Without doubt one of the most important and prolific British postwar artists, Hamilton made work that ranged across a wide spectrum of media, including painting, printmaking, photography, sculpture, typography and collage. With early works such as Just What Is It that Makes Today’s Home’s So Different, So Appealing? (1956), Hommage a Chrysler Corp (1957), Epiphany (1964), My Marilyn (1965) and Swingeing London ’67 (1968–9) Hamilton helped to define Pop Art, and with his cover for The Beatles’ White Album (1968) played an direct role in shaping 1960s pop culture. Throughout his career, Hamilton experimented at the intersections between design, technology and art; works such as Ashtray (1979), Lux 50 (1979) and OHIO (1985) demonstrated his long-standing interest in utility and industrial design. In the 1980s, Hamilton’s work took a more explicitly political turn, taking on subjects such as the Troubles in Northern Ireland, Margaret Thatcher’s premiership and the first Gulf War with works including Treatment Room (1983–4) and The Citizen (1981–3).
An artist of serious intellect, Hamilton also had a deep engagement with the work of fellow artists; his friendship with Marcel Duchamp led to him curating the first British retrospective of Duchamp’s work in 1966, a typographic version of The Green Box (published in 1960) and a reconstruction of Duchamp’s fragile work The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (1915–23). Hamilton was instrumental in the preservation of the Merzbau, built by Kurt Schwitters in Cumbria, and in the late 1970s produced work in collaboration with the artist Dieter Roth. Since the 1940s, Hamilton had also been engaged in a project to illustrate James Joyce’s 1922 novel Ulysses, and his ‘Imaging Ulysses’ project was exhibited at the British Museum in 2002. Hamilton was an influential teacher too; amongst his students at Kings College, Newcastle-upon-Tyne (later part of Newcastle University) between 1953 and 1966 were Nicholas De Ville, Rita Donagh (whom he was later to marry and collaborate with on a number of exhibitions), Mark Lancaster, Tim Head and Roxy Music’s Bryan Ferry.
Hamilton was a member of the Independent Group in the 1950s, and collaborated on the landmark exhibition ‘This Is Tomorrow’ at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, in 1956. Throughout his career he exhibited internationally. Major retrospective exhibitions were organized by the Tate Gallery, London (1970 and 1992), the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1973), MACBA, Barcelona, and Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2003). He participated in Documenta 4 and Documenta X, Kassel (1968 and 1997); the São Paulo Bienal (1989), and the Shanghai Biennale (2006). A major touring retrospective, curated by Paul Schimmel and Vicente Todoli will open in the summer of 2013 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and will travel to the Philadelphia Museum of Art; Tate Modern, London; and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid.
Hamilton was born the same year as Lucien Freud, who died in July this year, and yet the paths they took as artists could not have been more different. Unlike Freud, who applied himself deeply to a narrow field of activity as a painter, Hamilton went both wide and deep. He was an artist who actively demonstrated, through the things he made, a huge breadth of interests; in ideas, techniques and materials, and in other artists and areas of thought. Above all, Hamilton was an artist who believed, to some degree or other, in an idea of the future. As Michael Bracewell observed in an article on Hamilton in frieze in 2003, ‘Hamilton delivered a definition of Pop art back in 1957 that has yet to be improved on or updated – nothing less than the anatomy of Mass Age culture. His list of Pop’s defining adjectives – including “Transient (short-term solution)”, for instance, and “Expendable (easily forgotten)” – comprise an understanding of both the symptoms and the consequences of an increasingly accelerated culture.’
