Richard Hamilton was born in Pimlico, London in 1922 into a working class family. At the age of twelve he smuggled himself into an adult education evening art class.  Two years later he was so proficient at drawing that he was recommended to the Keeper of the Royal Academy School and secured a place for when he was sixteen, attending the life class at St Martins in the meantime. From 1938 to 1940 he was a student at the Royal Academy but since he was too young to be conscripted was sent by the Labour Exchange to study engineering draughtsmanship at a Government Training Centre when the art school was closed because of the outbreak of war. This kept him out of the army and in 1946 he returned to the Royal Academy.  A new regime under the vehemently anti-modernist artist Sir Alfred Munnings was not to Hamilton’s taste and he was soon expelled; consequently, he became eligible for military service but eventually gained a place at the Slade where it counted as a badge of honour to have been expelled from the Royal Academy School. It was here that he came into contact with the work and ideas of his foremost mentor, Marcel Duchamp – in 1965 he reconstructed Duchamp’s Large Glass. Two books had an abiding influence on him, D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s On Growth and Form and Siegfried Giedon’s Mechanisation Takes Command. The first dealt with natural form and morphology, the second with technological form and process. His paintings at that time were predominantly abstract, using point and line to articulate the canvas’s flat surface. From the first it was ideas that dominated and determined style. After graduating Hamilton taught for thirteen years at King’s College, Newcastle upon Tyne but was also involved in a whole series of innovative exhibitions. Growth and Form at the ICA for the Festival of Britain already demonstrated his preoccupation with technical devices and the degree to which they determine how an image is to be interpreted. Man, Machine and Motion, also at the ICA, represented a recapitulation of Futurist and Expressionist ideas and demonstrated how machines could extend the power of the human body. Finally in 1956 he co-organised This is Tomorrow at the Whitechapel Art Gallery. It was for the frontispiece of the exhibition catalogue and the poster that Hamilton created his most famous collage Just what is it the makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?  Anticipating the two main preoccupations of the sixties, this exhibition, based explicitly on the collaboration between architects, painters and sculptors, focused on the juxtapositioning of admass imagery and the ambiguities of perception, both of which were already central to Hamilton’s thinking of art as predominantly the communication of ideas.

Hamilton was both assiduous and sophisticated in his search for the correct image and its placement within the permutations of his compositions, and to this degree can be considered “academic,” as in this sense is his mentor Duchamp. As Hamilton says, “Anything I respect in art is for its ideas rather than for its handling or any other quality.” Nevertheless, “handling” in terms of a variety of techniques is vital to his working practice and also translates a fundamental understanding of reality as the essentially ambiguous grounding of our appraisal of events. The basic idea is that mass media informs popular apprehension of current and historical events. This is where politics and our “modern morality” come in. Each project that Hamilton takes up is subjected to an analytic process that in most cases, but not all, requires prolonged research and study. As in pre-modern academic painting a narrative context precedes any artistic image making. There is little room for spontaneity. The many different permutations of an image are carefully calibrated. Hamilton’s training at the Royal Academy and time spent as an engineering draughtsman were not wasted and Hamilton has remained loyal to his artistic origins. Since 1956 all of Hamilton’s work has been made up of composite elements which are then refined into a unified scheme. While recognising that painting is composed of marks on a flat surface and in this way announces its autonomy, Hamilton often plays with different styles and different perspectives in one painting. Illusionistic areas abut diagrammatic elements, paint overlays photographic material (often taken from press cuttings) or relief constructions and vice versa. All these techniques are visible in the series Swingeing London 67(1968-9) and the Portrait of Hugh Gaitskell (1964).

The first room in this exhibition is given over to Swingeing London so that it’s possible for us to see all the many variables involved in developing an idea from straight documentary to a much more stylized rendering of its subject matter. In February 1967 the police had raided the home of Rolling Stone Keith Richards, and Mick Jagger and Hamilton’s art dealer Robert Fraser were charged with the possession of unlawful drugs. Fraser was sentenced to six months imprisonment, Jagger’s sentence was commuted to a twelve month conditional discharge. The source of Hamilton’s image was taken by a Daily Mail photographer as seen through the window of a police van taking them, and other prisoners, to Chichester Court House. The tabloids were full of irrelevant information such as the colour of Jagger’s jacket, which Hamilton reproduced in the Poster print. The original series of six was worked on from an initial water colour into an etching, one of Hamilton’s preferred mediums, and a screen print on to which were added passages of oil paint, embossing and collage. In terms of imagery the emphasis was on the two sets of hands that denote freedom or rather the restraints on freedom in a society that professed to support excessive individuality. The title of the series refers to the swingeing sentences imposed. Hamilton’s sympathies were definitely with the victims of the legislation against drugs and he returned to this series to produce a print for Release, an organisation that gave legal aid to individuals most of whom were involved in drug related offences. He also helped organise an exhibition in support of Fraser during his imprisonment.

The catalyst for the Portrait of Hugh Gaitskell as a Famous Monster of Filmland (1964) was the assumption by some critics that Hamilton’s paintings were satirical in intent. Since this was not the case Hamilton decided to experiment with subject matter that was pointedly satirically and came up with a hate figure in Gaitskell, the leader of the Labour party and of the opposition from 1955 to his death in 1963. Gaitskell, who in general elections had twice lost to the Tories, blamed the left for Labour’s failure at the polls and anticipated in many ways the more recent right wing turn in New Labour. However, Hamilton’s anger was chiefly motivated by Gaitskell’s refusal to add his support to Labour’s calls for the unilateral disarmament of Britain’s nuclear weaponry. This earned the artist’s total disapproval and resulted in a portrait engendered by the morphing of a press photo of Gaitskell with an image of the phantom of the opera and other filmic science fiction monsters. Henceforth Hamilton’s paintings and prints were to take on a signal political character. Whether they are directly about politics or about the communication of political ideas or even about art’s ability to convey political matters is a moot point.