Richard Hamilton

Richard Hamilton (1922- ), British painter who pioneered the development of Pop Art in Britain in the 1950s.

Hamilton was born in London. In 1936-1937 he attended evening art classes in London while working in the advertising department of a commercial studio. He attended the Royal Academy Schools in London from 1938 to 1940, and again from 1945 to 1946. He studied at the Slade School of Art, London, from 1948 to 1951.

Hamilton, with the sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi and the critic Lawrence Alloway, was a member of the association of artists, critics, and architects known as the Independent Group, who met at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in the early 1950s, and whose discussions led to the formation of Pop Art in Britain. The Independent Group was interested in mass-produced urban culture, for example, cinema, science fiction, billboard advertising, and machines, and rejected the distinction between highbrow and popular taste. In London in the 1950s Hamilton organized several important exhibitions that explored these ideas. In 1956, the Independent Group mounted the renowned This Is Tomorrow exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, featuring a collage by Hamilton entitled Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing? (1956, Kunsthalle Tübingen, Germany)—an inventory of Pop images that contained the fundamental motifs of English and American Pop Art.

In the late 1950s, Hamilton created Pop paintings—for example $he (1958-1961, Tate Gallery, London)—in which he drew attention to the erotic use of the female figure in advertisements for toasters and vacuum cleaners. In 1966 he helped organize The Almost Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, an exhibition of the work of his friend Marcel Duchamp, at the Tate Gallery. Hamilton’s subsequent work explores the relationship between art and commerce in compositions as diverse as Five Tyres Remoulded (1971, collection of the artist), which proposes the tyre tread as art, and his designs of the late 1970s and the 1980s for stereo equipment—half amplifier, half oil painting—for a Japanese corporation. Among his major canvases, and one of his most widely exhibited works in recent years, is The Citizen (1982, Tate Gallery, London), a painting that takes as its subject the “dirty protest” of an IRA prisoner in his cell. In 1991 he completed a seven-year project designing a casing for a Swedish microcomputer. He represented Britain at the 1994 Venice Biennale. He lives and works in Oxfordshire. His writings, documents, and notes, Collected Words, were published in 1982.