On the eve of a major career
retrospective at Tate Modern, Richard
Cork recalls his meetings with the visionary artist
Richard Cork
Pop Art didn’t exist when
Richard Hamilton helped to organise the epoch-making London exhibition This Is
Tomorrow, held at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1956. But his section of the
show was daring enough to celebrate images culled from advertising, comic books
and film publicity. It outraged conservative English opinion at the time, and
Hamilton also made a brilliantly witty, provocative collage called Just what is
it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?
Here, in a room containing a
blown-up cover of Young Romance and an immense tin of ham on the coffee-table,
a muscle-bound Mr Universe flaunts his physique and clasps a shamelessly
phallic tennis racket. It thrusts out of his groin like a giant lollipop, and
the words “Tootsie POP” are splashed across its orange wrapping paper.
Looking at this collage now, we
immediately link Hamilton with the brash images produced in New York by Roy
Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol. But they did not begin their Pop work until the
1960s. Hamilton was a prophet, and his innovative collage now looks like a
clarion call for the army of Pop artists who would take the Sixties by storm.
His prodigious career is about to be celebrated in a major retrospective show at
Tate Modern, which opens this week. But back in 1956 he was struggling to make
a living. I was lucky enough to interview Hamilton on several occasions and
once asked him how he had felt then, as a 34-year-old artist in London. “I felt
completely out on a limb”, he told me. “I thought that I was being tremendously
adventurous and alone, going out into the sea with absolutely nothing in front
of me.”
At this difficult stage in his career,
Hamilton benefited from belonging to the Independent Group, a “small, cohesive,
quarrelsome, abrasive” assembly of angry young artists, critics and theorists
who met regularly at the ICA in London. He felt stimulated by the intense,
questioning attitude which gave these meetings their extraordinary vitality.
For Hamilton had always been a rebel, right back to his time studying at the
Royal Academy Schools. His experiences there ended in an explosive rumpus, and
he relished telling me about it many years later.
Hamilton first entered the RA
Schools in 1938, when he was only 16. At first the precocious teenager did
well, but the Schools were closed during the Second World War. Hamilton
recalled that “I had to go to the Labour Exchange, and they said: ‘What have
you been doing? Can you use a pencil? We’ll make you an engineering draughtsman.’”
So Hamilton received training and worked for a few dull years in an armaments
factory. When the war ended, he returned with immense relief to the RA Schools.
But the reactionary teachers hated Hamilton’s fascination with Modernism.
“Alfred Munnings had become the
President, and he used to appear after riding in Rotten Row”, Hamilton told me.
“Dressed in a rakish hat and boots, with a riding crop in his hand, he would
shout: ‘Are you one of those bastards who talks about Picasso?’ Munnings was
frightening, and my teacher Thomas Monnington also got angry when he saw my
Cézanne-influenced life drawings. He said: ‘Augustus John knocks spots off
Cézanne!’ I roared with laughter – it was hysterically funny. But Monnington
was not amused.”
Hamilton refused to change his
ideas about art. “By that time I wasn’t a kid any more, and this was all a bit
silly. Sir Walter Russell, the Keeper of the RA Schools, was still kind to me,
but he called me in and said: ‘The President has been told that you are not
profiting from your studentship. Therefore it is terminated.’ I was expelled.”
At the age of 24, the would-be artist now found himself “dragged screaming into
the bloody Army for a year-and-a-half’s national service with the Royal
Engineers”.
Hence Hamilton’s eagerness to
be defiantly innovative when he resumed his own creative work in the 1950s. But
even after the exposure afforded him by This Is Tomorrow, he “tried for eight
years to persuade dealers around London to give me an opportunity to show.” Then,
quite suddenly, he said, “I learned about the existence of Peter Blake, Allen
Jones and David Hockney”. They were still students at the Royal College of Art,
but Pop Art now created enough excitement to earn them a show in London. Even
though Hamilton was over a decade older than most of them, he felt “very
pleased that I was invited to contribute” to this exhibition. “I was carried
along on David Hockney’s golden coat-tails. He wafted in, and I was somehow
given a little reflected shine from this gold suit that he wore on special
occasions.”
During the 1960s, Hamilton
revealed just how impressive and experimental he really was. References to the
cinema abound in his work from this period, but its tone ranges from the
brashly satirical to the profoundly mournful. The leader of the Labour Party is
transformed into a bug-eyed maniac in Portrait of Hugh Gaitskell as a Famous
Monster of Filmland. But in the same year, 1964, Hamilton explored his
preoccupation with death by producing the sinister Interior II, based on a
murderous moment in the 1949 thriller Shockproof. Then, a few years later, he
seized on a press photograph of a contemporary event: Mick Jagger’s notorious
arrest on a drugs charge alongside the art dealer Robert Fraser. Handcuffed
together in a police van, the two men raise their hands in an ambiguous gesture
– half demonstrating their plight, half shielding themselves from intrusive
cameras. And Hamilton chose a typically sardonic title for his picture:
Swingeing London 67.
As he grew older, harrowing
themes dominated his work. The tragedy of Northern Ireland haunted him,
especially when he saw a TV news film of the so-called Dirty Protest at The
Maze prison near Belfast. In The Citizen, he showed the Christ-like figure of a
bearded protester who wore blankets and smeared the walls of his cell with
excrement. Hamilton was also profoundly moved by the fatal shooting of four
students by National Guardsmen at Kent State University, Ohio, during a campus
demo in 1970. “It’s a demonstration of the stupidity of mankind”, Hamilton told
me in 2010, his voice still expressing the deep emotion which had led him to
make such a powerful work from the event.
By then he was approaching 90,
but still completely dedicated to producing art at the Oxfordshire farmhouse
where he lived with his wife and fellow-artist Rita Donagh. “I have a very fine
lamp hanging over my easel”, he said. “Rita gets fed up with me if I’m not
ready for my gin and tonic by half-eight or nine. But it’s necessary to work a
lot, in spite of the pain from my arthritis. I’m getting on, and I don’t
recommend it!” He died in September 2011, and only now will the Tate Modern
exhibition, along with related shows at the ICA and the Alan Cristea Gallery,
reveal the full extent of his multi-faceted achievements.
Tate Modern’s Richard Hamilton
retrospective runs from Thursday to 26 May