Richard Hamilton

The man who defined Pop

Richard Hamilton was born in Pimlico, London, in 1922 and left school without formal qualifications, finding work as an apprentice at an electrical components firm where he discovered a gift for draughtsmanship. Evening classes at Saint Martin's School of Art and the Westminster School of Art led him to the Royal Academy of Arts, from which he was later expelled on the grounds of not profiting from the instruction. After national service and two years at the Slade School of Art he began exhibiting at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, where he also designed posters, leaflets and installations.

His first exhibition there, Growth and Form, opened in 1951 and was a pioneering piece of installation art, presenting scientific models, diagrams and photographs as a single unified work. In 1955 he organised Man, Machine and Motion at the Hatton Gallery in Newcastle upon Tyne, designed to look more like an advertising display than a conventional hang.

Just what is it

The collage that made his name, Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?, was produced in 1956 for the catalogue of This Is Tomorrow at the Whitechapel Gallery in London. A body builder holds a lollipop in a room furnished with the emblems of new affluence: a vacuum cleaner, a tape recorder, a tinned ham, a cinema visible through the window. It is widely treated as one of the first works of Pop art, and Hamilton's own definition of Pop, written in a letter to Alison and Peter Smithson, laid the ground for an international movement: popular, transient, expendable, low cost, mass produced, young, witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous and Big Business.

He taught at the Royal College of Art, where he promoted David Hockney and Peter Blake, and at Newcastle, where his students included Rita Donagh, Mark Lancaster and Bryan Ferry. Hamilton called Ferry his greatest creation, and Ferry returned the compliment.

Duchamp, politics and printmaking

A parallel obsession was Marcel Duchamp. Hamilton produced a typographic version of the Green Box notes and, familiar enough with them to attempt it, built reconstructions of The Large Glass and other works too fragile to travel for the Duchamp retrospective he curated at the Tate Gallery in 1966. Major surveys of his own work followed at the Tate Gallery in 1970, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1973 and the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin in 1974.

His subjects were rarely neutral. The Swingeing London prints came out of the drug arrest of his dealer Robert Fraser alongside Mick Jagger. A trilogy of paintings addressed the conflict in Northern Ireland, taking in a blanket protester, an Orangeman and a British soldier on patrol. He designed the cover and poster collage for the Beatles album usually called the White Album, and he kept chasing new technology, taking up the Quantel Paintbox for a television series and designing computer casings for Swedish manufacturers.

From the late seventies his energy went largely into printmaking, often in unusual and complex combinations of process. The Tate Gallery showed him again in 1992, and in 1993 he represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale and was awarded the Golden Lion. The British Museum exhibited his illustrations to James Joyce's Ulysses in 2002, a project he had begun during national service and reworked over five decades. Museum Ludwig in Cologne showed him in 2003 and the Serpentine Gallery gathered his political and protest work in 2010.

Hamilton died in London in 2011, leaving a painting in three parts unfinished. Tate Modern staged the first retrospective to cover the full scope of his work in 2014. The pigment transfer print Portrait of Derek Jarman, made in an edition of forty and printed by Adrian Lowe, sold at Bonhams in London in 2012 and is the same image catalogued here.