothes alone used to. Sex is everywhere,
symbolized in the glamour of mass-produced luxury — the interplay
of fleshy plastic and smooth, fleshier metal.

‘This relationship of woman and appliance is a fundamental theme

of our culture ;as obsessive and archetypal as the Western movie
gun duel. Some basic features [follow]. The caress. Characteristic
posture: inclination towards the appliance in a gesture of
affectionate genuflexion. Possessive but also bestowing. She
offers the delights of the appliance along with her other
considerable attributes. A job, like Dad’s. Mum too has a uniform,
apron equals pin stripe or grey flannel... The source of the overall
layout of ‘$he’ is a brilliant high shot of the cornucopic refrigerator
—a view that uses a photographic convention from the auto ads.
The cadillac pink colour of this particular model of RCA
36) 37°38
 38

Whirlpool’s fridge/freezer was adopted with enthusiasm for the

painting.

‘In spite of their contrived sophistication, my paintings are, for me,

curiously ingenuous (like Marilyn Monroe). At first sight it is easy
to mistake their intention as satirical. It looks as though. . . the
painting is a sardonic comment on our society. But | would like
to think of my purpose as a search for what is epic in everyday
objects and everyday attitudes. lrony has no place in it except in
so far as irony is part of the ad man’s repertoire. My woman may
seem exotic but, thanks to mass reproduction and wide
distribution, she has become domesticated. She owes much to an
Esquire photograph of ‘starlet’ (2?) Vikky Dougan in a dress
concocted by her publicist Milton Weiss. Miss Dougan specializes
in modelling backless dresses and bathing costumes. The only
pin-up | can remember making a greater impact in art circles was
Brigitte Bardot spread piecemeal through Revei///e (October 1957)
— the gimmick of make-your-own-lifesize-BB gave it an
understandable edge. | first saw Miss Dougan decorating a wall in
the Smithson’s home. | gained my copy from a student's pinboard
in the Interior Design Department of the Royal College. Lawrence
Alloway gave me the data on her — the photograph had impressed
him sufficiently to regard it as a fileworthy document. It turned up
again recently as one of a group of pin-ups in a painting by Peter
Phillips.

“Miss Dougan’s back, although too good to miss, was not quite
what was needed; a rotation of the figure gave the best of both
worlds plus. The shoulders and breasts, lovingly air-brushed in
cellulose paint, were done with one eye only on Vikky Dougan,
the other on the Petty girl. Her breasts can be seen in two ways.
The cleavage on the backside suggested an apron effect in
negative ; this was nice — an apron, however minute, is fundamental
to the woman-in-the-home image. This area is in shallow relief, 3”
ply sanded down at the lower edge to merge into the panel. The
relief retains some subtleties of modelling which are not perceptible
in the photograph — in fact, they can best be explored by sensitive
fingers rather than the eye.

‘A... detail, [from an advertisement, of an] automatic defrosting

system was photographed, blown up and pasted into the painting,

‘Two other advertisements, [for] the Westinghouse vacuum

cleaner and General Electric small appliances, combined to make
the remaining feature of ‘$he’, the device in the foreground
compounded from toaster and vacuum cleaner. The refrigerator
stands for major appliance, the small mobile units were
incorporated to extend the range to minor. They also provide the
opportunity for a plastic elaboration which gratifies my own
aesthetic needs...

‘The picture was worked on, on and off, for about two and a half
years. Towards the end Herbert Ohl from Ulm visited me in London
bringing a little gift from Germany for the English pop artist, an
advocate of what, at the Hochschule fur Gestaltung, they strangely
termed “the blau-jinx philosophy”. It was a winking plastic eye
 39

and within minutes of its arrival it was Sellotaped into position on

the painting, waiting to be inlaid and carefully sprayed to smear
the rectangular block into the surrounding surface.’

The dotted lines which appear in every version are again a

diagrammatic representation of movement. After an initial
visualisation of the overall composition (36), Hamilton made
studies (37, 38) of different possible types of woman, one
robotic (like another machine), the other soft and welcoming.
In the final painting, the two types were merged. The trumpet-like
element which appears in 36—38 is a component of a washing
machine, which will reappear in 48. In 37, the spiral-form breasts
look back to 28 ; the ‘skirt’ element was sprayed pink in 1969
to efface distracting pentimenti.

In Pin-up (47) Hamilton again openly joined traditional fine art

motif with pop ingredients, by presenting an odalisque image
filtered through the styles of presentation in girlie magazines.
‘Girlie pictures were the source of Pin-up; not only the
sophisticated and often exquisite photographs in Playboy
magazine, but also the most vulgar and unattractive to be found in
such pulp equivalents as Beauty Parade’ (RH in Bibl. A17). The
unifying smooth, mellow colour quality results from Hamilton's
aim of making the whole picture a compendium of flesh tints. The
analogy with similarly-conceived works by Renoir and Pascin was
conscious and Hamilton himself had dealt with the theme as early
as his contour paintings of 1939. But the flesh tones here were
specifically those produced by the photographers (and according
to the colour-printing requirements and limitations) of those
particular magazines — a popular, synthetic and convention-
conscious genre.

All the elements additional to the figure reflect the magazines’

obsession with significant accessories, from particular clothes and
footwearto (again) a mechanical device. As Hamilton had
merged a vacuum cleaner with a toaster in 39 and 40, so here a
telephone (the ‘Princess’ telephone by Bell) and record player
(the ‘Wundergram’) become a single machine; it has a
psychological role in implying the subject's availability — P/n-up is
among other things an essay in types of accessibility (by
technology, by divestment, and by projection into the spectator’s
space). The lightest flesh passages emphasise the pin-up’s reality
as a sunbathing bikini-wearer, the marked change of hue across
the breasts doubling as an allusion to fluctuating abundance of
milk (typically Hamilton pinpoints another functional aspect, thus
making another (semi-)mechanical analogy). The dotted lines
allude to an exuberant leg gesture, and the drawn breasts to other
possibilities of movement.

The first sketch (41) shows the device of breasts in relief, which
develops the idea of relief in $he (40), drawing also on the
ambiguous combination in $he of front and back views. The idea
of relief extends the general approach of the magazines’ deadpan
projection of a picture’s salient features. The incongruously
suspended bra equally extends the magazines’ heavy emphasis on
accessories ; introduced only at a late stage (46). it replaces an 46

actual bra which had detracted from the three-dimensional quality
of the breasts seen alone; it is a collaged photograph by Hamilton
of the garment back-lit.
Glorious Techniculture (49) is the second version of this theme.
The first, a panel 8’x 4’, was exhibited at the International Union
of Architects’ Congress on the South Bank in 1961. Dissatisfied
with it, Hamilton later cut it in half; the lower half, adapted,
became the present work. Accompanied by a critique and detailed
enumeration of sources by Hamilton, the earlier version is
reproduced in Bibl. A11. The sketch (48) shows something of the
setting represented in the earlier version, in which, however, most
of the upper half of the picture was a towering, multi-exposure
photograph of New York skycrapers at night, over which floated
Charlton Heston as Moses seen on the screen of a drive-in movie
theatre, and a characteristic space-creating abstract bar. Also
included (and seen in 48) were the scratchy column at top left
(a photograph of the moving lights of cars in New York at night),
and the pagoda-like motif, seen earlier in 36, 37 and 38 — the
three-ring pump agitator of the Frigidaire washing machine
(which recalled to Hamilton the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright
among others). In the advertisement from which the agitator was
taken, a teddy-bear was being whirled around in a machine wash;
he appears in 48.
Hamilton’s first title for 49 was Antho/ogy. The first of his paintings
not to be unified into a credible illusionistic whole, it also draws on
41
40
a remarkably wide range of visual material. The crisp black line at
top centre ‘is derived from a diagrammatic cross-section of the
General Motors Corvair engine; the diagram shows the cooling
duct with arrows indicating airflow ...’ Inserted into the profile of
a rifle in a space suggesting the interior of a car, is a bride ‘—a
bride for no other reason than that the figure was the right scale to
collage directly and the windswept veil gave an interesting
reinforcement of the active core of the painting... . Guns and
hunting is a branch of Pop mythology — symbol of the West, the
great outdoors; in an urban context violence, gangsterism and one
of the best-loved children’s toys. The two “‘knights’’ result from
sticking a complete cross-section of a car engine down on the
panel and then painting out certain parts [of :below, Nos 119,
120, 151]. What was left turned out to be a stern little robotic
spaceman and another figure jumping oddly to the commands of
the first. The thing the little one is bouncing on is freely taken
from a Corning Glass prismatic lens for airfield illumination’ (RH
in Bibl. A11).
Even this highly diversified work is emphatically linked to
traditional art by the prominence of another Cubist motif— the
guitar — which lies flat on the picture plane. Derived from a Life
magazine photograph, it belonged to pop musician Tony Conn,
whose personal device, his name written in string on the guitar,
Hamilton copied in 47 to accentuate the variety of types of
surface articulation and distortion (like the fragments of the Stars
and Stripes at top right and of a huge poster at top left).
41

AAH! (51) was Hamilton's first non-preparatory work for eight
years to be executed entirely in a traditional medium. It was begun
as a painting of types of differential focus in ‘art’ photography, and
as a treatment of the girl-and-car theme visualised wholly inside
the car. As the work proceeded the sensuous quality of
photographic colour and focus and the metaphorical overtones of
engagement with the instrument panel made the theme erotic, a
culmination of a dominant theme in all Hamilton’s works since
Just what is it. ...? (21) with the exception of G/orious
Techniculture (49).
The automobile aspects of 51 were anticipated by Banham in his
Man, Machine & Motion commentary (p. 14) when he noted
how gear-change had improved ‘from gloved grasp of massive
lever to naked finger-touch on chromium plant-stem’ and car
design ‘from an approximate truce with mechanical forces to a pure
creation of the human will — the driver no longer dresses for
battle, but for the boudoir’. However, the instrument panel in
AAH! is an amalgam of sources, notably the ‘Isher weapon’
(incapable of functioning as an instrument of offence) which is
described in and reproduced on the paperback cover of Van
Vogt’s SF novel ‘The Weapon Shops of Isher’; it is associated here
by Hamilton with the Varaflame cigarette lighter, manufactured by
Ronson (who had been advised, following motivation research,
that they should express in their advertising the sexual symbolism
of flame). The finger at left stresses the analogy with the creation of
51
42
man as represented by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel. The
lip is derived from a photograph by Irving Penn. Hamilton found
that the best way to achieve some of the difficult soft focus effects
was by dabbing paint with cotton wool. Concern with ambiguous
effects of focus in high-style American colour photography is a
direct link at this moment between the work of Hamilton and of
Richard Smith. Other connections are brought to mind by
Hamilton's careful stylisation from lettering in strip comics of the
letters (which rather detach themselves from the scene as a whole)
forming the word ‘AAH !’
The study (50) is a first visualisation of a relationship between
Isher weapon and car dashboard. In 1968, Hamilton added small
circular passages of airbrushed colour to make the drawing
correspond also with the painting’s preoccupation with
differential focus. The small version (64), takes up again
preoccupations of 1952—55 in being an accurate perspective
painting, from a side viewpoint, of the already complete 51. It is
also intended as a pun on the letter ‘R’, as it was made to a
prescribed dimension to occupy the ‘R’ slot in Joe Tilson’s
contributive picture A-Z Box of Friends and Family 1963, in which
contributors were designated by either Christian or surname.
i
“-
PF
&
AL
|i : ‘ase| i
64
 43

Hamilton wrote in Bibl. A17: ‘As was the case with ‘Hers is a lush
situation” the idea for ‘Towards a definitive statement on the
coming trends in men’s wear and accessories’ came directly from
a fragment of text; in this case a headline from a Playboy section
on male fashion. The “Towards” was added to my title because |
hoped to arrive at a definitive statement but never reached a point
where | felt able to drop the tentative prefix.

‘It became immediately apparent that fashion depends upon an

occasion, season, time of day and, most importantly, the area of
activity in which the wearer is involved. A definitive statement
seemed hardly possible without some preliminary investigation
into specific concepts of masculinity.’

The concepts explored were man in a technological environment

(a) ; sport (b) ; and timeless aspects of male beauty (c). All three
areas were combined in (d). Playboy's review of coming trends in
fashion was an annual feature : Hamilton's interest in it corresponds
to that in /ndustria/ Design's annual review of automobile styling
(35). Each of the four interpretations includes an appliance
thought of in a Playboy context as a typical adjunct of the male
personality — transistor radio in (a) ; telephone in (b) ; chest-
expander in (c) ; and juke box in (d).

Of (a) 54, Hamilton wrote in Bibl. A17: ‘Space research was then
throwing up its early heroes, every freckle on Glenn's face was
familiar to the world. J F Kennedy had made his incredibly moving
speech inviting all peoples to join together in the great tasks
awaiting mankind — the exploration of the stars among them’.
Part of a letter Hamilton wrote to the Tate Gallery (1 Jan. 1965)
about 54 throws interesting light on his working procedure: ‘The
date on the back of the picture... was the day that one of the great
American orbits was announced — Shepherd probably . . . the date
was cut from the newspaper and | felt it to be an appropriate
moment to regard the painting as finished ... An overall
composition was derived from the photographs of astronauts, in
the early orbits, transmitted back to earth (top right is an area of
painted TV scan lines). It is unlike these sources in being open and
not at all claustrophobic — there is a god-like elevation in the
treatment which harks back to ancient myths (Mercury-Icarus).
The accessories refer to several related contexts. A fragment of
helmet from a Lucky Strike ad, a racing driver's stitched head guard.
A five-pointed knob, on the right, is as much Sheriff's star as the
control device from which it was taken. Technology at a mundane
level is represented by a transistor radio printed circuit, at a banal
level by a fruit machine dial. Top left is derived from the reflex
system of the Cannon ciné camera. CCCP was added one day in
response to a Russian orbit. . .. The astronaut’s face is that of
President John F Kennedy.

(b) 56 mixes references to racing motoring (the helmet, spattered

windscreen, car-body rivets and upright numeral), American
football (the diagonal numerals) and gambling (the face and
binoculars being from a photograph taken in the New York stock
exchange of a man looking across the exchange at the latest
prices). The surface is modulated actually by relief (helmet) and by
 44

illusion in the contrasting orientations of the numerals. The frames

of 54 and 56 were specially made by Hamilton, to extend the
particular ambience of each picture: that of (a) has an engineered
quality, and that of (b) something of the feel of, for example,
cricket or baseball bats.

Although its theme is ‘timeless aspects of male beauty’, (c) 59 is of

all the series perhaps the most concerned with contemporary
interpretations of the theme. Timelessness is represented by the
simple situation of man in a bare extensive landscape, and by the
employment, to define the left side of the body, of three separate
contours, each taken from a different profile of the Hermes of
Praxiteles as seen in a group of photographs in L/fe magazine.
Here again, as in 28, 47 and 51 (as well as in the pre-pop work),
serial profiles simulate movement, in this case expansion and
contraction assisted by a chest-expanding appliance enlarged from
an advertisement in a muscleman magazine (the photographic
image came from the same source). Typically, pictorial and
diagrammatic functions are doubled, both in these implications of
movement and in the brand of underpants chosen, of which both
the appearance and the advertising stress aspects functional for
56 comfort (indicated by the recurrent Hamilton motifs of dotted and
crossed lines). Twin rivets double as nipples and as parts of the
appliance. The most marked references to the male image of 1962
as seen in Playboy are the stripes across the chest, copied precisely
from the photograph of a model wearing a new tee-shirt or jersey;
the hazy out-of-focus horizon at lower left (emulating horizons
seen behind hard-focus bottles and glasses in ads for drinks like
vodka) ; and the passage of reflecting silver paint which refers to
fashion’s preoccupation with metallic finishes of all sorts. The
painting’s sub-title ‘Adonis in Y-fronts’ is an adaptation of the title
of a current pop-song, ‘Venus in Blue Jeans’.

There were two sketches for 59, both lost; the second (rep: Bibl.
A15) was a purely linear drawing, with consciously neo-classical
overtones, of the Hermes (from Life magazine) on a ground of
sprayed gold (it developed as a direct by-product of a process
employed in 59). 58 is a reconstruction of this work, made in 1970.

61, an amalgam in which elements of all three earlier themes can be

distinguished, basically confirms Hamilton’s continuous thesis of
the interchangeability of modes; no element is included which
cannot be interpreted in terms of the other two fashion fields
explored. As in 59, the stripes are copied directly from a garment
(trunks) being worn in a photograph. The face is that of John
Glenn who made the first American orbital space flight on 20
February 1962. The detail of a jukebox, collaged from Esquire,
shows a machine in Times Square, New York, the only juke box
known to Hamilton in which the selection was of classical music.
Hamilton said that 61 (by contrast with 54, 56 and 59) ‘may be
hung in any orientation (a nul gravity picture). One view,
horizontal with the head on the right, is less favoured’. (Bibl. A17)

60, a study for 61, had for some time been abandoned incomplete
when, on President Kennedy's death, Hamilton added to it the Stars
& Stripes taken from a photograph of the lying-in-state.
 45

Wy
 46

All Hamilton’s works since 1956 had been pictorially composite :

they are highly unified schemes, very openly constructed, however,
from a multiplicity of distinct ingredients. Though there will be
notable exceptions, Hamilton is very much concerned from 1963
onwards with producing art works in which there is minimal
interference with the pre-existing integrity of the basic pictorial
scheme, however much he may manipulate its detailed facture. His
work thus includes ‘self-contained’ images such as head-and-
shoulders (68, 92) and a single building (101 et seq) ; objects
transposed intact with no immediately visible interference except ®
change of scale and medium (69, 90, 118, 135) ; images
determined merely by choosing where to crop a pre-existing Pt \
photograph, after which the resulting ‘seamless’ field of marks is “t \
changed only by accentuating its inherent qualities (96, 97, 98, se
100) ; and works which, however fragmentary, include only \%
marks that adhere strictly to a pre-selected scheme (65, 71). To a a
the existing rich ambiguity of a work’s internal relationships is thus
added an increased ambiguity in the relationship between the ee ee
work of art and its sources.

The drawing Five Tyres abandoned (65) and the related print (71)
recapitulate Hamilton’s perspective and Man, Machine &
Motion-type preoccupations and employ an image from popular
culture. The source was an advertisement which presented a brief
history of the development of the car tyre by showing five tyres
lined up in chronological order, with the date of each printed on
its photograph in an oval panel. The principal variation from tyre to
tyre was in the patterning of the treads, which included rings, = :
discs and zig-zags — specific visual forms determined, as in so moms
much of Hamilton’s work, by functional requirements. Hamilton’s
intention was to make a perspective construction showing the
disposition of the five circular treads in space, and from this to
Ne
ee
Re
make a line block from which to make a blind relief print in which
the treads would have been embossed on the paper in relief. In his
earlier involvement with perspective Hamilton had set steadily
more complex problems, as he would also do in 1965-66 (see
below, 101 et seq.). In 65 the complexity of determining the
relationships on curves was however so great in perspective
terms and the necessary work so laborious that he abandoned it; it
becomes yet another work intimating the presence of forms not
actually seen. 71 was constructed from a partial tracing of the
drawing, different parts of which are distinguished, for ease of
legibility, by different colours. Part of a tyre from a current
advertisement was enlarged to fit the perspective schema, and
inserted at lower right as a mark of completion.
47
 48

|
Both 69 and 70 were made in direct reaction to Hamilton's first © 5% s%e%o% ee” @,°,*
visit to the United States in autumn 1963. They are also ironical
fusions of the twin concerns — pop and perception — of Hamilton’s © °° osteo” @.°,°
contribution to This is Tomorrow, influenced by the mass of e@eee0e0 eM e@ @ @
developments (especially American ones) in both directions in the ® @ ©6060 @ © Meee
intervening eight years. ®@ @ ¢ eeeeeoeeee0e8
ye >eeeeee 0606 ®@
As regards pop, Hamilton wrote that one result of his US visit was
©.°.°% ee
gaining ‘a first-hand knowledge of the work of such painters as eee eo W's 00 0 8 68 8 8 8 8 8
Warhol, Lichtenstein, Dine, Rosenquist and Oldenburg. The thing eeeeeseseoeeeeeee@ @
eeeoeoeooeoeoeeeeoee eee @
that impressed me was their throwaway attitude to Art...” (Bibl.
eeeeoeo eCeoeoeseseeeeoe @
A17). 69 is a straight reproduction of a lapel button Hamilton © oP ete et ete over ete oretere®
bought in Pacific Ocean Park (initials spell ‘POP’) in Venice, Los
Angeles. Symbolising ‘much of what | enjoyed in experiencing the ®eee eee ooeeoe ee eee
@ @ ©
States,... also... that which | most admired in American art, its oon e sles leet letele ts OO
audacity and wit’ (Ibid.), it represented an epiphany in Joyce’s
sense of a sudden moment of insight experienced in an otherwise @@e686808686682®e ® @
unexceptional setting (commonplace artefact) or sequence of ©®@eeeeeeeee @ )
events. In the idea of gift-giving, its erotic theme has a distant et ee a4 ry .
connection with an aspect of the scriptural Epiphany. 70 is an eeeeeeooeoeeoeoeoeeoeesd
enlarged detail (depicting part of the head of a weeping girl) of
ihe Lichtenstein reproduced on the poster for his exhibition at Leo 70
Castelli Gallery, New York, September—October 1963. ‘Itsseemed
only reasonable’, Hamilton wrote, ‘to take the serial proGess to its
logical conclusion and make an art work from a piece ofa.
Lichtenstein art work from a piece of comic strip’ (Ibid.).

70 reproduces the exact colours of its source. 69 made the existing

complementary colours — orange and blue — closer in tone, to “@.
exaggerate the optical shimmer. Both works capitalise ironically
upon the preoccupation (usually expressed, however, in Somewhat
rarefied abstract terms) then beginning to rage throughout the
international art world, with optical illusion in art. 69 has
connections also, in particular, not only with Duchamp’s concept
Ve \poy
of readymades, but also with his optically F/uttering hearts 1936 ff F
lJ
—
(the specific purpose of Hamilton's US visit had been to see, at the
Pasadena Art Museum, the first-ever Duchamp retrospective).
Black and white photographs of 69 travesty the tonal relationship
between blue lettering and orange ground; some have the effect,
as here, of actually reversing the experience of the naked eye.

ce
] S)

66 67
 49

Portrait of Hugh Gaitskell as a Famous Monster of Filmland (68) work of Pau! Nash, Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland). The
was motivated partly internally (in Hamiiton’s systematic head terminates abruptly across the forehead in reference to
treatment of themes) and partly in reaction to outside comment. another film still of a man-monster, which shows the effects of a
Film monsters were a basic category of popular imagery to add to brain-graft at this point.
car and clothes styling and pin-ups (Hamilton had already treated
the theme obliquely in 28 and in display at This is Tomorrow). As 66, an initial visualisation, introduces the bloodshot eyeball motif,
these earlier paintings had been widely misinterpreted as satirical derived from a film still. 67 started as a study to test out the effects
in intention (when Hamilton’s approach to his subject-matter of relief (suggested by the monster’s mask) and of an overall
actually ranged from the detachedly analytical to the admiring), metallic base which should gleam through the oil paint. A copper
Hamilton grew interested in the problem of what form a truly priming proved so unsatisfactory as a base that 67 was developed
satirical painting might take. Thus an image of Claude Rains made as a relief in its own right. Chance alterations of mood suggested in
up as the Phantom of the Opera, taken from the cover of Famous the face according to the backgrounds glimpsed through the eye
Monsters of Filmland No 10, came to be merged with a newspaper holes led Hamilton to attach a motorised aluminium disc (1 rpm)
photograph of Hugh Gaitskell (1906—1963 ; Leader of the British behind the relief with collage fragments arranged in a circle. Some
Labour Party and of HM Opposition, 1955-1963). Hamilton has of these are pieces of flat single colour, others are photographic
explained the choice of Gaitskell as a target for satire : ‘In putting to (one is of Gaitskell’s successor as leader of the Labour Party,
myself the question ‘what angers you most now ?” | found that the Harold Wilson).
answer was Hugh Gaitskell. Perhaps it isn’t easy to understand,
with so much time intervening, how Hugh Gaitskell could emerge
as the prime subject of my disapproval, for my political inclination
is to the left, radical, non-party if vociferous and demonstrative.
Gaitskell at the conception of the painting ... had been for seven
years [leading] opposition to Tory government. [He] seemed to
me to dilute constructive opposition to policies that were leading
us steadily to perdition but most importantly | regarded him,
personally, as the main obstacle to adoption by the Labour Party of
a reasonable nuclear policy at a time when the will of a majority
within the Labour movement in Britain had been expressed in
condemnation of our continuing nuclear attachment. Gaitskell’s
role was all the more sinister because he was leader of the left —
because he was powerfully p!aced to fight his left and because he
did so from moral conviction and not for political or economic
expediency.

‘... |began, with the help of my wife, to collect press photographs

of Gaitskell ... My wife died in a car accident late in 62 ; three
months later Gaitskell died. We were told what a great man he had
been... The painting... was a subject that my wife felt deeply
about and, in a way, she had generated it ; for her, political
philosophy was something to be acted upon, so there were good
reasons for suppressing any squeamishness that Gaitskell’s death
might have occasioned...’ (Bibl. A19).

The painting proved extremely difficult to execute in such a way as

to conform to Hamilton’s predetermined aim of combining a
recognisable likeness of Gaitskell with a violent, expressionistic
handling of paint, a mode of application unfamiliar to him. Several
studies were destroyed, and it was this problem which led
Hamilton to use a photographic enlargement of Gaitskell’s head as
the painting’s ground, thus anticipating major aspects of his
subsequent development. The photographic base also helped
determine the paint quality, which Hamilton considered not
passionate, as originally intended, but suitably repulsive, its alien
character enhanced by a deliberately lurid colour range. (The
modelled effects and the abundant horns, protrusions and
openings make 68 curiously similar in outward ways to certain
68

In the two /nterior paintings, 80 and 81, and their ancillary works,
Hamilton pushes the use of intuition, allusion and ambiguity to
new extremes. He wrote in 1964: ‘A still from a forties’ movie
called ‘‘Shockproof” had a fascination that | spent some time
analysing. Everything in the photograph converged on a girl ina
“new look” coat who stared out slightly to the right of camera. A
very wide angle lens must have been used because the perspective
seemed distorted, but the disquiet of the scene was due to two
other factors. It was a film set, not a real room, so wall surfaces
were not explicitly conjoined ; and the lighting came from several
different sources. Since the scale of the room had not become
unreasonably enlarged, as one might expect from the use of a wide
angle lens, it could be assumed that false perspective had been
introduced to counteract its effect yet the foreground remained
emphatically close and the recession extreme. All this contributed
more to the foreboding atmosphere than the casually observed
body lying on the floor partially concealed by a desk’ (Bibl. A17).
All the evidence suggests that the ‘still’ is not taken from the film as
projected but is a carefully-arranged studio photograph, intended
to convey in a single exposure much more of the film’s plot and
mood than would one split-second image taken from the action.
As in his earlier examination of car and clothes styling, Hamilton
was responding here to another example of ultra-sophisticated
professional expertise, aimed at a mass market (‘“Shockproof” was
only a B film though scripted by Samuel Fuller and directed by
Douglas Sirk) but permeated by an almost inbred connoisseurship
of up-to-the-minute taste developments in interior design ; the
period flavour of the still, placing it in a very narrow time-span of
the late-forties, is intense.
The still therefore attracted Hamilton initially by the multiplicity of
the layers of experience it suggested. Its magic was very much
bound up with the strange ways in which the nature of the space
shown and the behaviour of the central figure drew the spectator
into the picture’s space and mood. ‘There is one painting which
| always think of as an epiphany in [the] Joycean sense... [the]
Van Eyck portrait of the Arnolfini... where the man and the woman
stare out... blankly and blandly, and they're decked out in strange
garments and there's a mirror behind them and a rather strange
interior, strange in the sense that it is not of our time... Whenever
I've looked at that picture I’ve had this feeling that we’re looking at
something of momentous significance... The whole of life is
suddenly crystallised in that moment when these two people face
you across not only a void of space, but a void of time. In the
/nterior paintings [the] woman in the picture . . . is also slightly
removed in time... Fifteen years in Van Eyck’s period wouldn't
mean very much, but fifteen years now is a tremendous gulf... |
was quite interested in that sense of period [on] an accelerating
scale’ (Bibl. A27).
Hamilton added that, led by the film still, he was once more ‘very
much concerned with perspective... The...three collage...
studies ... were attempts to explore how wild the perspective
relationships could be, and yet still be legible as aspace... |
discovered that there were practically no limits — that you could
50
produce any number of wall-like faces in relationship to one
another and it would somehow provide a... natural kind of space,
so long as there was some kind of furnishing in it, some kind of
human being [to give] it scale. . . [| took] the same elements in
each case... [and said] | will always have an opening into
another space. That was an essential ingredient. There was a bit of
foreground furniture. Something had to be near, and. ..1! was
trying... always to establish the relationship of the external
observer to the scene. If you provide something that’s very close in
a picture it somehow puts you, the observer, in the picture — you
look over this thing into the scene’ (Ibid.).
In the two completed /nter/or paintings, the woman represented is
Patricia Knight (co-star in ‘Shockproof’ with Cornel Wilde) ;her
image is transferred photographically from the still. In each of the
collage studies (72, 73, 74), a different woman appears. Hamilton
carefully chose these collaged images to avoid particular or
self-conscious associations such as photographs of fashion
models or the famous would have produced. Each woman had to
be engaged in some activity with dramatic implications, but in
such a way as to fit neutrally into the new context. Further control
factors were that the woman must be both young and reproduced
to an appropriate scale.
The woman in 72 was originally seen in an advertisement,
admiring the action of a washing machine (cf: 40). The setting of
this study, references to which occur in 80 and 81, is the house
interior of the daughter of a major Impressionist painter, taken from
magazine photographs. This interior included an easel, which can
be glimpsed in 72. On the easel, in place of a painting, Hamilton
has interposed a photograph of a television set, its arbitrary
insertion justified by the multi-serviceable function of an easel,
and then carried over into 73, 80 and 81 without the easel itself.
The events seen on the television screen thus become both part
of the scene and independent of it — an artificial interpolation, like
so much else.
The girl in 73, startlingly incongruously lit in accordance with the
multiple lighting of the ‘Shockproof’ source, was lying down in her
earlier context. The octagonal symbol on the desk is that of the
Chase Manhattan Bank. The girl in 74 was originally leading a
horse: here she is seen walking towards part of the late 1950s
extension of the School of Architecture at Cambridge, England, by
Colin St John Wilson and Alex Hardy.
Having established the desired general ambience, Hamilton
worked on two of the most vital components of the scene. The
drawing of the desk (75), on a purchased printed perspective grid,
uses a representation of empty three-dimensional space into
which, as into a box (or room) anything may be inserted. 76 was
painted on a photographic enlargement of 75. The lurid paint
passage at lower left stands for the presence behind the desk in the
still of the corpse of the man whom Patricia Knight has just shot;
the hard-edge passages behind the desk are in Mondrianesque
primaries intended to contradict sharply the already peculiar
perspective. The drawer (its wood texture in 76 partly produced by
 51

‘Fablon’ self-adhesive plastic sheeting) and the telephone (here

transparent, from a Bell ad) are elements which Hamilton, who
did not see ‘Shockproof' till 1968, correctly sensed to be crucial in
the film’s narrative. They both imply connection with the world
outside the picture — the telephone doing so as in 47, and the
drawer working like a relief projection into the spectator’s own
space. 7/7, 78 and 79 are silkscreen printings in black on paper
prepared with a roughly oil-painted colouring, different in each
case ; in 80 and 81, Patricia Knight was however silkscreened
without the underpainting of colour.

In /nterior /(80) a piece of real mirror, seen beyond Patricia Knight,

reflects back the spectator’s space, as does the polished
chair-back in 81. At upper right is included a photograph of 80 at
an earlier stage ; as did re Nude (18) in other ways, the painting
tells the story of its own making. The passage between this and
the front of the desk is typical of Hamilton’s immediate
juxtapositions of different visual devices (see discussion of 28).
Beside the vase of flowers, the photographic base is reinforced in
increasing degrees until the paint marks become fully autonomous.
Beneath this passage appears a curving diagrammatic line,
recalling one in 49 (on which in 1964 Hamilton was still working),
and actually marking the previous presence on the photographic
base of a sofa, which Hamilton cut around to remove (this device
first occurs in 72). Beneath this, what reads at first as a piece of
trompe I’oeil painting is a real pencil, pointing towards the focus
of attention.

Part of a text, largely by Hamilton, which was published in the

Tate Gallery Report for 1967-68, gives fuller documentation of the
sources of /nterior // and of Hamilton’s working methods :

‘Unable to include ‘Interior |” in his 1964 exhibition because it was

abroad, Hamilton undertook a second “‘Interior”’ painting. He
wrote (letter of 21 June 1968), “| would probably have made the
second version anyway because | was slightly disturbed by the
way the first painting had been pushed by its sources into a
period atmosphere. Since most of the available interior collage
material in magazines like ‘House and Garden’ is Mayfair interior
decorators stuff it became a bit overloaded in that direction...

“| was very conscious of the fact that any interior is a set of

anachronisms, a museum. The more ‘modern’ treatment of
Interior II tries to press home this point...

“A collection of quite different images attain a common identity by

the way they contribute to a group. | tried to provide the same type
of elements in each version though they are not identical. A curtain
(so much in the foreground that it puts the spectator outside the
interior) helps to make the spectator’s position illicit —a Peeping
Tom: this is another reason why the camera must not be felt by the
occupant... There is a compositional unity in that the figure is
placed at the visual centre. The carpet (or desk) acts like an arrow
in directing attention. Although there is no consistent vanishing
point there is a persistent tendency for lines to converge on the
figure. In the Shockproof still the desk partially hides the body of
 52

a man Patricia Knight has just killed in a struggle for a gun. The
dramatic role of the dead man is transferred to the lurid colour
treatment of the carpet...

“The Eames ‘la Fonda’ chair was taken from the Hille catalogue of
the Herman Miller collection. Its seat, shaped from 3” aluminium,
was upholstered with carved balsa wood painted and flocked
before fixing. The legs are a straight photographic enlargement.

“An electric wall socket was a late addition which | like to think of
as a metaphysical solution to a compositional problem. Interior II
seemed a little empty without the desk and | tried several objects
that might occupy the central position, everything was too
emphatic and contrived — | a!most settled for an electric fire, but
suddenly the socket became enough. It suggested that any 75
appliance might be plugged in — psychologically it is big but
without being too dominant visually. It was drawn from a socket
at home; trompe I’oeil because | wanted it to seem real enough to
imply the possibility of an appliance.

“The view into another room, a feature common to the whole

group, is most elaborate in Interior Il. Some of the material is
collage from a colour shot of Larry Rivers’s studio in Esquire.
There are stacks of pictures against the wall (I added in a piece of
blue paper to make an Yves Klein). Some furniture and a mirror
in this other room are painted in imitation of collage. The
dribbled paint around the chair affirms the [essentially] pigment
nature of that illusion game. The black strip is a token for
abstraction, a mark that cannot get absorbed into the perspective
convention so it lies on the surface. It was the last addition to the
painting in an attempt to satisfy a slightly desperate urge to
disrupt the equanimity of the composition...”

‘The fragment of an interior at top right attracted Hamilton ‘‘by

the dramatically low angle shot up into the ceiling. It was an
extreme view of an interior and absurdly unrelated to the many
perspective viewpoints in the paintings’. The television set was
“... derived from a brochure. The TV theme originated from a triplet
advertisement showing three varied wood treatments of the same
set.’ Two of these were used directly in the collaged studies.

“Appearing on the television screen is a frame from Abraham

Zapruder’s colour film of the assassination of John F Kennedy on
22 November 1963. It ‘serves a theatrical purpose... From the
start the Shockproof still had appeared ominous — perhaps partly
due to the remoteness of the girl from the body on the floor.
Putting the John Kennedy assassination on the television screen in
such a position that the occupant of the room doesn't see it,
brought in an element of blatant drama as an aside, offstage,
unnoticed. ‘One must remember that although a public figure
will assume a strong role in the narrative of a painting and can
affect subsequent action in it, the availability of material for
collage purposes prejudices the subject matter in favour of public
figures. At the time | used Kennedy his was the image most
frequently appearing in the magazines | scoured for collage — his
would be the most likely head to fit the bill even on a purely
 DS

statistical basis’. (All quotations in last two paragraphs from

letter of 21 June 1968).’

As in Chromatic spiral (7), one element (the figure of Patricia

Knight), placed first in the picture, compelled all subsequent
elements to relate to it (here primarily for psychological reasons).
The theme of firearms (their use is documented in 81 by the
Shockproof material and the mode of Kennedy’s murder) is
frequent in Hamilton’s work around now (they appear in both 49
and 51). The idea of aggression is central in later works like 86 and
132 et seq).

The silkscreen (83) is a reversed image of 72; mere reversal and

colour-change gives a quite autonomous mood. 84, executed on
a perspective chart with the trade name ‘Magic Carpets’ (see also
75), was a later exercise and not a study. The idea was to insert
collage elements which would correspond convincingly to the
space the chart proposed. Already-existing images at bottom and
top left were retained, again to make pictures within a picture. The
girl (cliché housewife image) seen through a distinct intervening
medium is conceptually a paradigm of Hamilton’s work from
earliest days.
54
I)
 56

Photography

Almost all Hamilton’s exhibitions, whether as painter or (as with

Growth & Form or This is Tomorrow) working in a wider context,
had conveniently marked a break between phases of his work.
His eight-year retrospective at the Hanover Gallery in 1964
conforms to this pattern. From immediately after the last works
shown there (the /nter/or series), a direct engagement with
photography becomes a centra! rather than contributory subject of
his work.

As already shown, photography had by 1964 a long history in his

production, ranging from its generative role in both the exhibition
and the paintings around ‘Growth & Form’, to the interpretations
of Muybridge, the almost entire construction of Just what /s it

principal theme, and the Ga/tske// portrait painted entirely on a

photograph. Now, however, the scrutiny of photographs is
intensified.

The crucial document on photography and Hamilton's painting

after 1964 is his own long and lucid essay in Bibl. A29. Once
again a marked apparent change (or in this case increased
emphasis) is actually the logical outcome of his preceding work.
For many years this had shown obsession with visible or invisible
but usually man-devised factors which come between the subject
in its original or elemental state and the image that we see.
Preoccupation with demonstrating how we see what we see had
even led him repeatedly to insert into his own paintings (the latest
stage in the chain of transmutations, as well as complete entities
starting from nothing) open assertions of their means of
construction and of illusion. Photographs provided a rich field for
such attention. Like others at this time (see above, pp. 46-48),
Hamilton was tending to simplify his imagery, in the sense not only
of individually less diversified compositions, but also of reduced
overt interference with a subject's pre-existing appearance. For
this, photographs, which are meant to be simply reproduced, were
the ideal material — especially since, running in parallel with
Hamilton’s revelation of devices, was his equal obsession with
sustaining and elaborating amb/guity. That photographs are ideal
for this purpose, too, is shown by Hamilton’s statement
(i!luminating also on his earlier work) that ‘Painting has long been
concerned with the paradox of informing about a
multi-dimensional world on the limited dimensionality of a
canvas. Assimilating photography into the domain of paradox,
incorporating it into the philosophical contradictions of art is as
much my concern as embracing its alluring potential as media’
(Bibl. A29).

As usual, Hamilton’s approach was systematic and analytical. As

he was continuing to do with pop imagery, he asked how
photography as generally experienced broke down into categories
and then dealt with subdivisions of high style photography (86,
90, 101 et seq, 155 et seq) ; with his own photographs as the work
of art (149) ; and with the commonplace photography of holiday

postcards (94 et seq), amateur snaps (141) and flashbulb
photo-journalism (132 et seq). He asked whether clear
boundaries exist beyond which a photograph ceases to fulfil its
function of communicating information, and submitted
photographs to extreme enlargement (97), near-obliteration
(119, 120) and negative-reversal (125, 127). Equally vitally, in a
field where the intended image itself is customarily read as a
photograph’s only texture, he scrutinised the facture of the
emulsion itself. These researches, the last two in particular,
detached though they may sound, are of essentially imaginative
motivation. As Hamilton has stated ‘The fascination that
photographs hold for me lies in [the] allusive power of the
camera’s imagery... | marvel that marks and shapes, simple or
complex, have the capacity to enlarge consciousness, can allude
back to an ever-widening history of mankind, can force emotional
responses as weil as aesthetic ones and permit both internal and
external associations to germinate the imagination of the
spectator’ (Ibid).
88
57
My Marilyn (86), the work in which Hamilton's involvement with
photographs is first fully seen, shows a concern with the power of
the simplest most primitive marks — here ticks and crosses, crudely
applied. Much of the painting's force derives from the quality and
implications of their juxtaposition with the sophisticated marks of a
skilled photographer and with the affecting image of a beautiful
and unhappy girl.
Hamilton explained in Bibl. A24 how ‘Marilyn Monroe demanded
that the results of photographic sessions be submitted to her for
vetting before publication. She made indications, brutally and
beautifully in conflict with the image, on proofs or transparencies
to give approval or reject ;or suggestions for retouching that might
make it acceptable. After her death some were published with her
markings — a batch by Bert Stern in Eros, others [including those
used in (86) after British publication in Town magazine, November
1962] by George Barris. The aggressive obliteration of her own
image has a self-destructive implication that made her death all the
more poignant; there is also a fortuitous narcissism for the
negating cross is also the childish symbol for a kiss. My Marilyn
starts with her signs and elaborates the graphic possibilities these
suggest.’
Marilyn’s marks were made by a variety of instruments and media,
among them (by incision) nail-file or similar, and lipstick ;they
included symbols, diagrams and written words. The marked
photographs were thus a rich illustration in themselves of
media-mixture and the juxtaposition of types of visual
communication, long-established themes of Hamilton’s own.
(Also, they set up a strange autonomous dialogue — between
Marilyn’s crosses, the near-geometrical seaweed and the rectangle
of each exposure’s frame; and between her arrow and those
printed on the negative). Hamilton’s developments of these
suggestions include tearing the photographic print (top right, 85)
contrasting the colours of marks and the hardness of edges, actual
removal of Marilyn’s image, introduction by collage of foreign
images, development of marks into extended passages of painterly
abstraction, and the domination of individual frames by sharply
distinct painting styles — My Marilyn almost reads like a
contributive picture (see 64, above), its compartments filled with
work by de Kooning, Wesselman, and Peter Blake, among others.
The spots obscuring the figure at bottom left cross-refer to Bert
Stern’s photographs of Marilyn with a spotted veil. In addition,
Hamilton adds distorting marks inherent in the photographic
process itself, and (like professional photographs and like Marilyn
in suppressing aspects of herself) falsifies fundamentally the facts
conveyed on the original exposure, for example by quietly altering
the horizon line, and thus the context in which the action occurs.
At lower right (the enlargement of the frame Marilyn selected),
after all these criticisms, interventions, refinements and evasions,
suddenly (as in life) Marilyn is no longer there.
In requiring to be read laterally and by intricate cross-reference, My
Marilyn is a departure from Hamilton's usual creation in any picture
of one (however weirdly) unified perspective. Here he complicates
the existing perspective shift from one exposure to the next. All
 58

three versions derive from the basic scheme in 85, of six 10” x 8”
photographic prints elaborating the information given in the
central print in the lower row;; its four frames are printed larger at
top left, and enlarged individually to fill the remaining four spaces.
The principle of interference with given information is furthest
elaborated in the painting, to the point where one’s understanding
of the fact that repetition is taking place is itself confused. The
screenprint 88 was made from 85 by entirely photographic means,
purposely avoiding hand marks but encouraging the photographic
process to make its own interventions in several ways, including an
abstract mottled effect from a previously-discarded
wrongly-exposed piece of process material added to give surface
modulation. Negative reversal, which would later be central in 127,
occurs at two points.
 oy)

90

Stil/-life (90) explores the opposite extreme of intervention with a fold-out was fully opened. Only two types of mark are made, both
photographic print, by adding marks as imperceptible as possible of which minimise the evidence of the artist's hand. Colour is
and, unlike Marilyn’s, in accord with the feeling of the original. sprayed onto the background by airbrush and the spelling of the
Hamilton wrote of 90: ‘It is a “ready-made”, or an ‘assisted house-name Braun is anglicised (by collage in 89, transferred
ready-made” in the Duchamp sense. Whereas Duchamp’s photographically to 90). The mood of the photograph is quiet and
ready-mades were chosen with a deliberate avoidance of concern calm; Hamilton altered the spelling to BROWN for ‘poetic’ reasons
for the aesthetic merit of the object chosen, St///-/ife takes a highly impelled by the word’s sound and not its meaning.
stylised photograph of an example of high style in consumer goods
to pose the question ‘‘does the neutrality of Duchamp, or the
studied banality of subject matter in most American Pop,
significantly exclude those products of mass culture classed as
‘good design’ from our consideration ?” ’ (Bibl. A29).

Sti/!-life reproduces part of a photograph from a Braun catalogue

of electrical appliances ;Hamilton shows one corner of a portable
Combination Grill. Although the whole of this Grill was shown in
the catalogue, it was printed as a fold-out, and Hamilton
reproduces the complete imagery seen on a whole page before the
 60

Mass-circulation American illustrated magazines had long been a

chief source of Hamilton’s and he now integrated himself with
them by sketching his own portrait (from life, in a mirror) in the
given lettered rectangular frame of the cover of 7/me magazine,
which still in the 1960s, despite being illustrated by photographs,
usually reserved its cover for hand-drawn portraits of the famous.
91 and 92 were done on printed layout sheets provided by 7/me for
use by its cover artists. 92 was an attempt to approximate to the
Time style of draughtsmanship. It was reproduced in 93 with the
diagonal strip at top left customary on 7/me covers (in which
major contents of each issue are highlighted). In connecting with
the print’s wide border, this strip helps assert the character of the
whole print as a flat sheet, and emphasises that no part of the sheet
is any less vital to the print than any other. 93 is the first print in
which Hamilton makes use of the border as a positive element in ENCRINON
the whole work. i

be Sar peas
RICHARD >
HAMILTON
b a

92 91 93
 61

94 and 96 are painted black and white photographic enlargements

from a coloured postcard of a beach scene at Whitley Bay,
Northumberland. In making the Gaitskell portrait (68), and his
Lichtenstein print (70), Hamilton had realised the value of the field
of half-tone dots which enlargement makes visible, and 70 had
also shown that to crop a pre-existing image is often as positive an
act of creation of an entirely new and distinct image as is drawing
from scratch. Hamilton became convinced that just as several
earlier landscape painters surveying the same scene could make of
ita Constable, a Boudin or a Monet, so, through photographic and
manual manipulation, could a painter develop an equally individual
result from a postcard. Any source, whether ‘natural’ or man-made
was a bit of the world from which the artist could extract virtually
anything he wished. 94 and 96 are at once transparently close to
their source and barely identifiable with it. The screen, invisible in
the source, becomes extremely prominent, while the figures are
transformed into abstract painterly blobs and smudges, their
character as pigment wilfully stressed by the way they are painted.
In making these marks, Hamilton has not followed the exact
configurations in the source (which, looked at with the naked eye,
appear a /iteral record of human figures, and seen through a
magnifying glass are perceived to be crude superimpositions by
hand of dabs of colour which often either do not register or do not
in any way correspond with the figures photographed). He has
made marks which signify the human figure as closely or as
distantly as these ; on an increased scale their role is more

extraordinary. It is remarkable how, when 96 is seen from afar,
these marks persist in communicating only the idea of people. For
seen from anything like close to, 96 reads as a series of eccentric
and always precise painted shapes — hair-thin lines, miniscule
coloured spots, forms which are perceived in t/me because they
merge tonally with the almost geometrically-bisected pink and
blue ground, and loose gestural hazes of transparent white paint.
One almost concludes that the screen (actually the one element
which corresponds to the earlier state) is a delicate and superfluous
veil, paradoxically in front of the coloured imagery, whose removal
would reveal in full detail a scattered abstract with dimly-perceived
internal relationships.
95, though much more explicit, was again arbitrarily overpainted as
by a postcard reinforcer. The base is an enlargement of a
photograph of the same beach seen in 94 and 96, taken by
Hamilton on a less sunny day ; the two figures at left are Rita
Donagh and Mark Lancaster.
97 is an enlarged and altered detail of a (non-coloured) postcard of
another scene on the same beach at Whitley Bay. The postcard was
in photographically printed emulsion rather than half-tone,
permitting much greater enlargement. Intrigued by the persistence
with which strange marks, however tenuous their connection with
the figure, suggested the human image, Hamilton decided to
continue enlarging to the point where this type of legibility broke
down. 97 represents the knife-edge border between legibility and
62
illegibility. The figures at the bottom, though like mere fragments of
an Arp or a Pasmore, still imply specific ages, activities and human
relationships, while towards the top figurative coherence has
dissolved. Hamilton’s additions are entirely free, yet often
(particularly the gesticulating white figure at top left), suggest the
human figure more strongly than do its visual remains. Enlarged,
the emulsion yields passages of hard outlines and melting
vagueness: Hamilton’s marks, ranging from high gloss,
hard-edged, to a cluster of misty airbrushed specks, extend these
possibilities to both extremes.
The photoprint (128) is in a relatively small edition because some
of Hamilton’s additions were applied by hand individually to each
sheet (they include paint spattered, airbrushed, and applied in a
blob in noticeable relief ;and stationers’ adhesive ring
reinforcements and marker-discs). The aim in these additions was
to range from the extreme of unobtrusive concordance with the
photographic image to that of alien intrusion and of the
diagrammatic. The ring reinforcements hark back curiously to the
vanishing points of fifteen years before.
In the collaborative version with Diter Rot (139), Hamilton sent
Rot a copy of the 128 photograph without the applied additions.
He told Rot he would apply these after receiving the print back,
but gave no clue as to their nature. Rot was asked to augment the
print as seen in whatever way he chose. On its return, Hamilton
simply made the predetermined additions, some of which fell on
 63

NZS e395 1150


and others off Rot’s heavy pigment. Rot’s self-restrictions to black
and white and to the already-existing outlines were entirely free
choices.
140 was the eventual outcome of a request from William Copley on
behalf of the Letter Edged in Black Press, New York, for a
contribution to the magazine SMS (each issue of which took the
form of a loose accumulation of printed works by many invited
artists). Published in SWS, No 1, February 1968, Hamilton's
contribution was a sepia reproduction, measuring 5” « 8”, of the
original postcard source of 97, with, as in 140, a central flap of a
type common in seaside postcards (though the Whitley Bay card
had no flap), and an eight-sheet black-and-white pull-out beneath
the flap. 140 is an enlargement of this idea, conceived as the
prototype for a multiple, the scheme for which was abandoned
when the technical problems involved were seen to be too great. It
differs from the SMS version in being entirely in black and white, in
having, as originally intended, scalloped edges and a rectangular
flap, and in that the first appearance of the subject of the final
image occurs there on and in 140 off the flap. Hamilton’s use of the
pull-out principle is unusual. Instead of his images roving around
the area generally symbolised in the cover view, they focus
inward on the initial view with increasing concentration. They
make literal the process by which the final image (and 97) was
produced, for the degree of enlargement required necessitated
progressive stages of enlargement. They are also a life-line
between the last frame and its full legibility as a mother-image.
100
64
The original title of the work was the triple-entendre 7o Mother
(misquoted twice in SWS as Mother and For Mother, both of
which change and impoverish the meaning). The undeviating
approach towards the subject along a straight line, involving serial
enlargement, parallels the process in re Vude (18).
The final version (150) was made for reproduction on the cover of
Studio International, March 1969, where it extended over both
front and back covers and the spine. Unable to make as powerfully
there the distinctions between different pigments which had been
a key point in 97, 128 and 139, Hamilton strengthened the theme
of different ways of giving information by wiiting in the identities of
both materials and — with imagined names — people (the absurd
interchangeability of material and image thus appearing still more
clearly). Moreover just as they had been with paint in 97 and 128,
so here the people are made as real by words as by their direct
photographic images.
In 100, Hamilton turned the principle of Whitley Bay to a cliché
urban postcard scene (and ideal subject of the photo-tinter). The
detail chosen for elaboration gives this painting a quite distinct
character, since visually it is an uneven distribution of elements,
massive and speck-like, geometrical and fluid, isolated and
clumped. There is still greater room for ambiguity and, in line with
the photo-tinter’s crude exaggerations, a sharper range of bolder
colour. Also Hamilton has, more fully than in 96, ‘embedded’ the
printed screen into his semi-invented imagery ; here it augments

the wavering character of all the forms, and also, its spotted
texture read against the rather larger, more widely spaced ‘pigeon,’
spots, it plays an active role in confounding any constant
illusionistic reading. The study (99), which omits any reference to
the screen, is another literalisation of the type of near-abstract
autonomy implicit in the usual type of postcard retouching.
The starting point of Landscape (98) was a colour postcard of the
South Downs, a real photograph to which colour had been
individually hand-applied to each example sold, (‘just a sheer
abandoned dabbing on of tints in arbitrary haste’ - RH). No two
cards bore exactly the same marks. Seeking to simulate the
retouchers’ approach, Hamilton had enlarged not the postcard
itself but the negative of the original aerial photograph, which,
with some trouble, he unearthed. ‘| began to apply the kind of
markings that were possible on the photograph, starting with [a]
kind of loose filling in of fields... and then adding... all sorts of
other marks at every possible level of interpretation. There were
marks that had no relationship at all to the photograph, which
were more like abstract art, Abstract Expressionist marks even,
and others... were... an imperceptible tinting ... building up the
reality of the image, ... At other points | put... simulations of real
trees in the form of sponges... (dyed green) ; little houses were
carved...in balsa-wood...and painted’ (Bib!. A27).
In a statement which applies to all those of his paintings which
develop photographic images in their sources’ own terms,
98
65
Hamilton added: ‘My interest... is in the transition between the
painted image, the photographic image. . . simulations of
three-dimensional space, and the real thing. There seems to me to
be not a very clear break between one and the other;... it’s
possible to make a slide, to smear the reality ... Certain marks on
[a] painting ... have nothing to do with it, they are pure marks,
they are paint... [other marks] have meaning at different levels,
different potentiality of communication, up to the point where one
is taken almost... into the real space in which the spectator is...
[In my work] the two are... related...in avery smooth...
rather than... a brutal kind of way’. (Ibid.)
Although so closely concerned with the complexities of
photography, Hamilton also continued with these works his
enumeration of categories of subject from the world of popular
culture, by ironically reappraising some of the clichés of traditional
art. In the two years 1965-7 he produced a still life, a landscape, a
self-portrait, bathers, and a mother and child theme. In this
sequence his series of Guggenheim reliefs takes its place quite
naturally.
 66

Hamilton had begun to consider ‘buildings’ as a possible class of

subject-matter. Lichtenstein’s paintings of classical temples and
Artschwager’s of skyscrapers stimulated him to tackle one which,
being largely curved, would be their structural antithesis. He was
also interested to know if a successful work could be based on a
new building and one which, like the supremely elegant Braun
appliances in relation to florid car-styling for a mass market, was
conceived as a work of high art in itself.

The Solomon R Guggenheim Museum on Fifth Avenue, New

York, was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1943-46 and built
in 1956—59. The final form of Hamilton's interpretation of it was a
set of reliefs in false perspective. His choice of this subject and
treatment was a curious concentration of his earlier interests. The
spiral form of the museum — a building assertively organic by
contrast with its classical opposites — seemed to look back to
Growth & Form, as well as encouraging, (as had the spiral
structure of the Exquisite Form bra), a false illusionistic reading as

101 104 102 103 108 107

 67

concentric circles (here stacked). The spiral form and the regular
recessions in the elevation facilitated a diagrammatic treatment.
The perspective problem was one of exceptional difficulty (see
also below, discussion of 65, 71) in which the spectator was again
made very conscious of shifting viewpoints, while the use of
heavy relief was a culmination of an obsession which could be
traced back through Hamilton’s work to 1951. Finally,the eccentric
appearance of the Guggenheim Museum was almost as familiar
an image in popular culture as those of John Glenn or the latest
Frigidaire.

In both their appearance and the process of their making the

Guggenheim reliefs contrasted with Hamilton’s work to date. A
single centralised image was a wide departure from anthologies of
shape, technique and source, and the Guggenheim reliefs were a
deliberate move to an opposite extreme. They were made, with
careful preparatory plans, in a manner consciously analogous to
the construction of a building. From three photographs of the
museum sent at his request by Lawrence Alloway who was then
working there, Hamilton chose one as the basis for 101. ‘The
drawing was labelled Architect's visua/and ... was an attempt to
make a very dramatic rendering of the building conceiving it as...
any... heroic architect might conceive the idea for his new...
building... | was following ...the mode of creation of architecture
by first of all getting the dramatic feel, ... as though | was starting
from scratch with this kind of concept and re-visualising it...
[When] | began to work on... the relief, |found it necessary...
to study... the plans of Frank Lloyd Wright, because it’s a very
difficult building to understand from the exterior... 1 found
myself trying to relate the plans to the kind of viewpoint | had
taken... Having a better understanding of the building | then
began to make drawings which approached his problem at the
technical level. | had to make plans, ... elevations and sections of
my own... relief and then came the stage of construction,
building it up with thick laminations, shaping down. So | was
thinking of myself... as covering the whole ground from
visualisation of the building to the planning to construction and
even laterto photographing and publicising. It was an attempt to
mirror the whole activity of architecture in the confines of a small
panel... 4 feet square. (Bibl. A27).

102 and 108 were stages in making precise the information in the
starting-point (101). 108 was enlarged onto a 4’ panel, and many
full-size studies of profiles and cross-sections, followed by
extensive and subtle hand-modulation of the resulting model,
were necessary before a mould could be made, so as to cast, from
the impossibly heavy model, six fibreglass reliefs. (Hamilton’s
work on the Guggenheim reliefs coincided with perspective
calculations of great complexity in his reconstruction of
Duchamp’s Large G/ass).

The six reliefs are coloured to deliberately contrasting effect.

Hamilton painted B/ack and White (109) to contradict the facts of
116
relief by giving the appearance of a drawing or diagram flat on a
sheet. Neapo/itan (110) derives its colouring from the modelled
effect of the fall of light. The relief was photographed when plain
 68

white (and when lit with great care). It was then sprayed a
creamy tint (vanilla), and over this Hamilton sprayed soft colour
(strawberry) distributed to simulate the tonal articulation of the
surface as shown in the photograph ; the recessed bands were
sprayed a green shade (pistachio) complementing the general
effect of soft blushes. The colour in 110 thus works both with and
against the form, according to circumstance. The analogy of both
colour and form with ice cream is direct. B/ack (111) springs
directly from possibilities seen in the recessed bands of Black and
White. The relief form here merges with the shifting appearances
of the surrounding environment: a form of marked clarity becomes
the vehicle for a total fluidity. Go/d (112), which Hamilton made
to resemble a traditional precious object, of special veneration,
seems simultaneously to richly absorb and to dispense light.
Meta/flake (113), refers back to Hamilton’s car-styling
preoccupations. Particles of anodised metals (in a permutation
entitled ‘Bouquet’) are mixed with a clear lacquer, a technique
from the customised car industry of California. Each particle
retains its own colour, giving the relief an effect faintly analogous
with Neo-Impressionist painting. 113 is also the most pictorial
of the reliefs, being the only one in which the sky is separately
coloured.

Spectrum (114), originally conceived as painted in heavy

impasto to oppose the relief’s smooth lines, again presents the
seven-colour sequence seen earlier in 7, passing at right-angles
across the parallel curves. As can be seen in 115, Hamilton
considered superimposing the spectrum at every angle from the 109
vertical to the horizontal. The form of the Guggenheim Museum is
reminiscent of that of a rainbow. but overlaying one rainbow on
another here inevitably disrupts the first, whether by accentuating
the distinctness of each palpable Guggenheim band, or by
implying, as in 114, a contradictory undulation across it. Unable
satisfactorily to combine relief with a free and heavy paint surface,
Hamilton considered in 116 the possibilities for a painting
(semi-illusionistic of relief) with these qualities.

All Hamilton’s treatments of the Guggenheim theme disembody

the building's very assertive three-dimensional form by transposing
it into a skin of colour and texture with quite independent
associations and effects. This is apparent also in the works
outside the main sequence, 103 and 104 and their eventual
outcome the screenprint (107). Earlier states (105, 106)
demonstrate the infinite manipulability of the given form by colour
treatment. In the reliefs, not only does the applied paint radically
alter one’s grasp of the literal structure but the degree of relief
leads to a side view which itself subverts expectations aroused by
the frontal aspect. Here the dramatic dimension of the image,
always strangely sensed in the main view, is revealed, along with a
startling formal eccentricity, more pronounced the further round
one stands. Especially from the left, the image has a slanting,
upsurging energy with both Art Nouveau and thirties overtones.
This quality, essentially of fantasy and of being beyond conscious
invention, is a result of the use of false perspective.
 69

di 114
 70

Like Still-life (90), Toaster (117) and the related print (118) are
derived from promotional material for Braun domestic appliances,
but as with the Guggenheim reliefs each work is a much more
self-contained image (or, in 118, complete scheme). The success
of these works springs from the artist’s interferences being
simultaneously crucial and yet so congruous with the style of
their source as actually to enhance at first sight its quality of
pristine impersonal processing by a commercial studio. For the
spectator, the result of this conjunction is an increased sensitivity
to the properties of the media employed.

The metal relief section of 117 was formerly in aluminium, set

against a black and white photograph with colour sprayed at
two points. After this had been damaged in transit, Hamilton
photographed a new background, this time in colour, and
substituted chromium-plated steel for aluminium. The
colour-printed background was itself sprayed, almost
imperceptibly, to bring it closer to the desired colour modulations.
As also in the print, Hamilton substituted his own name for the
word Braun. In 117 this and the absence of depicted shadow
assert the reality of the work of art as a relief constructed with
almost banal simplicity from rudimentary elements ; the only
shadows are literal, anti-illusionistic ones cast against a flat
background across a shallow depth of a few millimetres (cf:
Hamilton’s observations on Duchamp’s Choco/ate grinder, no 2,
1914, in Bibl. A22). The elements of the ‘toaster’ declare their
autonomy from one another and the juxtaposed textural extremes
of blurred background and crisp machine-wrought steel
unexpectedly switch roles, the clean rectangle becoming the
container of shifting unfixed reflections, and the colour emulsion
and atomised paint increasingly reading as an accumulation of
discrete spots.

The text in 118 was built up by Hamilton from fragments of Braun

texts for separate appliances and from technical data particular to
the print, modified only by an occasional word-change (the
reference to the Museum of Modern Art, New York, is a straight
quote from Braun literature). The peculiarities of literary style
(evidently a translation from German) and the minutiae of
typographical layout are wholly faithful to the precedents set by
Braun catalogues. The approach embodied in the text — listing
different ways (scientific, functional, aesthetic ...) of looking at the
subject, and ending with a literal, objective recall to the physical
facts of the art object itself — is characteristic of Hamilton’s own
established methods as a painter.

118
 71

119 and 120 continue the examination begun in the Whitley Bay
beach scenes of the limits of recognition of a human image
through photographic marks. Already involved with this theme,
Hamilton took photographs of beach scenes while on holiday in
Greece in 1965. The source of 119 and 120 was a 35 mm. colour
photograph taken on an island between Piraeus and Poros.

All the earlier paintings on photographs had tended to be both

unwieldy and difficult to work because the photographs were
mounted on board, and emulsion was an unreceptive ground.
With 119 and 120 Hamilton integrated photograph and surface
more closely, by using photo-sensitized canvas. 119 was worked
ona black and white and 120 on a colour-sensitised canvas,
both being otherwise identical enlargements of his original slide.

In 120 and in most of 119, the area of photograph surrounding any

human image is obliterated, leaving parts of figures and their
beach equipment as the only means to an understanding of the
activities depicted. The Whitley Bay paintings had been concerned
primarily with whole figures, and the limits of meaningful
enlargement. In 119 and 120 Hamilton found that even extremes of
125 fragmentation carried a huge quantity of information, especially
when the clues given by one fragment were corroborated and
enlarged by its disposition in relation to others. Thus the figures
alone become the means whereby the environment as a whole may
be ‘seen’ and understood, a point made most clearly in 120 where
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employ devices which carry a scene in which minute figures
instantly convey considerable distance right forward into the
spectator’s space. Vision seems to speed towards the viewer and,
without the introduction of any marks conflicting with the given
facts, distance appears strangely stretched. At the same time,
examination of individual figures, so unnaturally isolated as to
appear to have been placed by collage rather than by a reverse
process, paradoxically suggests a telescoping of space.

119 can be viewed as a phased intensification of reality in which

the most forceful indication of the presence of the bathing figures
is the tangible samples of their garments in the immediate
foreground. Almost all the people on this Greek beach were
153 Germans in family parties, so Hamilton chose beachwear of the
sort appropriate to German matronly taste. The rectangular
fragment of material is sewn to the canvas, attached along its top
edge only, to accentuate its origin exactly as presented here, as a
commercial sample; it is both a sample of fabric and a token of a
class of holidaymaker. The simulated rubber bathing cap in plastic
 13

resin is a re-arrangement on a flat surface of the petal-shapes as

they would appear in perspective on a head: it thus extends the
unexpectedly three-dimensional effect of the figures beyond. It
replaces a formation of rubber cap-petals which perished in the
heat while on exhibition in Africa.

The obliteration in 119 had been effected largely by

photo-chemical means. The screenprint (125) avoids all manual
involvement. A detail from the scene shown in 119 and 120, itis an
image almost unrelated in feeling, extracted entirely by decisions
either directly photographic or concerned, like photography, with
the densities of the constituent colour separations. The character
of the print was basically determined by deciding on negative
colour reversal and on the exact area to be enlarged. Each of the
bRRun
three colour screens, their relative hardness decided at will, was
printed in a wrong order—magenta with yellow, yellow with cyan,
cyan with magenta — and to introduce a reversal of the shadows
Hamilton added a white screen, developed from the image made
by the three colour-separations superimposed. The black border is
a vital element; it maintains the principle of colour reversal, and
gives heightened immediacy to the selected scene. The print was
originally entitled German Family in Greece. 153, the dye transfer 129
of the scene as a whole (and again a new world in relation to the
earlier versions), was also achieved by suppression of elements
already existing in the transparency. 154, the dye transfer of a detail,
relates back to the Whitley Bay imagery in focusing (though here
in colour) on a mother and children image, enlarged untouched, so
that the facture of the emulsion is as strongly evident as the image
it makes. 154 was again conceived on the principle that by
selecting his technique the artist can extract from given material
whatever expression he wishes. The Greek bathing scene had a 129, Hamilton's only sculpture (and in effect a relief because of its
general air of radiant heat; the shimmering, granular severely frontal aspect), was conceived as an updating, for an era
semi-Impressionist texture of 154 accentuates this quality. of advanced dental and domestic technology, of Jasper Johns’s
sculpture The Critic Smiles 1959 (a sculpmetal cast of a
conventional toothbrush with molars instead of bristles). The
denture, like the electric toothbrush, was made in Germany, but by
a dentist friend from an edible sugar original, seen in 130 and 131.

130 situates the sculpture in another elegant soft-focus setting

appropriate to a high-style Braun product (cf. 90,117), and
capitalises on the mysterious, hieratic, scaleless character of the
image. Hamilton has explained how 129 was ‘photographed with
the help of Euan Duff, a Kodacolor print followed and was heavily
retouched. [This, 130, was reproduced on the cover of the April
1968 issue of Art & Artists.] From this came an offset litho print
(131), laminated to regain the photographic character, to which
additional handpainted marks were applied. Thus there were three
possible points at which paint might intrude : on the object itself,
on the photographic print, and on the offset litho print’ (Bibl. A29)
The three layers of added marks intermingle to form a single
ambiguous space. 131, donated to the Documenta Foundation for
sale at Documenta /V, Kassel, 1968, is the final version of the
three-stage principle ;hand-applied adhesive elements and silver
paint are introduced, and the marks made range from the
diagrammatic to the formless and from the tangible to the virtually
consubstantial with the printed surface.

154
 74

130 131

135 takes up again the theme, investigated in 96, 98 and 100, of
the hand-application of marks to a photograph for its publication
as a postcard. Hamilton found in Milan four separate postcard
versions, each a different size, of a photograph of the interior of
La Scala opera house showing a full audience. In three, the colour
additions were printed, with different colours in each of the three
versions. The fourth, an edition of black and white photographic
prints, best facilitated enlargement and reproduction and was the
basis for 135. Hamilton blobbed in the colour with deliberate
crudity, in the style of the trade retouchers. As in 96 the perceptual
effect after a first glance is of two autonomous systems inexplicably
superimposed, though intellectually inextricable.
technical means underlying its source imagery. To have obtained a
high illumination distributed relatively evenly over so large an area
was an intriguing feat by the original photographers which adds to
the mystery of the subject. The large audience watches with great
solemnity a performance of photography (unseen but imagined
by the print’s spectator) of which they are themselves the end
product. It is another situation conforming to Hamilton’s concept
of epiphanies, a revelation about humanity discovered in a
moment of simultaneous dignity and absurdity.

The print’s subject connects closely in theme as well as treatment

with Hamilton’s work as a whole. Much involved with negative
reversal in many forms (cf: 88, 109, 119, 120, 125,127,149, 151)
he deals here with an inversion of the form of the Guggenheim
reliefs, and with a role-reversal between audience and those on
stage. 135 also introduces a new category of cliché subject, the
group photograph, and an emphatic statement of Hamilton’s
growing interest in symmetry and formal simplicity (cf: especially
92,96, 101 et seq., 117,127, 129 et seq., 140, 151, 154, 155 et
seq.). The accentuation of the horizontal barrier between pit and
stalls also stresses Hamilton’s long concern with interior/exterior
and foreground/background articulation. Moreover, like so
much of his work over two decades, 135 draws attention to the
 75

As with the /nter/or paintings, the source image for /‘m dreaming
of a white Christmas (127) came from a film and showed a figure
in an interior with openings to further spaces beyond; again
implicit in the image was the possibility of drawing the spectator
into the picture space. In a fragment shot in the film camera,
possibly an offcut rather than part of the final film, Bing Crosby is
seen in a hotel lobby in White Christmas, the first film shot in
Panavision.

Hamilton had had this material for nearly ten years, having
acquired it while preparing Bibl. A4. The idea of a painting based
on negative colour reversal had been with him, like most of his
ideas for paintings, for several years before he took it up. One
reason for putting it aside temporarily was Jasper Johns’s 1965
version of the Stars & Stripes in colours complementary to red,
white and blue. Hamilton’s intentions were however quite
distinct. He was again interested in the way in which technical
advances had made possible new ways of seeing the world. The
ambiguous space depicted resulted from the interaction of the
sophisticated artifices of interior designers in the film industry
(themselves responding to the technical requirements of camera
angles and lighting) and new lenses which created unfamiliar
perspectives. The position of Bing’s figure in relation to the picture
area combines with the unfamiliar but internally consistent reversal
of the entire imagery to suggest, as in A//ce through the Looking
G/ass, that the spectator is gazing into a mirror-world and that he or
Bing might slip from one world to the other — only through the
medium not of glass but of the substance of the imagery itself
(which being photographic contains in a literal manner its own
reverse). 127 is thus a fusion of Duchamp’s concept of everything
having its opposite with Hamilton’s scrutiny of nature as
perceived radically transformed by means peculiar to our era.

Understanding of the details of the hotel decor is difficult even in

the positive, due to the extremes of sharp and blurred focus in the
photograph. Colour reversal, while leaving the forms no less
specific, takes understanding to a still further remove, giving a
dream-like ambience of the unexplained and the open-ended in
the particular. The setting becomes unexpectedly ominous, with
garish deep red seen through the window, and the figure of Bing is WA 22
transformed both sartorially and racially in a most improbable but
entirely integral way. A space is revealed, both familiar and strange,
which is so close to us (Bing, life-size, is emerging from it with
great immediacy) that it is only just beyond our reach. Hanging frequently abut one another directly with curious effect —
conventionally on the wall, /’‘m dreaming of a white Christmas transparent next to solid, smooth plane next to minutely-defined
presents a room and a psychological dimension that seem to hair-line, modelled next to powdery next to smudged paint, and
adjoin our accustomed space and consciousness unusually opposed effects as of unyielding ebony or melting ice. Tracking
directly. across this episodic surface, the painting reads as a tour de force of
anti-form randomness.
Scrutiny of the elusive figurative facts in 127 and its versions leads
to a still greater concentration than in earlier works on the The subject was first visualised in 121, the most vehement of all
painting's literal physical components on a flat surface. Read, as it the versions in that the degree of colour-contrast and of Bing’s
intermittently and inescapably is, in this way, 127 is a bravura altered pigmentation were being tested here. Hamilton then
display of the range of possible types of paint mark, each of which attempted a lithograph, but as with the Hommage a Chrys/er Corp
asserts its own autonomy from all other marks, and often lithograph he abandoned the results as unsatisfactory while
apparently from any representational purpose. Such marks rehabilitating a proof by hand-applied additions (122). The
 76

subject eventually appeared as a screenprint (124) ; several of the

drawings made for this on a transparent ground were overlaid, to
produce in (123) a version with a marked spatial sense enhanced
by the literal depth of levels. The mode of execution of the
screenprint (124) was the reverse of a process of reproduction.
Hamilton made each colour separation by hand; almost every
mark made was a direct application of the medium, the resulting
colours and marks emerging from detailed work on the bench,
each stage helping determine the next, rather than from imitation
of a pre-existing model. The effect, which could easily be taken for
lithography, is built up from an anthology of ways of modulating
a surface illusionistically through the silkscreen medium (cf: in
another medium, an early print (9) ). There are flat monochrome
colour fields, spattered spots, delicate and crude areas of wash, a
passage of contoured chalk drawing, and negative spaces which
work as positive. The only passage which does not represent hand
intervention is the window to the left, a photographic image
through a granular screen. The print abounds in free improvised
marks which support the general arrangement while retaining a
certain autonomy. The thick flat passage of flesh colour directly
adjoining (as if collaged) the blue head, but read as behind it,
stresses the degree of reversal from nature ; the border contains
obtrusive specks of colour, again to indicate its positive role in the
print as a whole.

The starting point for /‘m dreaming of a white Christmas had been
the /dea of colour reversal, and not the colour quality observed in
the negative, which had, in its pervasive orange hue, a built-in
barrier. The finished painting (127) was developed from a
combination of the conceptual proposals of 121 with Hamilton’s
first discovery, at a late stage and by means of a colour print, of the
likely hues resulting from colour reversal. To this print (126),
Hamilton added kinds of colour he felt necessary to fortify it as an
image, and left exposed the alien indications of hand working. (In
the final painting at least one mark, the strip of red bent around the
upper corner of the coat Bing carries, was arbitrarily introduced to
enhance the purely visual activity at that point). As the tints in 126
were fugitive, Hamilton made from it the dye transfer (152),
retouching the separations here and there to strengthen or lighten
different areas. The lengthy and arduous hand work involved in
retouching each print individually led to restriction of the edition
to six examples.

123 124 126

 WT

127 Woe
 78

On 12 February 1967, Sussex police raided the West Wittering

STONES: 'A STRONG, en
SMELL a INCENSE |
home of Keith Richard of the Rolling Stones. Among those with
him in the house at the time were Mick Jagger, lead singer of the
group, Marianne Faithfull, and Hamilton’s dealer Robert Fraser.
Keith Richard was charged with allowing his house to be used for
the smoking of cannabis resin ; Jagger and Fraser were charged
with being in unlawful possession of different drugs, and after
court proceedings both were sentenced to imprisonment (Fraser
for six months; Jagger's sentence was commuted on appeal to a
12-months conditional discharge).

Rolling Stone ese] ; The source for Swingeing London 67 (137) and its related works
ee “oe was a press photograph taken on 28 June 1967, showing Jagger
and Fraser handcuffed together and seen through the window of a
police van as they arrived at the court building in Chichester.
Taken by a Da//y Ma// photographer, Mr John Twine, it was
published in the Da//y Sketch, 29 June 1967, and is reproduced in
133 (at top left).

Hamilton originally intended the culminating work in his

examination of this theme to be 137. Its image and format combine
many strands from his earlier work. The character of the image — its
action and its formal analogy with successive frames of a film — is
cinematic. It is yet another variant on the theme of the relationship
of human figure to motor vehicle, and in its blurred photographic
; quality and the deliberately created slanting angle of the upright of
133 the window, it looks back to Man, Machine & Motion. \t extends
Hamilton's interpretations of inner and outer spaces, transparency,
varied focus and photographic marks. And it combines the
directness of socio-political concern of the Ga/tske// portrait with
the compassion for the socially-inflicted suffering of a public idol of
My Marilyn. Hamilton was one of the signatories of a
closely-argued letter published as a full-page advertisement in The
Times of 24 July 1967, headlined ‘The law against marijuana is
immoral in principle and unworkable in practice’.

The title of these paintings is therefore an ironical comment on the

contrast between the excesses of individualism and freedom of
behaviour attributed to the London pop world of 1967 and the
restraints on privacy and personal choice and freedom represented
by the Jagger/Fraser prosecution and the ‘swingeing’ sentences
imposed. 7ime magazine of 15 April 1966 had published an article
(pp. 32-42, advertised on the cover by the phrase ‘London: The
Swinging City’) which purported to document a snowballing social
revolution towards light-hearted permissiveness centred on
London, and gave international currency to the phrase ‘Swinging
London’ from which Hamilton’s title is derived.

Like 121 (the first sketch for /’m dreaming of a white Christmas),
Hamilton’s first visualisation of Swingeing London 67 (132) gives
more emphatic expression than any version to the special visual
features of the source. The hands and glinting handcuffs occupy
an unusually large portion of the sheet, and the dramatic shadows
are heavily accentuated. It was while working on 132 that
Hamilton realised that the photograph must have been taken by
flash; its combination of passages of blurred vagueness with
 WE

hand-retouching for newspaper reproduction was a quality

Hamilton sought to sustain in all his versions. But equally the
quality of the photograph meant that the information it contained
was sparse, inevitably necessitating initiative by Hamilton to fill in
the details. He therefore assembled as many press cuttings as
possible, from which to build up a fuller factual picture.

Study of these cuttings quickly revealed the extreme degree of the

newspapers’ obsession with inessential detail and, considering the
emphasis obviously placed by the papers on these details, the
ludicrous and general discrepancy between one account and
another as to ages and sartorial, gastronomic and other particulars.
Asked by ED 912, Milan, to produce a graphic work for general
sale, Hamilton therefore prepared for reproduction by offset litho a
collage (coll. Daniela Pallazoli, Milan) of press material on the case
as a whole, intended to concentrate into one integrated expression
the complex sensory extemporisation proposed by the mass media
themselves. The accumulated irrelevance of the headlines and the
near-autonomy of these aspects of searching public curiosity from
the pressing moral issues of the case finally adds up to a powerful
moral protest. Once again, a work by Hamilton examines ways in
which what
we See is determined by the means by which it is shown.

The ‘poster’ 133 (in two editions, on different paper, each of 1,000)
was conceived like a print and reproduces with great fidelity the
contrasting tones and textures of the collage including relative
degrees of fading of the newspaper. At many of the points where a
colour is mentioned, Hamilton places a sample of it beside the
text, and other supporting material includes fragments of an
incense packet and of the wrapper of a Mars Bar. There is also
material concerning the Robert Fraser Gallery, in which, during
Fraser's imprisonment, Hamilton helped organise a loan
exhibition of work by sympathetic artists. It includes fragments
(one showing a detail of a Bridget Riley painting) of the coverage
of the gallery in the original ‘Swinging London’ article ; the gallery
notepaper heading ; and a Mickey Mouse motif drawn by Claes
Oldenburg as a sketch for a sign to hang outside the gallery’s
Duke Street premises. There is also material on another drugs case 134
which overlapped in time the Jagger/Fraser hearings and
involved another Rolling Stone, Brian Jones, and Balthus’s son.

The etching (134) was developed from 132. The hand-crafted

character of a medium Hamilton had not employed since the early
1950s prompted the obtrusive addition of passages in
photo-engraving, aquatint, diestamping, embossing and collage,
to parallel the immediacy of the source photograph and accentuate
the wide range in texture from the opacity of a reflecting lens to
the semi-transparency of a pane, the gleam of metal, and the relief
projections of ruffled shirt-front and cuff-link. The platemaking
and printing were done in Milan and the collage elements were
added by hand in London. To one copy of this print, Hamilton
made extra additions ; pink Letrafilm was applied to Mick Jagger's
lips and then scraped down to produce modulation, and Hamilton
added an inscription literally transcribing a newspaper report of the 136
trial. (‘It produces an effect of tranquility [sic] and happiness’’,
said Mr Malcolm Morris, QC, prosecuting.’)
137 142

When 134 was made, Hamilton had already made some progress
on the painting for 137. Pleased with the degree of actuality
conveyed by 134 and feeling that 137 was so far academic by
comparison, he laid over the painting-in-progress a transparent
positive used in producing 134; from this came the decision to use
photographic silkscreen in the finished painting(s). Hamilton
therefore had made an enlarged print of the original photograph,
on which he painted out the verticals which had obscured parts of
the figures and added invented forms to all four sides of the central
imagery. From the result (136), the screen employed in 137 and
142-148 was made. The relief element in 137, a simulation
(and enlargement by 2”) of the window of the police van,
emphasises the figures’ separated enclosure, as in a box. The
glinting quality of the handcuffs comes from metalised acetate
beneath the paint.

The six silkscreen paintings (142-147) originated, like the six

images of Patricia Knight (77), as trials for an ideal fusion of screen
and paint in 137, but as they progressed they became major
works in their own right. Hamilton transferred to six identical-sized
canvases the linear outlines of the composition of 136, and then
made within them six paintings contrasting in texture and colour
intensity. The intention was to superimpose in black by silkscreen 143
on each painting a documentary quality ; the screen was made
from 136. In five versions (a-e) this was done; in (f) the process
was reversed, paint being applied on top of the black imagery
 81

1 44 146

145 147
 82

screened direct onto a bare white ground. Although at first glance

the screening deliberately gives a large measure of uniformity to all
six versions, consciousness of wide essential divergences not only
of colour and texture but also of mood grows steadily as the
paintings are examined at greater length.

Common to all six is a basic colour scheme (allowing wide

variations) derived from press reports, and the colouring of the
two windows behind the figures. The right hand window always
suggests sky or landscape to represent the freedom being left
behind and the left-hand window is the colour of brick,
symbolising the figures’ impending enclosure ;the press
photograph was taken as the van drove from the street past the
gatepost of the court building. In (a) (142) the under-painting
was as straightforward as possible, the aim being a clear simplicity
of image and maximum smoothness of surface. By contrast (b)
(143) was painted in a heavy impasto with dramatic brushwork ;
Hamilton had in mind a type of academic flamboyance associated
with certain Royal Academy paintings of the 1930s. The paint in
(c) (144) was airbrushed to give soft modulations and a slightly
Renoiresque quality. (d) (145) was again painted in heavy
impasto but with dramatically exaggerated colour ; fierce oranges
and purples were applied at the points where the screen would
148
print darkest, so as to glow through the black deposits. (e) (146)
was also painted in very heightened colour, but the medium was
enamel, creating a markedly harsh and gritty texture in the
screened black. In (f) (147) Hamilton felt free, as he was painting
on top of the screened image, to add collage; it was used for the
views through both windows and for the handcuffs. Realisation
of the handcuffs presented the particular problem of how to give
them adequate definition while remaining true to their out-of-focus
vagueness in the photograph. Hamilton’s solution was to
formalise the glinting, rather uninformative abstract shapes in the
photograph into a progression of arbitrary-seeming discrete
collaged elements in aluminium and metalised acetate. Used in
147 (they were originally intended for 137), these focus the
psychological importance of the handcuffs. 148 is a version on
paper of the six silkscreen paintings ; one of several rough studies
of ideas for 147, it was preserved because it developed interesting
qualities of its own.

Hamilton's work of the previous nineteen years had included many

single and multiple figure paintings, as well as surprisingly many
works (4, 13, 18, 86) in which one figure is repeated many times.
There were also works (28, 35, 40, 51) in which a figure was
placed in a neo-human relationship with a machine, and one (68)
in which two heads were merged. Significantly the corpse in the
/nterior series wastransmuted into lurid paint passages. Two-figure
compositions were strikingly absent owing to the difficulty
Hamilton sensed in making any relationship between two figures
satisfactory simultaneously in both psychological and pictorial
terms (ie: not too dramatic or intense). After completing the
Swingeing London 67 series, Hamilton realised that he had,
intuitively, solved this problem. Formalisation, both functional and
visual, of the relationship creates a necessary detachment at the
same time as yielding a rich complexity.
 83

The Beatles had a copy of the Jagger/Fraser poster (133) and

asked Hamilton to design their double album ‘The Beatles’,
published in 1968. Hamilton's design included the sleeve, one
loose photograph of each Beatle, and a large fold-out reproduction
of an anthology of photographs. 141 is the collage from which
this was reproduced. Hamilton conceived the design as a whole as
a print in a limited edition ; each sleeve was printed with its
unique number in an edition of several millions.

Hamilton's collage was built up from photographs selected from a

personal collection sent separately by each Beatle. Disposition of
the photographs was influenced by the way the folds were to be
arranged in the printed version and by a wish to give a fairly even
distribution of images of each Beatle over the whole sheet.

Hamilton’s concern with different types of photographic mark and

degrees of sophistication is again evident; most of the added
marks, including ticks on contact prints and an impression in
lipstick of a fan’s lips, were pre-existing. Ringo’s hair and the door
handles at left are negatively drawn by cutting.

Hamilton was one of a large number of artists asked to contribute

a work inspired by Guillaume Apollinaire and his ideas to the
exhibition 7out Terriblement — Guillaume Apollinaire which
marked the fiftieth anniversary of Apollinaire’s death and was
held at the ICA, London in November 1968. The result,
Picturegram (138) was an elaboration in paint of Apollinaire’s
calligramme // p/eut (first published 1916). Although Apollinaire’s
calligrammes were usually published in typographical form, these
were formalisations of the layout of Apollinaire’s original hand-
written versions. 138 is painted on a photographic enlargement of
the autograph source of // p/eut (rep: Typographica 14, new
series, December 1966, p. 17). Faintly visible through the paint
are the printed ruled lines and a rubber-stamped monogram (of a
museum ?) on the original sheet.

By 1968, Hamilton's use of lettering, calligraphy and words in

collage and paintings had a long history, ranging from at least 1956
(21), through AAH! (51), the typed version of Hers /s a /ush
situation (63), Epiphany (69), My Marilyn (86), Still-life (90) and
Toaster (118). People Again (150) and Fashion-plate (cosmetic
study ///) (160) would extend this involvement. The starting point
of 138 was Apollinaire’s concept, in the calligrammes, of words
(poetry) constituting a visual work of art, in which the same ideas
are expressed at both a literary and a pictorial level simultaneously.
By comparison with its written version, transposition into type
seemed to Hamilton somewhat to remove any calligramme from
the type of self-revelation implicit in a painting ;138 therefore
deliberately pushes // p/eut in that latent direction. As with
Marilyn Monroe’s hand-applied marks on George Barris’s
photographs, the writing in // p/eut seemed to Hamilton to reveal
more than the straight information it embodied. Nuances of ink
and of calligraphy threw light on the time taken to complete the
calligramme, on the points of maximum hesitation and conviction,
and on the relative importance of different words. Corrections
could range from total effacement to a faint scoring through ; one
138

could thus see both where changes had been made and in some
cases the nature of the change. This interest of Hamilton’s has a
direct though reversed parallel in his work on the typographical
version of Duchamp’s Green Box which attempts to convey
Duchamp’s thought processes as well as the meaning of each
word.
138 seeks to evoke by its manner of painting the mood of
Apollinaire’s poem, in which observation of falling rain is fused
with a nostalgic sadness. Hamilton was painting it at the time of
Marcel Duchamp’s death in October 1968, and as he worked on it
it became for him, with its analogy with tears, a personal
expression of sadness (the more curious as both Apollinaire and
Hamilton — the two ‘writers’ of the calligramme fifty years apart —
had been personal friends of Duchamp.) Consistent with the
calligramme’s imagery of falling rain, an earlier inscription of the
title which Apollinaire crossed out to the left of the final title was
converted by Hamilton into a storm cloud. The tonal unity of the
painting (the letters are individually coloured but always approach
grey) springs from Hamilton’s aim of meshing words and painted
ground together into a single texture.
151 was Hamilton's contribution to the exhibition Vapoleon 1969.
Miniaturen nach J. L. David, held at the Schloss Gottorf,
Schleswig in August-September 1969. Each of a large number of
artists was sent a copy of a coloured postcard of David's unfinished
oil study c. 1797-8, in the Louvre, for his Portrait de Bonaparte,
and asked to return it with whatever completion he chose to make.
In a manner analogous to Bathers // (120) Hamilton made a
sharpened version of the image by painting out most of it, only
here he reduced it still further, to a purely linear representation of
Napoleon. In effect he used information suggested by the final
version to evolve a presumed earlier stage of the work, David's
under-drawing. His method was ironically the reverse of that
originally notionally employed. 151 was the second neo-classical
figure ‘drawing’ to be derived by Hamilton through transmission
by mass reproduction (see below, discussion of 58).
84
Hamilton’s contribution to the exhibition Art by Te/ephone, held
at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, in November—
December 1969, was Chicago Project / (170). It was painted by
Ed Paschke in accordance with the following instructions spoken
by Hamilton in London by telephone:
‘Get a coloured postcard in the Chicago area of a subject in
Chicago. Either get it yourself or, if you are worried about the
aesthetic responsibility of choosing something, ask a friend to
provide it.
‘Take a piece of paper and cut a hole in it 1” high by 13” wide.
The hole should be square with a corner of the paper, 1” to the left
of the edge and 3” from the bottom edge. Place this in the bottom
right hand corner of the postcard. Get a photographer to enlarge
the area of postcard revealed in the hole to a size of 2’ 8’ 4’,
preferably on sensitised canvas but if this isn’t possible have a
paper print dry mounted on hardboard (Masonite).
‘Leave 20% of the surface untouched black and white. Paint
40% in roughly the colours apparent in the postcard. Paint 40% in
complementaries of the colours that appear in the postcard.
‘Either transparent stains or opaque colours, some thick, some
thin, which areas are at your discretion.’
The postcard selected was an upright photograph of the tall
Prudential Building in Chicago.
Hamilton's interest in the potential extraction from any given
visual material of any desired formal, stylistic or textural expression
has already been discussed under 96.
170 goes still further; it asserts that even if responsibility for
selecting source material and final motif are removed as far as
possible from the artist or anyone else, the result will have a vitality
independent of its source and a distinct visual dialect. No-one
knowing Hamilton’s telephoned instructions for the creation of
170 could have predicted that of all his works it would be one of
the most formal, nor that its arrangement of distant figures amid
shadows and foliage, seen beyond a looming near-vacant
foreground, would so reinforce his assertion of the inherent
ambiguity of photographic marks. The activities depicted have a
sinister elusiveness common to Antonioni’s B/ow-up and the
blurred gunman-seeking enlargements of shrubbery from
amateur photographs of President Kennedy’s assassination.
In being an equal mixture of the arbitrary and of a consideration of
the nature of the motif, the hand-application of colour to this
enlargement is a metaphor of the postcard-retoucher’s craft which
Hamilton had been examining for several years. His proposal, not
yet embarked on as this catalogue goes to press, to carry out
personally on an identical enlargement the instructions given to
Ed Paschke, underlines the analogy.
 85

Pages 20—43 of Art in America Vol 57, No 4, July-August 1969,

were a memorial symposium on Marcel Duchamp, to which
Hamilton, among other artists, was asked to contribute. Although
a number of contributors sent texts, Hamilton found that the
complexity and extent of his feelings could best be expressed in
pictorial form.

In his studio were seventy sheets of glass, unmarked except for the
inscription ‘d’apres Marcel Duchamp’ which, occurring at the same
point on each sheet, had been written by Duchamp in Hamilton’s
studio, in summer 1968. (The sheets were waiting to receive
impressions of the S/eves multiple — to be distributed by the
Petersburg Press in 1970 — and each example would then be
completed by Hamilton adding his own signature after that of
Duchamp). Hamilton photographed the sheets in colour, stacked
together, from the front and from the back. Duchamp’s signature is
thus seen repeating again and again, receding from the spectator
in two ranks (one positive, one negative) until it merges into the
darkness of the farther layers. The far side of the stack cannot be
seen in either photograph ; an effect of infinity results. The image is
of a void, with a strong sense of progress into it; it also has
parallels with Hamilton’s device, in Growth & Form, of the infinite
multiplication of one image. Image and title embrace several levels
of speculation, among them an allusion to the open-ended
character of Duchamp’s complete oeuvre following the
posthumous revelation in 1969 of one of his major works; and
uncertainty as to the future lines of development of art itself.
Hamilton proposed to Art in America that the two photographs
should be printed back to back on adjacent spreads, but in the
event only the front view was used. In the work itself, however,
(149), the photographs are mounted back to back and hung on
hinges from the wall in accord with Duchamp’s own practice in
the G/ider glass. Many thicknesses of glass are notionally
comprehended within a few millimetres. 149 embodies in literal
form Hamilton’s obsession with negative reversal. As does /’m
dreaming of a white Christmas (and as did Duchamp), it deals
with passing from one side (and from one state) to another.
Paradoxically, while the image is always of infinity, the spectator
can in this work pass to the other side quite literally.

170 149

The Cosmetic studies (158-169) are the outcome of Hamilton's
continuing consideration of genres of basic visual phenomena in
our culture that call for assimilation into fine art. The source is
contemporary fashion photography, especially its most exotic
manifestations in the sophisticated photographs appearing in
magazines such as Vogue, Harpers Bazaar and Queen from which
much of the collage material was taken. Hamilton was once again
concerned to push farther in the directions which his material
itself suggested. The Cosmetic studies are thus a bizarre
combination of the irrational and fantastic emotions projected by
models’ expressions (embracing the seductive, the frigid, the
rapturous and the distraught) ; the magazines’ breathless obsession
with the colour, stylistic innovation or accentuated bodily feature
of the moment; and the deadpan instructional emphasis of
photographs concerned with make-up, skin-culture and hair.
The alteration of the human image through interposed devices Is a
long and central theme of Hamilton's oeuvre. It can be traced from
The transmogrifications of Bloom (4), through the Muybridge
studies, re-Vude (18) and Man, Machine & Motion, to its
treatment on an extended scale throughout Hamilton’s pop and
directly photo-centred periods. In 1960, Hamilton indicated how
fully this theme integrates with his interests over a wider field of
imagery when he remarked of the automobile industry: ’...
artificial stimulants for rapid turnover have been found. The main
method for promoting change is body styling, so the automobile
coach-building industry uses the technique of haute-couture’
86
(Bibl. A7). The Cosmetic studies are also a prime example of
Hamilton’s obsession with the immediate juxtaposition of
contrasting visual languages (discussed, for example, under 28 and
80), such as a diagrammatic motif next to a passage of illusionistic
modelling next to an abstract deposit of pure pigment. In
composing a single head from elements taken from any number of
separate heads and bodies, Hamilton renews that compulsive
merging of disparate ingredients into new wholes seen in works as
various as 7oastuum (39), the Ga/tske// portrait (68) and the print
on the theme of The critic Jaughs (131). But his concern with unity
again runs parallel with a desire to keep active the sense of
discrepancy and ambiguity between different parts. In this sense
the Cosmetic studies come close to the /nter/or series (72—84) in
examining how wild and disturbing the multiple viewpoints and
substitutions (thigh used as shoulder, etc) can become and yet
remain plausible. Finally, the series develops directly from the
principle of serial interference seen in the graphic interpretations of
The critic laughs (130, 131). The studies anticipate a figure
painting (possibly three-quarter length) which — to consider the
face alone — would be a painting of photographs (probably
re-touched) of paint (make-up, etc) adapting or even, in the more
mask-like instances, representing the face of the woman (a
three-dimensional object with a highly frontal aspect) on which it
is placed. The need to represent clothes introduces yet further
possibilities of modes of simulation. The studies explore all these
problems in numerous permutations.
The three Fashion-p/ate studies (155-157) are preliminary
examinations which introduce the diagrammatic (eye in (b)) and,
in (c), the collaged mouth and neck (those of Varushka) which
recur in Cosmetic studies IV-XII. As work on (a) proceeded,
Hamilton detected a humorous resemblance to himself, on which
the addition of the winking eye is a comment (cf 40). Treatment of
the eyes was a special problem of the Fash/on-p/ate subject, as two
eyes taken from a single head made too particular an effect, while
two from separate sources were difficult to integrate satisfactorily.
155-7 propose three ways of dealing effectively with a second eye.
Determined to make a print as a further step towards a painting,
Hamilton photographed, in collaboration with Tony Evans, a
carefully-chosen grouping of studio equipment for fashion
photography, to act as a frame for a head-and-shoulders image,
and to emphasise the ritualistic character of the fashion
photo-session. This was lithographed in Milan, soft tonality and
luminous whiteness being accentuated. Hamilton began building
up on one sheet (eventually 163) collage elements which should
recur throughout the print’s edition. As this proceeded, the
difficulty of obtaining sufficient identical collage material for an
edition combined with the developing physical interest of this and
other studies to change the project to one of an interlinked series of
collage-drawings. One purpose of this series was to familiarise
Hamilton with the technique (as alien to him as had been the
expressionistic handling required by the Ga/tske// portrait) of
conveying a sweet, feminine and kitsch-like quality through paint
itself. This was also the first occasion on which he had embarked
on a series of drawings (or studies) with the aim of working on
them till each was resolved and complete in its own right.

155 156
The twelve Cosmetic studies should essentially be seen as an
integrated group. Elements smaller than the mouth which is
common to eight of them reappear intermittently, as do rhyming
techniques ; the final experience is of an interdependent visual
complex abounding in relationships both oblique and literal, many
of which emerge only through extended observation. The series
contains four distinct subdivisions into groups of three in
numerical sequence, each group defined partly by the placement of
heads within the printed frame and partly by emphases of
accessory and colour.
In Cosmetic study / (158) a pure disc of colour (doll-like ? beauty
spot ?) adjoins the most realistically-painted eye of the series. The
sample of fabric exemplified the use throughout the series of
tokens for substances or concepts; as so often in Hamilton’s work
a wider sensory experience is conveyed than is literally shown. II
(159) contrasts with the other eleven studies in having started with
a painted image and moved towards collage. The swathed hair at
right is that of Jane Holzer, Andy Warhol's first superstar. In
immediate contrast, Ill (160) began with a complete face in collage
which was then altered. The relationship of words and colours at
lower right is intended to be evocative of mood and sound in much
the same way as the word BROWN in 90. Each of these collaged
fragments has been placed next to the nearest approach in the
adjoining paint to the colour it describes (cf: 133). Throughout the
series, just as some added elements contradict, so do others
87
We7)
reinforce existing implications; in lV (161) the shadow beneath
the chin is formalised by added collage into a choker ;another neck
and choker of pearls at left are converted into a hair-band. The
fantastic leaps of scale common to the series are demonstrated by
the small area below the neck in V (162), formerly a complete
shoulders. VII (164) developed into a country girl; wearing
gingham, cherries and violets, she also has a picture hat, its wide
brim defined at one point by negative collage of part of a neck.
Vill (165) pushes the magazines’ preoccupation with face packs in
the direction of ritual, which the associations of masks imply ;the
lips are painted in an aperture of the mask. Hamilton also had in
mind ritualistic photographs like those in B/ack Eros, where black
girls’ faces are whitened by a thick paste (there is a parallel with
the transmutation of Bing Crosby by negative reversal in 127). The
mask idea also links 165 with the Gaitskell portrait, particularly in
the sharp line of demarcation across the forehead. The left eye in
IX (166) is taken from the same Lichtenstein source asthe print, 70.
A curious property of the Cosmetic Studies is their tendency to
recall for any spectator particular (and quite unconnected) people,
in terms of personality as well as of appearance ; not only does the
series abound in internal cross-references, but each study is a rich
compendium of open-ended clues. Perhaps the series’ most
striking feature when properly seen, evenly spaced all around the
spectator at eye-level, is the hieratic, awesome, ambiguous but
timeless character of these twelve images.
88
 89

164 165 166

167 168
 90

Catalogue 6 15
Structure Still-life?
1950 1954
The exhibition includes a selection from Sugar etching and aquatint Oil on canvas
Hamilton’s work between 1949 and 1955, 40 x 30cm/152 « 113in [18-19] 61 x 51c0m/24 x 20in [24]
and every completed work from 1956 Rita Donagh
Y
onwards except one study for each of 28, Chromatic spiral 16
35 and 93 and two for 59, all of which 1950 Trainsition III|
have been variously stolen from or mislaid Oil on panel 1954
by their owners; one study each for 35, 54 53:5 47cm/21 x 184in [18-19] Oil on panel
and 109 (et seq), all of which the owners Mr and Mrs Benn W Levy 91-5 122cm/36 = 48in [26]
are unable to lend; and some versions of Roderic Hamilton
26, 77 and 134. All works listed in this 8
Particular System 17
catalogue are reproduced except state
proofs of prints, and 52, 57, 58, 77 and 78. 1951 Study re Nude
Works shown in London but not at Oil on canvas 1954
101:5* 127cm/40 x 50in [21-22] Watercolour and pencil
Eindhoven or Berne are marked ‘L’. Works
for which no ownership is cited belong to 9 37 x 29cm/142x 114in [24-25]
the artist. In the dimensions, height Heteromorphism Private collection
precedes width. For all prints, the 1951 18
dimensions given are those of the sheet, Etching, aquatint, drypoint, soft ground, etc re Nude
except for eight etchings (6, 9, 10, 14, 19, 25:5 19:-5cm/10 « 73in [21-22] 1954
20, 34, 135), for which the dimensions 10 Oil on panel
given are those of the plate. The number Self-portrait 122 91-5cm/48 x 36in [24-25]
in brackets following the dimensions refers 1951 19
to the page of this publication on which Etching, aquatint, drypoint, soft ground, etc re Nude etching
a work is reproduced and discussed. 30 x 19:5cem/112 72Zin [21-23] 1954
11 Relief etching with colour intaglio
1 40 x 30cm/153 « 113in [24-25]
d’Orientation
Leopold Bloom
1952 20
1949
Oil on hardboard Still-life?
Pencil
57-5 39:5cm/228 « 153in [16-17]
117 160cm/46 x 63in [22—23] 1955
12 Burin engraving
2
Sketch for ‘Super-Ex- Position’ 25 «x 17cm/93 x 62in [24-25]
Leopold Bloom (‘He foresaw his pale
body’)
(Gas 21
1949 Ink and watercolour Just what is it that makes today’s homes
Pencil and watercolour 19 25:5cm/74 x 10in [22-23] so different, so appealing ?
57 x 39:5cm/224 x 15hin [17] Mr and Mrs Paul Cornwall-Jones 1956
13 Collage
3
After Muybridge 26 x 25cm/104 « 9Zin [29-30]
In Horne’s house
1953 Edwin Janss Jr, Thousand Oaks,
1949
Pencil and conté crayon California
Ink and watercolour
38 « 30:5cem/15 12in [17] 47 x 36cm/184 x 144in [23] 22
Reyner Banham This is Tomorrow, perspective of exhibit
4
14 1956
The transmogrifications of Bloom
Man walking (after Muybridge) Collage and ink on paper
1949
1953 30:5 47cm/12« 183in [28-29]
Pencil
Etching and aquatint Mr and Mrs Paul Cornwall-Jones
55 x 39-5cem/212x 153in [17]
25 17cm/93 x 63in [23] 28
5
Study for ‘Hommage a Chrysler Corp.’
Induction
S7/
1950
Pen and ink, gouache and collage
Oil on canvas
34:5 21-5cm/134™ 84in [32]
51 x 40:5cm/20 x 16in [18-19]
Mrs Mary Banham
 91

24 Sy 40
Hommage a Chrysler Corp. (Study) Study for ‘Hers is a lush situation’ $he
1957 1957 1958-61
Pen and ink, watercolour and collage Ink, collage, gouache Oil, cellulose, collage on panel
35:5 24cm/14 x 94in [32] 18 x 28cm/74 114in [36] 122 « 81cm/48 = 32in [37-39]
(Not in exhibition) Private collection Private Collection
25 (Not in exhibition) 41
Study for ‘Hommage a Chrysler Corp.’ 33 Pin-up sketch |
S)57/ Hommage a Chrysler Corp. 1960
Ink, watercolour
and collage (version for line reproduction) Ink, gouache
23 « 33cm/9 x 13in [32] 1958 37 x 23cm/144 = Yin [39-40]
Giorgio Marconi, Milan Collage and ink Rita Donagh
26 47x 37cm/184™ 143in [32-33] 42
Hommage a Chrysler Corp. (a) Mrs Marcel Duchamp, New York Pin-up sketch II
1957, 34 1960
Lithograph with pastel, gouache and Hers is a lush situation, etching Ink, gouache
collage 1958 37 x 23cm/144 9in [39-40]
35:5 x 49:5cm/14 « 194in [32-33] Etching with collage Dr Johannes Cladders, Krefeld
Mr and Mrs Paul Cornwall-Jones 18 25cm/7 x 93in [36] 43
27 Rita Donagh Pin-up sketch III
Hommage a Chrysler Corp. (b) 35 1960
1957 Hers is a lush situation Ink, watercolour, gouache
Lithograph with pastel, gouache and 1958 37 x 23cm/1443 Yin [39-40]
collage Oil, cellulose, metal foil, collage on panel A Vowinckel, Cologne
38 x 53cm/15 x 21in [32-33] 81 « 122cm/32 « 48in [35-36] 44
Richard Morphet Private collection Pin-up sketch IV
28 36 1960
Hommage a Chrysler Corp. Study for ‘$he’ Ink, watercolour, gouache
1957 1958 37 x 23cm/144 x Yin [39-40]
Oil, metal foil and collage on panel Pencil, ink, watercolour, gouache Alexander Dunbar
122 81cm/48 « 32in [32-33] 25:5 20:5cm/10 x 8in [37-39] 45
Private Collection L M Asher Family, Los Angeles Pin-up sketch V
29 37 1960
First sketch for ‘Hers is a lush situation’ Study for ‘$he’ Ink, watercolour, gouache
1957 1958 and 1969 37 x 23cm/144 x 9in [39-40]
Collage, crayon, ink, gouache Ink, gouache John Taylor
19 28:5cm/74 x 114in [36] 25:5« 19cm/10 x 73in [37-39] 46
Bruno Bischofberger, Zurich 38 Study for Pin-up
30 Study for ‘$he’ 1961
Study for ‘Hers is a lush situation’ 1958 Ink, collage
1957 Ink, watercolour, collage 35:5 25:5cm/14 x 10in [39-40]
Ink, crayon, gouache and metal foil 23 x 17cm/9 = 63in [37-39] 47
23 x 36cm/9 14in [36] Mr and Mrs Benn W Levy Pin-up
Rita Donagh 39 1961
31 Toastuum Oil, cellulose, collage on panel
Hers is a lush situation — study 1958 122 « 81cm/48 x 32in [39-40]
SIS Ink, watercolour, metal spray, collage Private collection
Ink, watercolour, collage 44x 38cm/174 15in [37-39] 48
23 x 37cm/9 x 144in [36] Mr and Mrs David Allford Sketch for ‘Glorious Techniculture’
Kurt Fried, Ulm 1961
(Not in exhibition) Gouache, pencil, collage, photograph
15x 15cm/6 x Gin [40-41]
Dr Heinz Hunstein, Kassel
 92

49 56 63
Glorious Techniculture Towards a definitive statement on the Text for ‘Hers is a lush situation’
1961-64 coming trends in men’s wear and 1963
Oil and collage on asbestos panel accessories (b) Typewriter, ink
122 122cm/48 = 48in [40-41] 1962 16:-5x 25:5cm/64x 10in [36]
Eric Franck, Kusnacht-Zurich Oil and collage on panel Hanns Sohm, Markgroningen
61 x 81cm/24 x 32in [43-44] 64
50
Mrs H E Grigg, Biot ‘AAH !' in perspective
Study for ‘AAH !’
1961 and 1968 57 1963
Ink and watercolour Towards a definitive statement on the Oil on board
23 x 37cm/9 = 144in [41-42] coming trends in men’s wear and 26 17cm/104 x 63in [42]
Private collection, Cambridge accessories (c) sketch | Joe Tilson
1962 65
51
Pencil on paper Five Tyres abandoned
AAH!
25:5 35:5cm/10 x 14in 1963
1962
Private collection Coloured pencils and ink
Oil on panel
81 x 122cm/32 48in [42] (Not exhibited or reproduced) 48 x 72cm/19 x 284in [46]
Mr and Mrs Max Wasserman, Chestnut Hill, 58 Galerie Hans Neuendorf, Hamburg
Mass Towards a definitive statement on the 66
coming trends in men’s wear and Hugh Gaitskell as a Famous Monster of
52
Towards a definitive statement on the accessories (c) sketch II Filmland — sketch
coming trends in men’s wear and 1962 and 1970 1963
accessories (a) sketch | Aerosol paint and ink on paper Crayon, gouache
1962 25:5 x 35:5cm/10 x 14in [44] 39 x 37:5cm/154 143in [48-49]
Pencil and gouache and collage (Exhibited but not reproduced) Private collection, Cambridge
25:5 35:-5cm/10 x 14in 59 67
Private collection Towards a definitive statement on the Study for ‘Portrait of Hugh Gaitskell as a
(Not exhibited or reproduced) coming trends in men’s wear and Famous Monster of Filmland’
53 accessories (c) Adonis in Y fronts 1963-70
Towards a definitive statement on the 1962 Copper on relief and collage on motorised
coming trends in men’s wear and Oil and collage on panel disc
accessories (a) sketch II 61 « 81cem/24 x 32in [44-45] 45-5 = 45:5cm/18 = 18in [48-49]
1962 Dominy Hamilton
68
Gouache, metal foil, collage on paper 60 Portrait of Hugh Gaitskell as a Famous
25:5 35:5cm/10 x 14in [43] ‘Together let us explore the stars’ Monster of Filmland
Private collection 1962-3 1964
54 Ink, gouache and collage Oil and collage on photograph on panel
Towards a definitive statement on the 51 x 33:5cm/20 x 134in [44-45] 61 « 61cm/24 « 24in [49]
coming trends in men’s wear and Mrs Richard Smith Arts Council of Great Britain
accessories (a) Together let us explore the 61 69
stars Towards a definitive statement on the Epiphany
1962 coming trends in men’s wear and 1964
Oil and collage on panel accessories (d)
Cellulose on panel
61 « 81cem/24 x 32in [43] 1963
diameter 122cm/48in [47-48]
The Tate Gallery Oil, collage, perspex relief on panel
122 « 81cm/48 x 32in 70
55
or 81 x 122cm/32 x 48in [44-45] A little bit of Roy Lichtenstein for....
Towards a definitive statement on the
Eric Franck, Kusnacht-Zurich 1964
coming trends in men’s wear and
Screenprint
accessories (b) sketch 62
58:5 91:5cm/23 « 36in [48]
1962 Adonis in Y fronts
Petersburg Press
Gouache on collage on paper 1963
25-5 35:5cm/10 14in [43-44] Screenprint
Rowland Scherman, New York 68-5 x 84cm/27 = 33in [44]
Petersburg Press
 93

71 79 87
Five Tyres abandoned Patricia Knight [4/6] My Marilyn — trial proof
1964 1964 1965
Screenprint Oil and silkscreen Screenprint
58:5x 91-5cm/23 « 36 in [46] 76 x 51cm/30 x 20in [51 and 53] 56:5 x 67-5cem/224 x 263in [58]
Petersburg Press Petersburg Press
88
72 80[L] My Marilyn
Interior study (a) Interior | 1965
1964 1964 Screenprint
Collage and oil on paper Oil, collage on panel with inlaid mirror 69 x 84cm/274 = 33in [57-58]
38 x 51cem/15 x 20in [50-51] 122 x 162:5cm/48 = 64in [50-54] Petersburg Press
Swindon Museum and Art Gallery Erna and Curt Burgauer, Kusnacht-Zurich 89
73([L] 81 Still-life — study
Interior study (b) Interior Il 1965
1964 1964 Collage
Collage, oil, pastel, gouache Oil, collage, cellulose, metal relief on panel 20:5 x 20:5cm/8 x 8in [59]
38 x 51cem/15 20in [50-51] 122 x 162-5cm/48 x 64in [50-55] 90
Anthony Diamond The Tate Gallery Still-life
74 82 1965
Interior study (c) Interior Photograph with sprayed phototints
1964 1964 89-5 x 91cm/354 x 353in [59]
Collage, oil, pastel Screenprint (first version) Sammlung Ludwig, Wallraf-Richartz
38 « 51cm/15 x 20in [50-51] 56:5 x 69cm/224 x 27iin [53] Museum, Cologne
Private collection, Cambridge Petersburg Press 91
75 83 Self-portrait |
Desk Interior 1965
1964 1964-5 Pen and ink
Pencil, pastel on printed perspective grid Screenprint 28:5 21cm/114™ 8iin [60]
40:5 x 54cm/16 « 214in [50—52) 56:5 78:5cm/224 x 31in [53] Private collection
Kurt Fried, Ulm Petersburg Press (Not in exhibition)
76 84 92
Desk Magic Carpets Self-portrait II
1964 1964 1965
Oil and collage on photograph on panel Collage on printed perspective grid Ink, oil
61 « 89cm/24 « 35in [50-52] 38 x 49-5cm/15« 193in [52-53] 28:5 21cm/114% x 8Zin [60]
Harry N Abrams Family Collection, New A Vowinckel, Cologne Rita Donagh
York 85 93
YY My Marilyn (paste-up) Self-portrait
Patricia Knight [not numbered] 1964 1965-7
1964 Photographs and oil Screenprint
Oil and silkscreen 51 <x 62cm/20 « 241in [56-58] 53:5 40-5cm/21 « 16in [60]
76 x 51cm/30 « 20in [51] Ricke Collection, Cologne Petersburg Press
Rita Donagh 86 94
78 My Marilyn Whitley Bay |
Patricia Knight [2/6] 1965 1965
1964 Oil and collage on photograph on panel Tinted photograph
Oil and silkscreen 102:5« 122cm/404 « 48in [57-58] 13-5 20:5cm/5ix 8in [61]
76 x 51cm/30 x 20in [51] The Peter Stuyvesant Foundation 95
Dr Johannes Cladders, Krefeld Whitley Bay Il
1965
Tinted photograph
14:5 20-5cm/52 8in [62]
 94

96 104 112
Whitley Bay The Solomon R Guggenheim — drawing II The Solomon R Guggenheim (gold)
1965 1965 1965-66
Oil on photograph on panel Sprayed ink on plastic film Fibreglass and cellulose and gold leaf
81 x 122cm/32 48in [61-62] 61 x 58:5cm/24x 23in [66 and 68] 122122 18cm/48 x 48 x Jin [66-69]
Private collection The Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, 113
97 New York The Solomon R Guggenheim (metalflake)
People 105[L] 1965-66
1965-66 The Solomon R Guggenheim — 4 trial proofs Fibreglass, acrylic, metalflake
Oil, cellulose on photograph 1965 122122 18cm/48 x 48 x Jin [66-68]
81 x 122cm/32 « 48in [62] Screenprints 114
98 each 58-5 « 58-5cm/23 x 23in [68] The Solomon R Guggenheim (spectrum)
Landscape Sanford Lieberson 1965-66
1965-66 106 Fibreglass and cellulose
Mixed media on photograph The Solomon R Guggenheim — trial proof 122122 18cm/48 x 48 x 7in [66-69]
81 « 244cm/32 96in [65] 1965 The Solomon R Guggenheim Museum,
Private collection Screenprint New York
99 58-5 x 58-5cm/23 = 23in [68] 115
Trafalgar Square study Petersburg Press The Solomon R Guggenheim — 4 Studies
1965 107 for ‘spectrum’
Oil and acrylic on panel The Solomon R Guggenheim 1966
40:5 61cm/16 x 26in [64-65] 1965 Crayon, watercolour, oil, pencil, ink
Private collection, Bellagio Screenprint each approx. 19 x 19cm/74x 73in [67-68]
100 58-5 x 58:5cm/23 x 23in [66 and 68] Mr and Mrs Lester Francis Avnet, New
Trafalgar Square Petersburg Press York
1965-67 108 116
Oil on photograph on panel The Solomon R Guggenheim — working Study for ‘The Solomon R Guggenheim’
81 < 122cm/32 48in [64-65] drawing 1967
Sammlung Ludwig, Wallraf-Richartz 1965 Gouache on photograph
Museum, Cologne Ink and pencil 19 18-5cm/74 = 7xin [67-68]
101 56 x 56cm/22 « 22in [66-67] The Solomon R Guggenheim Museum,
The Solomon R Guggenheim — architect's 109 New York
visual The Solomon R Guggenheim (black and (Not in exhibition)
1965 white) A l7/
Pastel and gouache 1965-66 Toaster
51 x 58:5cm/20 x 23in [66-67] Fibreglass and cellulose 1966-67 (reconstructed 1969)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 122122 18cm/48 « 48 « 7in [66-68] Chrome steel and perspex relief on colour
gift of Mr and Mrs Charles B Beneson The Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, photograph
102 New York 81 x 81cm/32 32in [70]
The Solomon R Guggenheim — study 110 118
1965 The Solomon R Guggenheim (Neapolitan) Toaster
Ink and pencil 1965-66 1967
52 52cm/204 « 204in [66-67] Fibreglass and cellulose Offset litho, silkscreen, metalized acetate
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 122122 18cm/48 x 48 x 7in [66-69] 89 x 63:5cm/35 x 25in [70]
Joseph M and Dorothy B Edinburg Fund 111 Petersburg Press
103 The Solomon R Guggenheim (black) 119
The Solomon R Guggenheim — drawing | 1965-66 Bathers |
1965 Fibreglass and cellulose 1966-67
Sprayed ink on plastic film 122 122 « 18cm/48 = 48 x 7in [66-69] Mixed media on photograph on canvas
62 x 59:5cm/244 x 234in [66 and 68] The Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, 84 117cm/33 x 46in [71-73]
New York Galerie Hans Neuendorf, Hamburg
 95

120 129 138

Bathers II The critic laughs Picturegram
1967 1968 (reconstructed 1969) 1968
Oil on colour photograph on canvas Dental plastic and electric toothbrush Oil on photograph on canvas
76x 114-5cm/30 x 45in [71-72] 22 9x 5em/82 x 34 2in [73] 101:5 x 65cm/40 « 253in [83-84]
121 130 139
I’m dreaming of a white Christmas — sketch The critic laughs People/Popel (in collaboration with
1967 1968 Diter Rot)
Watercolour, gouache, crayon, pencil Gouache and crayon on colour photograph 1968
69 x 101cm/274x 393in [75] 33 x 25:-5cm/13 x 10in [73-74] Acrylic, collage, cellulose, gouache on
122 131 photograph
I'm dreaming of a white Christmas — study The critic laughs 60 x 79cm/234 x 31in [62-64]
1967 1968 Mr and Mrs Paul Cornwall-Jones
Litho and gouache Offset litho, laminate, silkscreen, enamel 140
71x 91-:5cm/28 x 36in [75] 59:5 46:5cm/233 x 184in [73-74] People multiple (1/1)
Karl-Heinrich Miller, Dusseldorf Petersburg Press 1968
123 132 Photographs
I’m dreaming of a white Christmas— Swingeing London 67 — sketch 44 69cm/174™ 274in [63-64]
working drawings for screenprint 1968 Sergio Tosi, Milan
1967 Pencil, pastel, watercolour, metalized 141
Ink on plastic films acetate The Beatles
59 x 92cm/23% « 36Lin [75-76] 33 x 48cm/13 x 19in [78-79] 1968
Rolf Becker, Bremen Arts Council of Great Britain Collage
124 133 87:5x 58:5cm/343 « 23in [83]
I’m dreaming of a white Christmas Swingeing London 67 — poster 142
1967 1968 Swingeing London 67 (a)
Screenprint Offset litho 1968-69
76 x 104cm/30 « 41in [75-76] 70-5 x 50:5cm/274 x 192in [78-79] Oil on canvas and silkscreen
Petersburg Press Petersburg Press 67 x 85cm/264 = 334in [78-82]
Rita Donagh
125 134
Bathers (a) Swingeing London 67 — etching 143
1967 1968 Swingeing London 67 (b)
Screenprint Etching, aquatint, diestamping,
collage 1968-69
70:5 x 94:5cm/272 « 37xin [71 and 73] 57 x 72:5cem/224 x 283in [79] Oil on canvas and silkscreen
Petersburg Press Petersburg Press 67 x 85cm/264 « 334in [78-82]
Sammlung Ludwig, Wallraf-Richartz
126 135
Museum, Cologne
I’m dreaming of a white Christmas La Scala Milano
1967 1968 144
Phototints and colour pencils on colour Etching and silkscreen Swingeing London 67 (c)
photograph 25:5 37cm/10 x 143in [74] 1968-69
33 x 48cm/13 « 19in [76] Petersburg Press Oil on canvas and silkscreen
67 x 85cm/264 x 334in [78-82]
127 136
Swingeing London 67 — working drawing Michael Friedrichs, Cologne
I’m dreaming of a white Christmas
1967-68 1968 145
Oil on canvas Ink and gouache on photograph Swingeing London 67 (d)
106-5 « 160cm/42 « 63in [75-77] 40:5 51cm/16 x 20in [79-80] 1968-69
Oil on canvas and silkscreen
128 137
67 x 85cm/264 « 333in [78-82]
People Swingeing London 67
Private collection, Bellagio
1968 1968
Silkscreen, collage, gouache on Relief, silkscreen on oil on photograph on
photograph hardboard
65:5x 84-5cm/253 « 334in [62-63] 58:5« 79x 7:5cm/23 x 31 * 3in [78-80]
Petersburg Press Private collection, Cambridge
 96

146 154 163

Swingeing London 67 (e) Vignette Fashion-plate (cosmetic study V1)
1968-69 1969 1969
Enamel on canvas and silkscreen Dye transfer Collage, enamel and cosmetics on
67 « 85cm/264 « 334in [78-82] 59 x 49cm/234 19tin [73] lithographed paper
Galerie Hans Neuendorf, Hamburg Petersburg Press 100 x 70cm/394 x 272in [86-88]
147 155 164
Swingeing London 67 (f) Fashion-plate study (a) self-portrait Fashion-plate (cosmetic study VII)
1968-69 1969 1969
Silkscreen on canvas, acrylic and collage Collage, enamel and cosmetics on paper Collage, pastel, acrylic and cosmetics on
67 x 85cm/264 333in [78-82] 70 x 50cm/273 x 193in [86-87] lithographed paper
The Tate Gallery 100 x 70cm/394 x 273in [86-89]
156
148 Fashion-plate study (b) 165
Swingeing London 67 1969 Fashion-plate (cosmetic study VIII)
1969 Collage, enamel and cosmetics on paper 1969
Silkscreen and pastel on paper 70 x 50cm/273
x 1938in [86-87] Collage, enamel, acrylic and pastel on
71 X 88cm/28 x 343in [80 and 82] lithographed paper
157
Mr and Mrs Paul Cornwall-Jones 100 x 70cm/394 273in [86-89]
Fashion-plate study (c)
149 1969 166
After Marcel Duchamp ? Collage, enamel and cosmetics on paper Fashion-plate (cosmetic study IX)
1969 70 x 50cm/272 « 193in [86-87] 1969
Colour photographs (2) Collage, acrylic, pastel and cosmetics on
158
each 24 29cm/93 = 114in [85-86] Fashion-plate (cosmetic study |) lithographed paper
150 1969 100 x 70cm/394 « 273in [86-89]
People again Collage, enamel, acrylic and cosmetics on 167
1969 lithographed paper Fashion-plate (cosmetic study X)
Crayon, gouache, collage etc. on 100 « 70cm/393 « 273in [86-88] 1969
photograph Collage, enamel, pastel and cosmetics on
159
31 x 51¢em/124 x 20in [63-64] Fashion-plate (cosmetic study I!) lithographed paper
Private collection 1969 100 « 70cm/394 x 273in [86-89]
151 Collage, enamel, acrylic and cosmetics on 168
Miniature of Napoleon after J L David lithographed paper Fashion-plate (cosmetic study XI)
1969 100 x 70cm/393 « 273in [86-88] 1969
Gouache and ink on postcard Collage, acrylic and cosmetics on
160
15x 10:-5cm/6 x 44in [84] lithographed paper
Fashion-plate (cosmetic study III)
Klaus Hoffmann, Seebull 100 « 70cm/39%4 « 273in [86-89]
1969
152 Collage, enamel, acrylic and cosmetics on 169
I'm dreaming of a white Christmas lithographed paper Fashion-plate (cosmetic study XII)
1969 100 x 70cm/393 x 273in [86-88] 1969
Dye transfer Collage, pastel and cosmetics on
161
36 x 54cm/144 x 214in [76-77] lithographed paper
Fashion-plate (cosmetic study IV)
Petersburg Press 100 x 70cm/394 « 273in [86-89]
1969
alos Collage, enamel and cosmetics on 170
Bathers (b) lithographed paper Chicago Project |
1969 100 x 70cm/393 = 273in [86-88] 1969
Dye transfer Acrylic on photograph on board
162
29x 54cm/154™ 211in [72-73] 81 x 122cm/32» 48in [84-85]
Fashion-plate (cosmetic study V)
Petersburg Press 1969
Collage, acrylic and cosmetics on
lithographed paper
100 x 70cm/393 x 272in [86-88]

Biographical outline
including complete list of one-man
exhibitions
1922
Born London, 24 February.
1934
Started to attend evening classes in art at
local adult education centre, Pimlico,
though under age.
1936
Left elementary school. Worked for a year in
advertising department of electrical
engineering firm. Attended evening classes
in art at Westminster Technical College
(teachers included Mark Gertler and
Bernard Meninsky) and St Martin’s School
of Art (teachers included William Roberts).
1937
Engaged in display department of Reimann
Studios (art school/commercial studios).
Spent much time in life class. Teachers
included Merlyn Evans, Matvyn Wright,
and Prof Heyes-Heyer (who introduced
Hamilton to new art on exhibition).
1938
Student of painting at Royal Academy
Schools (to 1940). Teachers included
Sir Walter Russell.
1940
Nine months’ course as engineering
draughtsman.
1941
Jig and tool draughtsman (at Design Unit
to 1942; at EMI 1942-45).
1946
Resumed study at Royal Academy Schools;
expelled (July) for ‘not profiting by the
instruction given in the Painting School’
(teachers included Philip Connard and
Thomas Monnington). Began 18 months’
military service.
1947
Married Terry O'Reilly (September).
1948
Student of painting at Slade School of Art
(to 1951); spent much time making
etchings (teacher John Buckland Wright).
1950
Exhibition of Reaper engravings, Gimpel
Fils (February).
1951
Devised and designed ‘Growth & Form’
exhibition, ICA (July-August).
1952
Teacher (to 1953) of design to
silversmithing, typography and industrial
design students, Central School of Arts
and Crafts. Fellow teachers (various
departments) included Paolozzi, Pasmore,
Turnbull and Anton Ehrenzweig.
Independent Group formed at ICA (to
1955). Hamilton a member; others
included Reyner Banham, Lawrence
Alloway, John McHale (conveners),
Eduardo Paolozzi, Toni del Renzio, Alison
and Peter Smithson, Theo Crosby, Frank
Cordell, Nigel Henderson, James Stirling,
William Turnbull, Colin St John Wilson.
1953
Appointed lecturer, Fine Art Department,
King’s College, University of Durham (later
University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne),
Newcastle-upon-Tyne (to 1966).
Introduced and taught Basic Design course.
This and Victor Pasmore’s Basic Design
course, taught simultaneously, were
eventually fused, and taught to all Fine Art
Department students whatever their
final specialisation. Important roots of
the course lie in its teachers’ experience
at the Central School (see 1952). See
Bibl. A3 which also includes a useful
historical outline by Roger Coleman.
1955
Exhibition of paintings 1951—55, Hanover
Gallery (January). Devised and organised
‘Man, Machine and Motion’ exhibition,
Hatton Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne
(May) and ICA (July).
1956
With John McHale and John Voelcker
devised an environment on twin themes of
perception and popular imagery as part of
‘This is Tomorrow’ exhibition, Whitechapel
Gallery (August-September).
1957
With Alloway and Pasmore devised and
organised ‘an Exhibit’, Hatton Gallery,
Newcastle-upon-Tyne (June) and ICA
(August). Began to teach Interior Design
one day a week at Royal College of Art (to
1961). (None of Hamilton’s teaching
appointments were in painting, his
principal professional involvement).
97
1958
Designed ‘Gallery for a Collector of
Brutalist and Tachiste art’, Ideal Home
Exhibition, Olympia (March).
1960
Received William and Noma Copley
Foundation award for painting. Published
typographic version he had designed of
Marcel Duchamp’s Green Box (Bibl. A8).
1962
Death of wife Terry Hamilton in car
accident (November).
1963
First visit to USA (October).
1964
Exhibition of ‘Paintings etc. ‘56-64’,
Hanover Gallery (October-November).
1965
Began reconstruction (to 1966) of Marcel
Duchamp’s Large G/ass.
1966
Organised Arts Council exhibition ‘The
Almost Complete Works of Marcel
Duchamp’, Tate Gallery (June—July).
Exhibition of Guggenheim reliefs and
studies, Robert Fraser Gallery (October-
November).
1967
Exhibition of drawings and prints, Galerie
Ricke, Kassel (March). Exhibition of
paintings, Galerie Alexandre lolas, New
York (May).
1968
Exhibition of selected work 1957-68,
Studio Marconi, Milan (November).
1969
Collaborated with James Scott on a 25-
minute colour film on his work and its
sources, produced by Maya Film
Productions for the Arts Council of Great
Britain. Exhibition of Swingeing London 67
and beach scene paintings, Robert Fraser
Gallery (April-May). Exhibition of paintings
and graphics, Galerie Hans Neuendorf,
Hamburg (November). Exhibition of
Cosmetic studies, Studio Marconi, Milan
(December). Awarded joint first prize (with
Mary Martin), John Moores Liverpool
Exhibition 7 (November).
1970
Exhibition of Cosmetic studies, Galerie
René Block, Berlin (January).

Selected bibliography
Richard Hamilton’s own writings
Al
‘Hommage a Chrysler Corp.’, in
Architectural Design, Vol XXVIII, No 3,
March 1958, pp. 120-1.
A2
‘Towards a Typographical Rendering of the
Green Box’, in Uppercase, 2, 1959 (no
page numbers).
A3
‘Diagrammar’ in The Developing Process
(‘Work in progress towards a new
foundation of art teaching as developed at
the Department of Fine Art, King’s College,
Durham University, Newcastle-upon-Tyne,
and at Leeds College of Art’ ), Newcastle,
1959, pp. 19-26.
A4
‘Glorious Technicolour, Breathtaking
Cinemascope and Stereophonic Sound’,
unpublished typescript of lecture on
technical innovations in the leisure
industries, 1959.
A5
‘Persuading Image’, in Des/gn, 134
February 1960, pp. 28-32.
A6
Unpublished BBC transcript of ‘Artists as
Consumers ; the Splendid Bargain’,
discussion between Lawrence Alloway,
Basil Taylor, Richard Hamilton and
Eduardo Paolozzi, in the series Art— ant/-
Art; produced by Leonie Cohn, recorded
18 January 1960, and broadcast BBC
Third Programme, 11 March 1960.
A7
‘Art & Design’, lecture, followed by
transcript of discussion, in Popular Culture
and Personal Responsibility, verbatim
report of National Union of Teachers
Conference, Church House, Westminster,
26—28 October 1960, pp. 135-155.
A8
Diagram, and ‘The Green Book’, in The
Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even,
typographic version by Hamilton of
Duchamp’s Green Box, Lund Humphries,
1960.
AQ
‘FoB+ 10’, in Design, 149, May 1961,
p. 42.
A10
‘For the Finest Art try — POP’, in Gazette,
No 1, 1961.
A11
Statement on ‘Glorious Techniculture’
(49), in Architectural Design, Vol XX\, No
11, November 1961, p. 497 (part of the 27
pages of this issue devoted to the buildings
and art assembled on the South Bank for
the Congress of the International Union of
Architects, London, July 1961).
A12
‘About art teaching, basically’, in Motif, 8,
Winter 1961, pp. 17-23.
A13
‘An exposition of $he’, in Architectura/
Design, Vol XXXII, No 10, October 1962,
pp. 485-6 (reprinted in Bibl. B.35).
A14
Text (p. 37) and illustrations, on
commissioned theme of incidence and
selection of images experienced in daily
life, in Ark, 34, Journal of the Royal
College of Art, London, Summer 1963,
pp. 4, 14-16, 24-26, 34, 37.
A15
‘Urbane Image’, in Living Arts, 2, 1963, pp.
44-59 (and inside and outside cover
photographs).
A16
‘Duchamp’, in Art /nternationa/, V\\/10,
16 January 1964, pp. 22—28.
A17
Catalogue of exhibition of paintings
1956-64, Hanover Gallery, London, 20
October — 20 November, 1964.
A18
Unpublished BBC transcript of interview
with Andrew Forge, produced by Leonie
Cohn, recorded 3 November 1964, first
broadcast in part in ‘New Comment’,
November 1964, and first broadcast in full
on 5 April 1965 (both broadcasts in BBC
Third Programme).
A19
‘Portrait of Hugh Gaitskell as a Famous
Monster of Filmland’, unpublished
typescript, 1964.
98
A20
Introduction and notes on works in VOT
SEEN and/or LESS SEEN of/by MARCEL
DUCHAMP/RROSE SELAVY 1904-64,
catalogue of the Mary Sisler Collection,
Cordier & Ekstrom, Inc., New York,
January-February 1965.
A21
The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors
Even Again (an illustrated account of
Hamilton’s reconstruction of Duchamp’s
Large Glass), Newcastle-upon-Tyne,
1966.
A22
Catalogue of Arts Council Marcel
Duchamp retrospective exhibition, Tate
Gallery, 18 June — 31 July, 1966.
A23
‘Son of the Bride Stripped Bare’, in Art and
Artists, Vol 1, No 4, July 1966, pp. 22-28
(interview with Mario Amaya on
Hamilton’s reconstruction of Duchamp’s
Large Glass).
A24
Catalogue of exhibition of paintings
1964-67, Galerie Alexandre lolas, New
York, 1 —31 May 1967.
A25
‘Roy Lichtenstein’, in Studio /nternational,
Vol 175, No 896, January 1968, pp. 20—24.
A26
Unpublished BBC transcript of interview
with Christopher Finch and Anne
Seymour (in which Allen Jones was also
interviewed), produced by Leonie Cohn,
recorded 3 May 1968 and broadcast in
BBC Third Programme, 15 May 1968.
A27
Unpublished pre-edited transcript of
conversation with Christopher Finch and
James Scott for Arts Council/Maya Film
Productions film (1969) on Hamilton's
work, 1968.
A28
Catalogue of exhibition of work 1957-68,
Studio Marconi, Milan, November 1968
(includes Italian translation of Bibl. A15).
A29
‘Photography and painting’, in Stud/o
International, Vol 177, No 909, March
1969, pp. 120—5 and cover.

General
B1
Catalogue of ‘Growth & Form’ exhibition,
ICA, London, 4 July—31 August 1951.
B2
Catalogue of ‘This is Tomorrow’ exhibition,
Whitechapel Gallery, London, August —
September 1956.
B3
Catalogue of ‘an Exhibit’, Hatton Gallery,
King’s College, Newcastle-upon-Tyne,
3-19 June, and ICA, London, 13—24
August 1957 (text by Lawrence Alloway).
B4
Alloway, Lawrence. ‘Re Vision’, in Art
News & Review, Vol VI, No 26, 22 January
OD OA DEO
B5
Alloway, Lawrence. ‘Art News from
London’, in Art News (New York), Vol 54,
No 3, May 1955, p. 11 (on ‘Man, Machine
& Motion’).
B6
Alloway, Lawrence. ‘London: beyond
painting and sculpture’, in Art Vews (New
York), Vol 55, No 5, September 1956, pp.
38 and 64—5 (on ‘This is Tomorrow’).
B7
Alloway, Lawrence. ‘Artists as Consumers’,
in /mage No 3 (circa February) 1961, pp.
14-19.
B8
Alloway, Lawrence. ‘ ‘Pop Art” since
1949’ in The Listener, 27 December 1962,
pp. 1085-7.
B9
Alloway, Lawrence. ‘The Development of
British Pop’, in Pop Art, ed. Lucy Lippard,
Thames & Hudson, 1966, pp. 26-67.
B10
Alloway, Lawrence. ‘Pop Art: The Words’,
in Auction (house journal of Parke-Bernet
Galleries, New York), Vol 1, No 5,
February 1968, pp. 7-9.
B11
Alloway, Lawrence. ‘Popular Culture and
Pop Art’, in Studio /nternational, Vol 178,
No 913, July-August 1969, pp. 17-21.
B12
Banham, Reyner. ‘Vision in Motion’, in Art
5 January 1955, p. 3.
B13
Banham, Reyner. Commentary in
catalogue of ‘Man, Machine & Motion’
exhibition, Hatton Gallery, King’s College,
Newcastle-upon-Tyne, May, and ICA,
London, 6-30 July 1955.
B14
Banham, Reyner. ‘Man, Machine &
Motion’, in The Architectural Review, Vol
CXVIII, No 703, July 1955, pp. 51-3.
B15
Banham, Reyner. ‘Miscellany —
Exhibitions’, in The Architectural Review,
Vol CXX, No 716, September 1956, pp.
186-8 (review of ‘This is Tomorrow’).
B16
Banham, Reyner. ‘Ideal Interiors’, in
The Architectural Review, Vol CXXIII,
No 734, March 1958, pp. 207-8 (review,
with reproduction, of Hamilton’s ‘Gallery
for a Collector of Brutalist and Tachiste
art’).
B17
Banham, Reyner. ‘Motherwell and Others’,
in The Architectural Review, Vol CXL, No
833, July 1966, pp. 59-62.
B18
Banham, Reyner. The New Brutalism. The
Architectural Press, 1966.
B19
Banham, Reyner. ‘Representations in
Protest’, in New Society, 8 May 1969, pp.
717-8.
B20
Baro, Gene. ‘Hamilton’s Guggenheim’, in
Art & Artists, Vol 1, No 8, November
1966, pp. 28-31.
B21
Crispolti, Enrico. La Pop Art. Fratelli
Fabbri, Milan, 1966.
B22
Crosby, Theo. ‘This is Tomorrow’, in
Architectural Design, Vol XXVI, No 9,
September 1956, pp. 302—4.
B23
Crosby, Theo. ‘This is Tomorrow’, in
Architectural Design, Vol XXV1, No 10,
October 1956, pp. 334-6.
B24
Finch, Christopher. ‘Richard Hamilton’, in
Art International, X/8, October 1966, pp.
16-23.
99
B25
Finch, Christopher. Pop Art, Object &
/mage. Studio Vista/Dutton Pictureback,
1968.
B26
Finch, Christopher. /mage as Language,
Aspects of British Art 1950-68. Pelican
Books, 1969.
B27
Lynton, Norbert. ‘London Letter’, in Art
International, V\\|\/10, December 1964,
p. 43.
B28
Lynton, Norbert. ‘Art out of News’, in The
Guardian, 25 April 1969, p. 10.
B29
McNay, M G. ‘Big Daddy of pop’, in The
Guardian, 25 July 1966, p. 7.
B30
Procktor, Patrick. ‘Techniculture’, in The
New Statesman, Vol 68, No 1756,
6 November 1964, p. 710.
B31
Reichardt, Jasia. ‘Pop Art & After’, in Art
/nternational, V\\/2, 25 February 1963, pp.
42-47.
B32
Rot, Diter. Phonetic translation of Bibl. A15
in catalogue of Hamilton one-man
exhibition, Galerie Hans Neuendorf,
Hamburg.
B33
Russell, John. ‘Art News from London’, in
Art News (New York), Vol 63, No 9,
January 1965, p. 49.
B34
Russell, John and Lord Snowdon, in
Robertson, Russell, Snowdon, Private
View. Nelson, 1965, pp. 258-9.
B35
Russell, John and Gablik, Suzi. Pop Art
Redefined. Thames & Hudson, 1969.
B36
Seymour, Anne. Catalogue of exhibition
Drawing Towards Painting 2, Arts Council
Gallery, London, 14 April-20 May 1967
(and tour).
B37
Spencer, Charles. ‘Richard Hamilton,
Painter of ‘“‘Being Today” ’, in Studio
International, Vol 168, No 858, October
1964, pp. 176-181.
 100

Index to lenders The Artist 123456891011 1418 19 20 37 46 58 67 69 87 89 94

95 97 103 108 110 112 113 117 120 121 126 127 129 130
136 138 141 149 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164
165 166 167 168 169 170
Private collections17 28 35 40 47 50 53 66 74 96 98 99 137
145 150

Harry N Abrams Family Collection 76

Mr and Mrs David Allford 39
Arts Council of Great Britain 68 132
LM Asher Family 36
Mr and Mrs Lester Francis Avnet 115
Mrs Mary Banham 23
Reyner Banham 13
Rolf Becker 123
Bruno Bischofberger 29
Erna and Curt Burgauer 80[L]
Dr Johannes Cladders 42 78
Mr and Mrs Paul Cornwall-Jones 12 22 26 139 148
Anthony Diamond 73[L]
Rita Donagh 15 30 34 41 77 92 142
Mrs Marcel Duchamp 33
Alexander Dunbar 44
Eric Franck 49 61
Kurt Fried 75
Michael Friedrichs 144
Mrs H E Grigg 56
Solomon R Guggenheim Museum 104 109 111 114
Dominy Hamilton 59
Roderic Hamilton 16
Klaus Hoffmann 151
Dr Heinz Hunstein 48
Edwin Janss Jr 21
Mr and Mrs Benn W Levy 7 38
Sanford Lieberson 105[L]
Sammlung Ludwig, Wallraf-Richartz Museum 90 100 143
Giorgio Marconi 25
Richard Morphet 27
Karl-Heinrich Muller 122
Museum of Modern Art, New York 101 102
Galerie Hans Neuendorf 65 119 146
Petersburg Press 62 7071 79 82 83 88 93 106 107 118 124
125 1281319133 184.1351525153)154
Ricke Collection 85
Rowland Scherman 55
Mrs Richard Smith 60
Hanns Sohm 63
Peter Stuyvesant Foundation 86
Swindon Museum and Art Gallery 72
Tate Gallery 54 81 147
John Taylor 45
Joe Tilson 64
Sergio Tosi 140
A Vowinckel 43 84
Mr and Mrs Max Wasserman 51
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