Artwork of the 80's
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Artists & Works
Richard Hamilton
British (b. 1922)
PICASSO'S MENINAS from Homage to Picasso (n.d.)
Drypoint etching and aquatint
29.75" X 22.25"

STYLE: HOMAGE TO PICASSO
POP ART

  

Richard Hamilton is considered one of the principal theorists of the Pop movement. He was expelled from the Royal Academy Schools in Great Britain for "not profiting from instruction." He then attended the Slade School of Art, and in the late fifties he began organizing exhibitions of artwork that addressed art, technology, and mass culture. Hamilton was a member of the Independent Group, formed in the 1950s by a group of artists and writers at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, whose symposiums contributed to the development of Pop Art in Britain. After a brief teaching career, Hamilton turned to a full-time art career, exhibiting his work world-wide and representing Britain at the 1993 Venice Biennale as well as participating in other international showcases.

Hamilton believed that all art was equal, with Elvis on one side of a long line and Picasso on the other. He was interested in all types of artistic creation and embraced technology in art-making early on. An accomplished printmaker, Hamilton has worked with master printers throughout his career. His print for the Homage to Picasso portfolio, Picasso's Meninas, is a double reference-referring to Picasso's reworking of Velasquez's Meninas, a portrait of the family of King Philip IV of Spain. Picasso is shown at left, as Velasquez, while Hamilton and his wife are in the background, as King Philip IV and his consort, Mariana. The print was made with master printer Aldo Crommelynck, who had worked with Picasso since 1963.

CRITICAL EXCERPTS

Richard Hamilton, "Art and Design," Popular Culture and Responsibility (1960)
"The mistake that critics of the mass media are making is to complain that pop art, as fed by the mass media to the mass audience, is not like fine art. But of course it is not. Fine art is accessible in terms of value judgments and its qualities are not transient, whereas pop art's values establish themselves by virtue of mass acceptance and will be expendable. What we might begin to worry about today is why current fine art is coming to assume all of the characteristics of pop art."
John Russell, New York Times, 2/27/04
"Born in 1922, Mr. Hamilton was from an early age an outsider's insider. After being expelled from the Royal Academy School in London for ignoring its hallowed ways, he spent 1947 and 1948 in compulsory military service. His spare moments during those years were given primarily to close study of James Joyce's Ulysses.
He enrolled in the Slade School in London in 1948, and in 1949 he made his first studies of Leopold Bloom, the chief character in ''Ulysses.'' Bloom was forever to be in and out of Mr. Hamilton's thoughts, serving as a 20th-century Everyman.
The notion of the art world as a sub-department of an ivory tower did not survive the end of World War II. Mr. Hamilton's understanding of this is well set out in the catalog to this show: ''After 1945, Hamilton asserted his conviction that the mass media presented life in a mid-20th century that had a mythological and epic quality that was just as powerful in its expression, and as worthwhile in artistic terms, as anything in history that had inspired generations before him. Henceforth this was to be the central tenet of his work.''