Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-To-Reel Collection “Pop Art in England” by Richard Hamilton, 1963 [I'll Announce You?]

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Pop Art in England” by Richard Hamilton, 1963

MALE 1 [I’ll announce you?]. Ladies and gentlemen, my friend Richard Hamilton is in the United States to see the Marcel Duchamp exhibition at Pasadena. Hamilton is an expert on Duchamp. He is one of the (inaudible). He is also a painter, and as a painter he brings a Duchampian irony and sophistication to the interpretation of [the world of the consumer?]. And in the world of the consumer, the subject of many of Hamilton’s paintings is, I think, the [sexual?] area of art. Another aspect of Hamilton’s connection with pop art in London (inaudible) is that he and a group of other Englishmen, myself included, arranged some seminars discussing relations between the fine arts on the one hand and pop art on the other. The point [00:01:00] I want to make, as you’ll see, is that Hamilton is a man very well equipped both as a painter and as a man [on the scene?] (inaudible) what Time Magazine called a British intellectual. He is in a [very good?] position to give us a very clear account of pop in England, while (inaudible). While he was in Pasadena seeing the Duchamp show, Walter Hopps at the Pasadena Museum gave him [another title?], which he likes even better, and that’s the [urban cultural?] (inaudible).

RICHARD HAMILTON Thank you. (applause) This group of slides that you’ll see and the talk that goes with it will give you an English viewpoint of America. And it’s strange to think that someone [00:02:00] coming from England will bring you a collection of slides with which you are all more than familiar because it’s the American way of life, but it is symptomatic of the British intellectual’s attitude to his environment, to his surrounding life, to regard the American model as archetypal to any urban experience. The material that I’m going to present to you is in some way historic. You may be thinking that I am at some point trying to put forward a view that we did it first, but this is quite irrelevant to my motive. What I want to do is to present a straightforward picture of what has occurred in London over the last 10 years, and [00:03:00] in some ways I try to be objective about it. But I’m sure that a lot of people would regard even the presentation or inclusion of some of these painters as, well, misguided. They would not like themselves to be regarded as pop, but all of the people that I’ve included have been accused or praised as pop artists at some time or other. At least three of them have been called the father of pop, so, in spite of their unwillingness to accept this parentage, at least they deserve it in some respects.

To my way of thinking, the most important [00:04:00] origins of this interest or at least the most important manifestations of this interest in London were expressed in an exhibition that Eduardo Paolozzi did in 1953. Eduardo Paolozzi, Peter Smithson, and Nigel Henderson collaborated together on an exhibition called Parallel Of Light And Art, which was a documentation of their interests, their visual interests, entirely. I think Paolozzi was probably the main mover in this exhibition and the main editor of the material. He has always been an avid collector of Life Magazine photographs. As a student at the Slade, I remember he spent a great deal more time in the library of the American embassy in London than at his studies in the art library at the Slade, and his background of the American [00:05:00] glossy magazines — he was one of the earliest people in London to observe the fact that the American glossy magazines were one of the richest sources of visual material available to the artist.

The second exhibition was Man, Machine and Motion in 1954, which was an exhibition I put on with more specialized interests, specialized in the sense that there was a more rigorous theme,

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Pop Art in England” by Richard Hamilton, 1963 which was called Man, Machine and Motion. But the wide-ranging selection of material, the wide-ranging sources were, at least, an equivalent to this kind of thing that Paolozzi had been doing with his material in a more general way. In the early ‘50s, a group of people called the Independent Group — they called themselves the Independent Group to separate themselves from the label of the [00:06:00] ICA, the Institute of Contemporary Arts, in London, which was their home in that it was made available to this group of people so that they could conduct lectures and discussions. The earliest lectures were an attempt to analyze important phenomena of the day, both visual phenomena and other phenomena. We talked about philosophy, cybernetics. All the fashionable words were absorbed in a very superficial way by this group. We attempted to find out what was going on. Ergonomics, information theory, theory of games, terms like the “mass media” were investigated. The group considered mainly of painters and sculptors, a great many architects, and some critics, so there was a very wide stratum of the London intellectual life. [00:07:00]

One of the most absorbing and stimulating of these lectures, these early lectures, was one given by Eduardo Paolozzi at which he took an epidiascope and ran through some of the excitements of his own scrapbooks, pages from magazines that he had collected over the years. And this is a slide that I’ve made from a document that Eduardo Paolozzi gave me, and, although it may not be one that he actually used on this occasion, it certainly is a fairly good indication of the kind of interest that he had at that time and still has, for that matter. Anyone who knows Paolozzi’s work would recognize the affinities that the cover of this science fiction magazine has with his work. This projection of images that we were not accustomed to seeing [00:08:00] on a large scale suddenly thrown up onto the wall created a great many gasps of astonishment and delight. Peter Smithson followed this up with his own contribution to the sessions. This is, I think, typical of his interests. As an architect, he was using the advertisement — this is an advertisement, which interests me also because it has no text other than the words “facial quality.” But the language of styling in the ads was something which excited him. In fact, he made this plane in an article that he did for Arc Magazine. That’s the student magazine for the [Royal?] College of Art, and he headed this article, “But today, we collect ads.” And he said, [00:09:00] “Advertising has caused a revolution in the popular art field. Mass production and advertising is establishing our whole pattern of life principles, morals, aims, aspirations, and standards of living. We must somehow get the measure of this intervention if we are to match its powerful and exciting impulse with our own.”

Well, the way that Peter Smithson matched this powerful and exciting impulse with his own was in a project called The House of the Future, which he did for the Ideal Home Exhibition in London. This is an exhibition which is attended by several million people every year, run by one of the largest newspapers in the country, and Smithson was invited to make a house with this theme, The House of the Future. He took the bait with both hands and produced this rather astonishingly and stunty theatrical dwelling, and the [context?] with the ad, with this [00:10:00] particular ad, seemed to me to be fairly direct, although Peter Smithson would probably not wish this kind of point to be made. [Lawrence Alloway?] contributed an evening to these sessions, one which was devoted to violence in the cinema. Among the slides that he showed were scenes of violence, physical violence, of Richard Widmark slapping Jean Peters’s face and that sort of thing, but he also concerned himself with the new aggressive techniques of the cinema at a technical level. The cinema was then beginning to engage itself in (inaudible) holding onto its

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Pop Art in England” by Richard Hamilton, 1963 audience by a physical projection out of the screen, and this is one of the slides that he used on that occasion.

Lawrence Alloway also made a personal statement in Arc, a statement which said, [00:11:00] “The popular arts reached soon after the war a new level of skill and imagination. [Berenson?], Fry, [Read?], and the others gave me no guidance on how to read, how to see the mass media, images of home, the family, and fashion in the glossy magazines, narratives of action and patterns of behavior in the pulps, the coordination of both these images and these narratives in the movies. My sense of connection with the mass media overcame the lingering prestige of aestheticism and fine art snobbism.” I think this kind of statement from a critic gave a new impulse to many of the creative artist working at that time. It is a creative kind of criticism and a creative statement at a level of critical writing. Another critic who was working at that time in London [00:12:00] and [engaging?] himself in our projects was Reyner Banham, who presented an evening on American automobile styling. Not only was he concerned with styling but also the way in which the images were presented in the advertisements. My contribution to these evenings was one on industrial design. This is typical of the kind of thing that I was concerned with at that time.

After this period of analysis when no one was at all concerned with pop art as an art, there was a continual concern to find equivalents, to find what significance these images, which were being discussed as pop art, had. For example, this Cadillac was discussed by Peter Banham as [00:13:00] a pop art object. We were saying that industrial design at this mass consumer level had reached a point where it was equivalent to popular art. Symbols were being used which placed it in that field rather than in the field of function and engineering, but we had an opportunity then to make an exhibition. Theo Crosby, an editor of Architectural Design Magazine, persuaded the Whitechapel Art Gallery to devote some space to a big exposition of the themes of the moment. This was called This Is Tomorrow. That was taken as the title and the theme for the exhibition. Most of the artists, sculptors, and architects working on this project worked in a way which [00:14:00] they were quite familiar with, which their audience was quite familiar with, making fairly fanciful kinds of structures and presenting artistic effects within the structure. I worked with John McHale and John Voelcker as an architect.

Ideally, each group consisted of an architect, a painter, and a sculptor, and each worked in a separate piece of the exhibition. And each of the artists working in the group or at least each section contributed its own portion of the catalogue. One of the pages, which I made for the catalogue, was this collage, which was an attempt to assess all the things in our present environment. They were simply listed in a tabular form, all the [00:15:00] things that were of interest or of importance. And this is simply a composite of all these things. It’s almost a chart of phenomena which were of value.

What I think we were trying to say was — at least, what I was trying to say was that we couldn’t make any statement about tomorrow that had any real validity, but what we could do is try to say what today was. And this was our concern in this particular section. Since we were trying to expose current phenomena and current attitudes, we spent a good deal of time presenting popular material. This is a photograph of a portion of our exhibit, which had a large display piece of Robby the Robot, which had appeared a few weeks earlier on Piccadilly Circus, [00:16:00] on

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Pop Art in England” by Richard Hamilton, 1963 the London Pavilion. It did include some fine art. It included a good deal of illusion material. There were some Duchamp Rotoreliefs. There were some optical illusions of other kinds. Beside this Robby figure, you can just about discern a reproduction of a Van Gogh Sunflowers painting. We were saying also that some art made a parallel with popular art themes, and a figure like — an object like the reproduction of Sunflowers had become popular art. We were saying also at that time as a group — the Independent Group as a whole was saying that there was a continuum. I think the phrase that Lawrence Alloway invented was the “pop art–fine art continuum.” And we were trying to discern where [00:17:00] the levels changed. What was new about this popular material for us was that it was no longer being produced by the people for the people but being produced by intellectuals or professionals for popular consumption. This was the distinction that was now being made between pop art and popular arts.

Soon after this exhibition, there were — and also in some degree before it — there were attempts to assimilate these interests into works of art. The earliest manifestation, I think, was Paolozzi. This collage, which is of 1954, owes some allegiance, as has been pointed out, to things like Frankenstein, the mummy’s head, but also owes allegiance to Woolworths. Toys came into his sculpture in this period very considerably. [00:18:00] This particular collage is made up of pieces torn from the commonest kind of automobile magazines available in England. A painting which is an attempt of my own to come to terms with this material was a picture called Hommage à Chrysler Corporation. This was painted in 1957. A direct outcome of this is my involvement in the This Is Tomorrow exhibition.

Also, in 1957, a painter called Peter Blake was working quite independently. He had no relations with the Independent Group as such. He may not even have been aware at that time of what was going on in the early ‘50s, but certainly a good deal of the material that he was using did overlap with [00:19:00] what we were regarding as pop art. Another person with unlikely contacts, seemingly unlikely contacts, with the group as a whole was Dick Smith. This painting, for example — which was a later one, but I think his interests go far back — is called [Lubitsch?], which shows his interest in this subject matter. There’s an overlap with the Royal College of Art here. Peter Blake, the painter of Drum Majorette, was working at the Royal College at that time, and so was Dick Smith, and they shared a home together. Dick Smith was also a great friend of Lawrence Alloway’s, mainly through their joint interest in films. Later expressions of these themes occur in the work of painters like [00:20:00] [Ron Kitaj?], an American who came to the Royal College. The Royal College begins to be a nest of activity. This interest [was?] turned over from the Independent Group into the Royal College of Art. This is a later painting, a 1962 painting, but it’s symptomatic of Kitaj’s interests, which go back for some years. Another painter working at the Royal College who took Kitaj’s leads very strongly was Hockney. This is one of his paintings of the end of his stay at the Royal College. Now, several other painters, Allen Jones, [Derek Boshier?], and Peter Phillips — this is an example of Peter Phillips which shows the most direct kind of [usage?] of popular material that we have in England, I think.

I’d like now to look at some of these painters in greater detail. Peter Blake is probably as good a point as any [00:21:00] to start. I took this photograph of him before I left London a few weeks ago. This is the outside of his house, and it revealed very clearly the Victorian nostalgias that Peter Baker has. He has a very strong sentimental streak, and this sentimentality reveals itself in

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Pop Art in England” by Richard Hamilton, 1963 his preoccupation with the charming materials of previous ages. He also has an extraordinarily adept eye at seeing the significant things of the moment, as you will see from other pictures, but I think this is in some senses revealing. Tattooed Lady is a fairly early painting, a fairly early drawing, which shows the kind of interest that he had. As well as his Victorian preoccupations, [00:22:00] you see that Coca Cola, Elvis Presley, various other heroes of American popular culture are visible as [tattoos?] on the lady’s body. This is a painting of 1959 which demonstrate this other side of Peter Blake, extraordinary tastes and exquisite handling of collage material, particularly these collages of [girlies?] that he likes so much. Again, the romantic English approach to painting seems evident in everything that Peter Blake produces. Even in this kind of very novel-seeming complex, you feel, the romanticism is very strong. [00:23:00] Got a Girl, that’s the title of this slide, this picture. It again shows how exquisitely he can handle collage material, and also it shows a theme which seems to occur not only in English so-called pop painting but also in American. You very often get a juxtaposition of hard-edge abstraction with photographic imagery. And Peter Blake was certainly one of the earliest people to use this relationship in England. I don’t know who was the earliest in America. There seems to me to be a very strange relationship between Got a Girl and this picture with the royal family, which is a picture that Peter Phillips gave — rather, which Peter Blake gave to me some time ago. [00:24:00] I’m sure it isn’t purely coincidental.

There is another side to Peter Blake, the side of exquisite painter. This is a self-portrait that he did a few years ago which helped to achieve his reputation in England. He got a prize for this picture, and it put him very much in the news. The streak of romanticism that one finds in Peter Blake is very well exemplified in this slide. He has an extraordinary eye for human frailty and human prettiness as exemplified in this slide of Drum Majorette. Eduardo Paolozzi [00:25:00] is another figure that, as I said, goes way back, his interest in popular material, exemplified in this photograph which was taken of him in which he used as an illustration in the Royal College of Art Magazine. He is one of the people in England who most vigorously deny their connection with pop. This is a fairly recent collage or silkscreen of a collage that he’s made, and it does show the kind of language that he’s concerned with at the moment. Again, you get a certain amount of what seems like hard-edge abstraction even in just a token form, these stripe patterns which occur in both Peter Phillips’s and Peter Blake’s work. You get a use of direct photographic imagery at about the center of the picture. You’ll see there’s a sort of newspaper photograph which overlaps with [00:26:00] something of Ron Kitaj’s. The overall effect is of pin board, which I think emerges from the constant use that’s made of pin boards by artists nowadays. They collect material and display it, present themselves in a wall which is devoted to that purpose, and this comes out as a compositional device in the pictures very often.

Paolozzi has also made statements about what he’s doing. He said, in 1958, “It is conceivable that in 1958 a higher order of imagination exists in science fiction produced on the outskirts of Los Angeles than the little magazines of today.” This, again, is a very firm demonstration that popular art could contribute something [00:27:00] of new vigor to the fine arts. Another work of that time or, at least, another work of recent times is this thing, which he called Mechaniks Bench. This comes from a little book that Paolozzi produced by silkscreen. It shows, again, his interest in material that’s not only of the very present but also going back to Victorian times. His interests aren’t sentimental in the way that Peter Blake’s art, nostalgic, but there is a tendency to go back as well as to take material of the very latest time. It’s, I think, an indication of the kind

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Pop Art in England” by Richard Hamilton, 1963 of interest that we have in England, which distinguishes it from American interest in pop art, [00:28:00] that [our art?] (inaudible) much more catholic. Anything that’s printed is liable to come into the work at any time rather than very narrow limitations on the kind of influences and sources that are permissible.

Now, this is another illustration from the Paolozzi book called Metafisikal Translations. It shows that side of his interest in toys that come out very frequently in his work. This is a slide that I made of his most recent exhibition now showing at the Waddington Gallery, and there’s a very close parallel between the building [bricks?] that he presented in his book and the sculptures that he’s producing now. [00:29:00] This is a photograph that was taken in his studio, and you can see his interest in toys being very clearly demonstrated, not only the toys, the robots at the top — he has a large collection of these Japanese-made robots — but the bookcase itself is also the kind of architecture that he’s concerned with in his sculpture at the moment. There’s a changeover in his interest. This is another slide from his recent exhibition. You’ll see that a good deal of paint occurs on the picture itself, and the paint strikes me as being derived very directly from the tin toys that appear on the top of the bookcase as well as the shape of the sculpture, I think, having some relationship to the architecture of his environment. [00:30:00]

Now, Ron Kitaj, the American I mentioned, is very much not a pop figure. He is one of the people claimed as the father of pop art, and certainly his influence at the Royal College was very great. I think you have to recognize his Puritanism, his extreme Puritanism, which wouldn’t permit him to have any interest in the kind of things that are regarded as pop in America. He is a bibliophile, has an enormous library. All his sources in his paintings come from this, the subject matter of literature. His influence has been very strong, however. What he brought to the Royal College was an interest in narrative pictures. There’s a picture that he painted which is a very good demonstration of what he did. This one is called Certain Forms of Association Neglected Before. [00:31:00] I think that his main attitude in painting this picture and the attitude that he brought to the Royal College of Art was that abstraction has been with us for a long time now, but there are certain other aspects of pictorial imagery which are of importance. And what he has done is simply to mix every kind of pictorial language up and create an eclectic style for himself. What he does here is simply take an illustration — to make an illustration of a man (inaudible), a sort of Orson Welles character swinging in a hammock, which is situated oddly in a library, and oppose this or contain it within a picture which has something which he would regard as abstract marks. These abstract marks also bear a very strong resemblance to end papers [00:32:00] in books, and he tends to use end papers a good deal, novel papers. I don’t think it could be regarded as very good abstract art. It couldn’t be regarded as very good illustration, but the result of putting these two images together and also adding this title, Certain Forms of Association Neglected Before, produce, certainly, an image which is very thought- provoking.

Another picture of Kitaj’s, an early on this time, which was done during his Royal College days, is called Custer’s Last Stand, which again reveals his interest. His approach is ethnographic rather than pop. This cowboy is not Gary Cooper, which it might well be in the hands of any other artist working at the present moment. It’s the real west as seen in images from the Smithsonian Institute. [00:33:00] His source is revealed in this thing from the Smithsonian Institute Journal, which he showed me and permitted me to make a slide from. This is a painting

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Pop Art in England” by Richard Hamilton, 1963 made by Indians at the time of Custer’s Last Stand, and it shows the dead soldiers of the army as seen and desired by the American Indians. He has used this language of the Smithsonian Journal to oppose it to this idea of the cowboy, the kind of man who fought these battles.

Another picture which shows his remarkable approach of mixed idioms is this picture called Isaac Babel Riding with Budyonny. This eclectic, almost [00:34:00] pastiche approach of Kitaj’s is the thing which I think distinguishes it from almost any other painting at the moment. He uses it in a way, almost a quotation. He [calls?] it sometimes a “change of pace.” He is liable at any time to change the mode in which he is describing things, and the top right-hand corner, for example, he would regard as Mondrian in style. There are other elements which are pictorial completely, others which are Victorian kind of painting, others which are entirely his own. Another picture which shows this tack board technique — a great many pictures nowadays in England, anyway, are being painted by breaking it down into components, little separate frames, which fill the picture. In this case, it’s quite a direct [00:35:00] attempt to make a sort of chart. It’s called Specimen Musings of a Democrat.

Perhaps the most remarkable picture that Kitaj has painted recently is this one called Reflections on Violence. Here, again, the changes of pace are very apparent. You are expected to read this picture in terms of units which are changing their quality. For example, there’s a theme which he calls the wandering Jew theme, which is this strange five-pronged or five-fingered unit here. It appears again there and in a different form here and then again in something which becomes quite pictorial in its approach. [00:36:00] This particular piece is taken from a newspaper photograph of an American cop standing over somebody that has just been shot in the street. This idea of violence is used to find each of the notations within the picture, and any language can be used to present them. This business of changing pace is something that I have also concerned myself with in a very different way than Kitaj. This is a painting of my own from 1958 called Hers is a lush situation. I’m much more likely to make a composition within the terms of reference of the rectangle that would happen with a Kitaj. Dick Smith remarked to me some months ago that there were only two kinds of picture nowadays. You either broke the picture down into [00:37:00] rectangles, component parts, or you made a picture which was an all-over pattern which extended off the edges of the picture. This came as a little bit of a shock to me because I said, “But surely there’s another way to paint a picture. You can paint a picture which is a composition within a rectangle.” And he said, “Oh, yes, that’s right, but that’s an old- fashioned way of going about it.” Certainly, it is old-fashioned, and it’s remarkable how few pictures nowadays do seem to conform with this tradition, traditional way of working. My pictures are always very much composed.

Another one of about the same time and which succeeded it very rapidly was a picture called She. This used domestic appliance material instead of the American car styling with the other pictures, the two previous pictures which we’ve seen. The change of pace [00:38:00] that occurs in this picture is found in this source. The thing at the bottom of the painting is a combination of a toaster and this Westinghouse vacuum cleaner. What I liked about the vacuum cleaner was the way in which imagery is very freely used. Differently languages are used very freely. You have a photograph of the appliance. You have a diagram superimposed over it to show how the thing works, and you also have text inserted into the image to reinforce the meaning. So very often, I

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Pop Art in England” by Richard Hamilton, 1963 find myself putting into my pictures something which I call a diagram as opposed to a photographic treatment or an illustrative treatment.

Now, this is a recent picture called A definitive statement on the coming trends in menswear and accessories. This again, [00:39:00] like Hers is a lush situation, took its title as a theme to begin with. It’s a picture which is about — this particular example is about space exploration to some extent, a definitive statement on the coming trends in menswear at a technological level as well as at a fashion level, as you see in the sort of Bermuda short stripes. Since it’s concerned with space, I made it with a picture which could be turned in any direction, so I made these three slides to show the possibilities of this. Quite recently, I had an opportunity to present a series of my pictures in a magazine called Living Arts, and I set up this cover to be photographed by a photographer called Robert Freeman. This is a slide which [00:40:00] chops off the two ends. The edges on either side are very much cropped. It was simply an attempt to spread out the language that I have been using as well as make a portrait of myself. The man with the shoulders is myself, perhaps not easily recognized. It was also an attempt to equal the things that interested us. Most of the things that I had used to work from and what a lot of people are using to work from at the moment is a very professional pictorial technique, an extraordinarily highly developed photograph by Bert Stern in the ads, difficult to equal. What I was attempting here was to do so without any resources, any financial resources, but what I was trying to do was to equate the imagery with the original sources. [00:41:00] I’ve been taking this language and turning it into pictures. Now I was trying to turn it back into what it had been originally, a photographic image of a particular kind.

Dick Smith seems to be very far removed from any of the other painters of this kind. His language isn’t narrative nor illustrative, but the titles of his pictures give a very clear clue as to the kind of interests that he has. For example, in 1960 he was painting this picture on the left, which is called McCall’s, which is about McCall’s Magazine and derived from McCall’s Magazine. He also painted pictures called [After Six?], Revlon, Billboard, [Summer of?], Pepsi, and Tissue. In 1961, he painted pictures called Buzz. That was [00:42:00] a reference to Busby Berkeley, the choreographer of Gold Diggers of 1934 [sic]. He painted a picture called Garland, which is the one on the right, which is not only, of course, a garland in the sense of being a garland of colors, but also it’s a reference to Judy Garland. He painted a picture called Lubitsch, which we saw earlier, and another called The Andrews Sisters. In 1962, he’s been working on titles such as Pack, The Lonely Surfer, Pagoda, Gift Wrap, [Stagger Lee?], and Piano. The packs are a very important theme in his work. This is one of the package pictures. It’s difficult to identify the pack. The ends of the cigarettes — it’s a cigarette pack, and the ends of the cigarettes are the circular discs that you see, the yellow circular discs. He recently came to the university [00:43:00] where I teach, and he was invited to come up and talk about his interests and to engage the students in a project of his own choosing. When he came, he came with a theme of a rainbow room. I’m going to show you a few slides of this rainbow room because I think it’s not only a remarkable pedagogical experiment, which was extremely successful, but it’s also indicative of his attitude as a painter. On the first day, he said to the students, “I’d like you all to paint rainbows on a piece of paper. You can paint black rainbows, white rainbows, rainbow-colored rainbows, yellow rainbows, any rainbows you like, as long as they have something of the curvature and quality of a rainbow.” They all worked on this for a few hours and succeeded in making quite a number of rainbows. He then said that they should cut these in

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Pop Art in England” by Richard Hamilton, 1963 such a way that they could be folded into a box so that you were looking into a rainbow-covered [00:44:00] rectangle or enclosed space, like a box with one side removed with a rainbow spread around the inside.

Then, he took it further by saying, “We must make a bigger kind of rainbow.” So we got a lot of crepe paper, and he marked out a rainbow on the floor, and the students then assembled bits of crepe paper into a large rainbow. This is the rainbow progressing. Some of the two-dimensional rainbows can be seen on the walls behind Dick Smith, who’s standing. Having gotten the rainbow, we got a seven-foot square rectangle, a cube of wood, rather, an open frame, and wrapped the rainbow that we made on the floor around the cube. [00:45:00] And here, you can see that the rainbow room was then furnished with a chair, which was covered with rainbow, and a rainbow picture was put on the walls. This is Dick Smith photographed in his rainbow room. After this, the final two days of the week’s project were spent by the students on producing a picture of the rainbow room. They all made a painting in two dimensions. What had happened was that a two-dimensional rainbow had been converted into a three-dimensional rainbow, and the three-dimensional rainbow was then translated back into a two-dimensional rainbow. And the remarkable thing was that 12 students produced 12 astonishingly good pictures as a result of this.

Dick Smith’s incredible talents as an ideas man, as a thinker about ways of putting a twist into a space and optical effects [00:46:00] is demonstrated in this picture, which also brings him much closer to some of the things that have been done by other people. For the first time in a picture by Dick Smith, you begin to see that the label Philip Morris is left on, and you can also read the words “Philip Morris” as well as see that the ends, these circles which cover the picture, show the texture of tobacco. This is a new development in Dick Smith’s field. At the moment, he’s painting very large pictures. The packs are beginning to force themselves out from the surface of the canvas. Some of these things are 16 feet long and come out about four feet into the room. The one on the left has the remarkable property of not only being a pack sticking out into the room, but perspective drawings, graphic delineations of packs are superimposed over the [00:47:00] actual pack. But they never hit the three-dimensional projection. The picture in the back, the blue picture there, is called Lonely Surfer.

The intermarriage between various artists working in England is something which is very difficult to realize when you see the pictures independently, but I think there is a very strong rapport between a lot of the people working there. Hockney, for example, has distinct ties with Dick Smith. Dick Smith admires his work, although it seems very unlikely when you compare the two, when you compare the works together. Dick Smith is a very neat sort of person, a very discreet and charming man. Hockney, on the other hand, is a very overt character. He is [00:48:00] a complete exhibitionist, enjoys being photographed in exaggerated costume. When he went to the Royal College to accept his gold medal because he was one of the favorites of the — favorite students of the Royal College of Art, he went there to accept his gold medal award wearing a gold lamé jacket. This is something which demonstrates his exhibitionist tendencies.

But you can see from this picture, which is called The Marriage, that the preoccupation with ways of presenting space overlaps with Dick Smith’s interests. Not only does he use cut-out canvases, three-dimensional projects — this is made up of three canvases which are in fact flat,

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Pop Art in England” by Richard Hamilton, 1963 but one expects at any moment that things might be painted into a box. This is like, in some ways, [00:49:00] Dick Smith’s rainbow room, but this is a room with figures inside, with a scene inside instead of a rainbow. All sorts of other devices are added to it to get these strange qualities like the hole in the side, which shows the back of the room, just reinforcing the fact that it is a box that you’re looking into. Different kinds of plastic devices are used all over the picture, which links back with Kitaj’s interest. The blue head of the man is painted in a more or less realistic way, slightly more realistic than the head of the woman, but on the other hand the [shoe?] of the woman is painted in a semi-Egyptian style, as Hockney calls it. This means that it’s painted in profile. The picture is called The Marriage, but this doesn’t necessarily mean — in fact, Hockney tells me that it doesn’t mean simply that the subject is of a marriage. He regards it as a marriage of styles [00:50:00] rather than a marriage between a bride and a bridegroom.

This is another of Hockney’s sources, a book called Physique Pictorial. Now, this is a still from a film which appears in that little magazine, which he produced in Los Angeles. The film from which this still is taken is called The Cruel Stepfathers, and it’s a Cinderella story. The boy with the apron is bullied by his two big brothers, and he has to do things for them. Now, this produced a picture very directly, a painting of Hockney’s called Domestic Scene, Los Angeles, which you can see standing behind him on the mantelpiece there. This is Hockney wearing his gold lamé jacket. Another aspect of this magazine which interests Hockney [00:51:00] a good deal are the drawings that appear in it. You can see when it’s sharp that there are affinities between the drawings and the way in which things are drawn here. This is drawn by one of their artists called Spartacus. Another one is called Tom. Spartacus, Hockney says, is very good at hair, so when he draws hair on a picture he tries to paint it like Spartacus.

These are two pictures that he’s working on at the moment. He has recently moved into an apartment in Notting Hill Gate. He had to buy all the furnitures and fittings to move into it so that the place is filled with strange chintz and odd other articles of decoration. He has taken this environment quite naturally to himself, and all his pictures now contain chintz furniture. The picture on the left, the blue picture, which is rather dimly visible, shows another aspect of Hockney which relates back to Dick Smith indirectly. [00:52:00] The picture is of a tapestry. That’s the blue part of it, stopped short a little bit above the bottom of the canvas. There’s a bit of floor space projecting from the bottom of the canvas back to this tapestry, which has a narrative on it. Something is going on. There are figures who are doing something. There’s also a rainbow in the picture. Now, standing in this small space between the canvas and the tapestry is a man, and his hands are raised in that peculiar fashion because he’s pressing against the glass, which Hockney proposes to put in front of the picture. Now, this comes now from any pop material at all but from ideas that he culls from sources such as this (inaudible). Here, you have exactly the same situation of a narrative on a surface which is separated from the surface of the picture by curving it. [00:53:00] This is reinforced by establishing a figure as external to the narrative picture.

Dick Smith once told me of his preoccupation with distorting the picture plane, with modifying it in one way or another, and gave me as an example the Kodak trademark, which is, I think, the same kind of thing that Hockney is trying to do. If you modify the surface in this way, you can do it either abstractly or in a conceptual way as Dick Smith does, or do it in an illustrative way as

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Pop Art in England” by Richard Hamilton, 1963

Hockney does, but it is the same in intention. Other illusion pictures now being painted in England are things by Joe Tilson. Joe Tilson is difficult to fit into this category of pop, but he’s quite anxious to do so himself. He’s one of the few people who are eager to get into the act rather than to get out of it. [00:54:00] Some of his source material is from toys. You can see the comparison is fairly direct in this image. Recently, at an ICA evening, we’ve been having sessions there, presentations of their work by various artists, and Joe Tilson was among the people who contributed to these evenings. After Tilson had finished, a voice in the corner, which was Dick Smith’s, put the first question, and he said, “Joe, is folk art here to stay? Do you think folk art is here to stay?” And this led to a very long discussion about whether Joe was a folk artist or a pop artist or a fine artist or what kind of artist he was, and I think it is very crucial to the whole phenomenon of pop art that a good deal of it tends to become folk art. And once this bridge [00:55:00] is made over into folk, the emphasis is distorted. Again, this folk material comes out even in a slide like this, which is one of Joe Tilson’s, which he made for the War Museum in London.

Peter Phillips is another artist who uses the folk idiom, but he stays closer to our time. This is the world of the penny arcade. This is a slide which Peter Phillips gave me and which shows very clearly the source of paintings that you’ll be seeing now. This is a Peter Phillips painting from about three years ago. This is a picture which has come along a little earlier than I had [00:56:00] hoped for. Again, another example of this combination of abstract ideas, the language of hard-edge painting combined with figurative material, inside each of these styles is a transfer of a [girlie?]. What he’s been trying to do lately — I seem to be getting into a bit of a muddle with the slides. What he’s been trying to do lately is coarsen his language very considerably. What he’s drawing now is an equivalent of this [Polo Foods?] machine. You can see that the drawing of the figures on the right-hand slide, which is a detail of a painting, is an attempt to make an equivalent of the kind of drawing that you see in the girlie on the food machine and, I think, probably a very successful equivalent.

Now, Derek Boshier is odd in the London setup because he’s concerned or was concerned until recently [00:57:00] with the morality of the whole business of popular language. He seems to find it difficult to reconcile his subject matter with the morality of is advertising good or not, and these seem to indicate that the consumer, because of the way he’s subjected to advertising, is in somewhat of a mess. This is a way in which [Cadbury’s?] milk chocolate in England is advertised, with, “One and a half glasses of milk go into each bar of Cadbury’s milk chocolate.” I show you this slide. It’s perhaps not appropriate that it should be shown at such a distinguished establishment as the Guggenheim Museum. It’s done by a student, but it does begin to show the kind of thing that we can expect for a while in England. [00:58:00] It’s by a student of mine in Newcastle called Mark Lancaster. We’re going to, I think, have a good deal of American material, but it will no doubt be presented to us with this kind of sweetness, affection for the subject matter, a sweetness of paint quality, too, which I think is romantic and English. And we don’t seem to be getting at the moment any of the more severe kind of pictures or interest in this kind of material that you have in America.

Bernard Cohen is another artist who would have great difficulty in reconciling himself to the idea that he is in any way connected with pop. I think there is a connection in that the language of the pop thing is there, the breakdown into component units, the tendency to read things in

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Pop Art in England” by Richard Hamilton, 1963 successions of [00:59:00] a strip cartoon, successions of images, and I think there’s also some overlap with the language of Kitaj and Dick Smith.

We’ve got to understand this approach to things as an attempt by the artist to reconcile himself with his current environment. There was a time — and it was only a short time ago, 10 years ago — when artists had to look forward only to a prospect of extending the language of abstraction. Abstract Expressionism had taken a fairly strong hold all over the world, and in London art schools we were getting the same kind of thing that was being done in American art schools. A second generation of Abstract Expressionism was coming up, and a certain horror was felt, I think, by some artists, both here and in London, [01:00:00] which made them look around for new kinds of subject matter, new sources, new things which had meaning to them. We had to reconcile ourselves with this kind of image, an image which is being projected out to us continually by the most powerful arbiters of taste, the glossy magazine image of what our environment should be like.

The slide on the right is a photograph taken by one of the younger people in England, Robert Freeman, who surrounded the Independent Group. Lawrence Alloway once described Robert Freeman and a group of people at Cambridge as “sons of the Independent Group.” Certainly, he’s proving to be a very useful contributor to the language [01:01:00] as a photographer. I included this slide because I feel that we have to again understand this mixture of idiom, this mixture of language as something which we’re constantly coming across and having to come to terms with. A space, an architectural space, a three-dimensional space is being modified by the pictorial matter which is being put onto its surface. This can consist of pictorial matter, the figures of these monsters. It can consist of 3D lettering, of two dimensional lettering on the surface, and then the confrontation of this subject matter with a living being beside it. We have to consider that our society is expending itself very rapidly, that there’s a vastly [01:02:00] increased rate of turnover not only of our technology but also of our aesthetics.

The slide on the right, which came up a little prematurely, is put there to exemplify the strange relationship that man has now to a machine at a popular level. Hot-rodders are people who are engaged in an intimate relationship with mechanics of enormous complexity at almost a folk art level. This folk art aspect of the thing is exemplified in this cover from Hot Rod, which shows the kind of love, the kind of affection that people have for this machinery. Technology, however much it tries or however much it exists at a level of extreme sophistication, very often [01:03:00] has to come to terms with the way people use it. This is the way in which pilots decorated their airplanes during the war, again, an aspect of popular art or even folk art engaged in not conflict but rapport with technology. We have also a popular art which is not a popular art in the sense of being a folk art but which is an art of extraordinary ability and sophistication and professionalism. This is an image which can be viewed at absolutely any level. It can be enjoyed by a child, by an adolescent, or by an artist. Anybody looking at this thing can get something from it. It was done by an artist of exquisite sensibility and great invention. [01:04:00] Also, the language of advertising is a language which has meaning for artists now. It has qualities which make it necessary for the artist to come to terms with it. A great deal of our visual material is coming to us minced, digested, pre-digested, transformed. This is a photograph in a magazine called [Scene?] produced by web offset, an extreme degradation of the original image, the original concept of what the figure was. It’s more like a Francis Bacon. It has more

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Pop Art in England” by Richard Hamilton, 1963 to do with what’s upstairs than anything else, but it’s the kind of image which is becoming increasingly important to us.

We also have to [01:05:00] face situations which we’ve never faced before, such as in this (inaudible) of a portable television set. A moving image is being carried around a room. Not only is this moving image becoming moved around in a room, but it’s translated back into a photograph of that scene and printed on a two-dimensional surface. With all this interest in technology, the extreme excitement of the world around us, we are always forced to come back to nostalgia, to the way that human beings behave in relation to one another. We have to accept that whatever level of technology, sophistication, civilization, a good 50 percent of human interest is going to be as absurd as this kind of relationship. [01:06:00] There is a very strong difference, as you will have no doubt felt by now, between the American attitude to popular art and the attitude of London people or English people. The thing that struck me since I’ve been in America is that the great difference is that we in Europe have been far too timid and too loyal to our cultural heritage. Expendability was one of the things which I felt when I first encountered this material, which couldn’t be assimilated into fine art. The two factors were just incompatible. You can’t have fine art which is expendable.

What the American painters have done or, rather, what at least two or three American painters have done, which I now, having seen the work, regard as audacious and daring to an extraordinary degree, is to make an art which is expendable. By making [01:07:00] this action, by finding the terms, they’ve put it into the realm of fine art. This is the failure that I think we’ve had in Europe, the failure to see that by audacity, by making the act, you made it art. You made it fine art. The important thing, I think, is not style. Pop art as a style is almost dead. You can regard it as dead. The important work has been done by now. What is our concern as artists is with ideas. Style and syntax are hollow pipes to the mind, and what nourishes us is really the stuff that drips or gushes through. Thank you. (applause) [01:08:00]

MALE 1 (inaudible).

END OF AUDIO FILE 9009112_01-Pop-Art-in-England.mp3

Pop Art in England / Richard Hamilton. 1963/10/20. Reel-to-Reel collection. A0004. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Archives, New York