The Richard Hamilton Exhibition at the Tate Modern

I finally got round to seeing the Richard Hamilton exhibition at the Tate Modern yesterday. I don’t really know much of his work except for the very famous collage, ‘Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?’ which was seen as the first Pop art work. I didn’t realise quite how much he actually did in his lifetime and how incredibly varied his work was, both in medium and subject matter! His work was also incredibly current and moved with the times throughout his life.

These are a couple of his works that I thought were brilliant from this exhibition.

Firstly I thought his political portrait of Hugh Gaitskell, ‘Portrait of Hugh Gaitskell as a Famous Monster of Filmland’ was very effective. Hugh Gaitskell was the leader of the Labour party at the time and opposed the campaign for unilateral nuclear disarmament which was supported by most party members. He uses an interesting technique of incorporating painting as a tool for collage and it really does present Gaitskell as a villainous figure!

Later on in his career he used the same technique but combining it with more traditional collage for his ‘Fashion Plates’. This was a series of deconstructed images of models that revealed the darker side of the fashion world. Some of these plates just looked like fragments of a woman’s face others were actually quite gruesome and perhaps suggested something about what goes on behind those beautiful faces.

Towards the end of his life he carried on creating quite controversial artwork such as ‘War Games’ which was shown in the exhibition. This was centered on the Gulf War and commented on the changing ways in which news is conveyed through the media. This image was specifically responding to the trivialization of the war by BBC’s Newsnight as they used a sandpit with model tanks to represent army manoeuvres so that it avoided showing Iraqi casualties. I think the blood that is dripping from the television is very effective because it’s so subtle and just seeping out just like the truth about the Gulf War is to the British Public.

On a lighter note I really liked his Polaroid Portraits. In the late 60s he set up a project to ask artists and friends to photograph him. Gradually as he began to collect more and more portraits he realised that each person’s sensibility was surprisingly marked in the image they created, despite the automatic nature of this camera.