Richard Hamilton

2 Pages 434 Words

Richard Hamilton

Richard Hamilton was born in 1922. He Finished at the Slade School of Art in London in 1951 after working in advertising during the forties. Hamilton’s style was established in 1956 when he finished his work, “Just what is it that makes today’s homes so appealing”. It was inspired by an Italian artist named Eduardo Paolozzi, who was known for including references to popular culture as well as mechanical elements in his art. Richard Hamilton was one of an independent group who wanted his art to be “of the moment”, rather than above it.
With inspiration from artist Eduardo Paolozzi, Richard Hamilton did various collaborations with other artists that shared his beliefs in art as well as created much of his own using popular culture. In his works he included journalism, cinema, advertising, sex, and television, as well as many other topics that were big in the moment that the art was being created. The idea that advertising could shape the consumer’s desires excited Hamilton, therefore, he used lots of snippets of advertising from magazines and television in his work (Fineberg, 239). This type of art was popular with British pop musicians as well, and when asked to do some work, Richard Hamilton jumped at the chance to create art for the Beatles on their white album in 1967. Hamilton as well as the others in “The Independent Group” had paved the way for pop art to break through in the sixties.
In Lawrence Alloway’s article entitled “The Arts and the Mass Media”, not a whole lot is said about Richard Hamilton and his works except that he and Eduardo Paolozzi were the forefathers of pop art. What is said about the art created is that the mass media give perpetual lessons in assimilation, instruction in role-taking, the use of new objects, as well as many other things. In essence, popular art, as a whole, offers imagery and plots to control the changes in the world; everything in our...