Richard Hamilton (24 February 1922 – 13 September 2011) English painter and printmaker. Three different strands of training and experience contributed to his early life and career after being taught briefly by Mark Gertler at Westminster Technical College in 1936: a traditional training at the Royal Academy Schools (1938–40, 1945–6), from which he was eventually expelled ‘for not profiting by the instruction given in the Painting School’; experience in commercial art at the Design Unit (1941–2) and at the record company EMI (1942–5); and an avant-garde, modernist-influenced training at the Slade School of Fine Art (1948–51). These prepared the ground for his subsequent exploration of the means by which received boundaries between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art could be eliminated, in order to examine the relationships between diverse forms of expression, styles and currents of taste normally considered mutually exclusive.
As early as 1948 James Joyce and Marcel Duchamp became major influences on his thinking, first in drawings illustrating Ulysses and subsequently in his Reaper prints (1949–51; see Richard Hamilton: Prints, 1939–83, pp. 23–31). He participated in the discussions of the Independent group concerning popular culture, advertising, the media and mass art (1952–5), and he adapted elements from these forms in developing his distinctive stance. In the exhibition Man, Machine and Motion (U. Newcastle upon Tyne, Hatton Gal., and London, ICA, 1955), which Hamilton devised, he examined ways in which car design made covert statements about status, power and sexuality. These concerns paralleled the semiological analyses of contemporary writers such as Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco and Jean Baudrillard, in which everyday fashions, lifestyles and commodities came to be read as critiques of consumerism, revealing its ethics, its imagination and the way in which it transformed desires, values and expectations into particular styles. Such ideas were among the themes of the collage Just What Is it that Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing? (1956; Tübingen, Ksthalle), which Hamilton produced for the exhibition This Is Tomorrow at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, in 1956. In this domestic interior scene a stereotyped semi-nude couple cut from the pages of mass-circulation magazines disport themselves amid up-to-date accessories of comfortable living. This iconography of modernity, affluence and glamour, while appearing to promise a blissful picture of the forthcoming consumer paradise, is relayed with a questioning and ironic tone that announces the double-edged mode of parody, a characteristic of Pop Art. S. C. Maharaj | From Grove Art Online | © 2009 Oxford University Press
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