British Pop Art pioneer Richard Hamilton died on September 13, 2011 at 88 just after completing three large paintings for a new forthcoming solo exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in London.
Despite his achievements, Hamilton remained rather unknown by the public contrary to Lucian Freud or David Hockney, a fact that led his wife Rita Donagh to regret that he was the only British artist who had not a book written about him.
Still, Hamilton pioneered Pop art well before British contemporaries such as Eduardo Paolozzi or his American counterparts Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol. Indeed, Hamilton is often credited with having invented the genre with a famous collage from 1956 featuring a muscleman holding a red lollipop adorned with the word "Pop" which defined modern consumer culture as "witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous, big business".
In fact, Hamilton felt isolated though his great inventive works produced in the 1950's and the early 1960's titled "Hommage à Chrysler Corporation", "Pin-up" [now in the collection of New York's Museum of Modern Art ], and "Hers is a Lush Situation" should have earned him the recognition he deserved.
At the time, nobody was doing anything like that but Hamilton didn't have any support from other artists and had to wait many years before his influence over Pop Art was fully acknowledged.
Home
News
