Richard Hamilton

A pioneer of British Pop art, Richard Hamilton (1922–2011) was an English painter and collage artist, who explored consumerism, advertising and the media in the realm of fine art. His 1955 exhibition Man, Machine and Motion at the Hatton Gallery in Newcastle upon Tyne and his 1956 collage Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? are widely considered among the earliest works of the Pop movement.

Richard Hamilton was born in London in 1922. After briefly working in the advertising department of a commercial studio, Hamilton attended the Royal Academy Schools in 1938. Following his graduation in 1940, the artist studied engineering draughtsmanship at a government training centre and worked as a tool and jig designer during World War II. After the war, he studied etching at the Slade School of Art and taught design between 1952 and 1966.

In the 1950s, Hamilton became a member of the Independent Group, formed within the Institute of Contemporary Arts by artists such as Eduardo Paolozzi and John McHale, critics including Lawrence Alloway and Reyner Banham, and architects like Alison and Peter Smithson. The group succeeded in applying a critical framework to advertising, product design, Hollywood film and popular music. At this point, by ‘Pop art’, the Independent Group meant popular culture. Members of the group also believed that fine art should be placed along a continuum, on the same level as popular culture, demolishing traditional cultural hierarchies. The group shared a common interest in the possibilities of collage, using imagery taken largely from glossy, colour American advertising.

Richard Hamilton’s work is a playful yet critical exploration of consumerism, mass media, and the intersection of high and low culture. Hamilton was experimenting with imagery which he thought encapsulated life. Hamilton’s aesthetic study constituted a close reading of the visual world using the apparatus of iconography. The artist experimented with the deconstruction of the realm of advertising and the visual allure of consumer goods, in an approach inspired by Marcel Duchamp and Surrealism. He succeeded in taking apart and reassembling his chosen imagery to produce a complex and multi-layered work, which teases apart the sophisticated language of advertising.

Richard Hamilton died in 2011 at the age of 89. Today, his works can be found in the collections of the Kunstmuseum Basel, the Tate and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Guggenheim Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, among others.

Browse related stories: Andy Warhol and Pop Art Style Guide