Richard Hamilton and Design


Currently at Tate Modern is the first retrospective of the work Richard Hamilton, the influential British artist, teacher and essayist, who is considered to be a pioneer of pop art. Here Alice Rawsthorn looks at his output in the context of his design influences.


Blueprint

Words by Alice Rawsthorn

Once a week during the late Forties, the art director of British Vogue, Alex Kroll, invited a group of young artists and designers who had shown an interest in fashion illustration to studio sessions at the magazine's offices, where he monitored their progress. Among them was Richard Hamilton, then a painting student at the Slade School of Fine Art, who attended these meetings for a few months in 1949 before being informed that his work was 'too artistic' for Vogue.

'Too artistic' though it may have been for a fashion magazine, Hamilton would be told repeatedly for the next decade that his work was not artistic enough by the custodians of the British art establishment, who suspected that much of it would more accurately have been classified as design than art. The reason is evident in an essay by Hamilton in a 1962 issue of Architectural Design magazine. 'Contemporary art reacts slowly to the contemporary stylistic scene,' he wrote. 'How many major works of art have appeared in the 20th century in which an automobile features at all? How many feature vacuum cleaners?' Very few, was the answer, whereas Hamilton's paintings were filled with them as well as with robots, comic books, Hollywood stars, TV sets, billboards, Playboy pin-ups and other totems of technology and consumer culture. The titles of his artworks alluded to them too; and his essays were not only rich in references to magazines such as Design, Architectural Design and Typographica, but often published in them.

Hamilton's insistence on exploring design, technology and consumerism with the same passion and intellectual rigour as art history seemed inexplicable to the grandees, who considered such terrain to be tarnished by its association with commerce and industry. When the Arts Council organised a 1964 survey of the most important paintings and sculptures of the past decade, it included some 30 artists, but not Hamilton. Six years later, the curatorial consensus had changed so radically that the Tate devoted a solo show to his work, including many of the paintings it had ignored in 1964 as well as his investigations into the design of cars, kitchen gadgets and fashion imagery. The cover of the catalogue was devoted to Toaster, a 1967 work inspired by the promotional literature for the Braun HT 2 single-slit toaster.

Interior

'Interior II' (1964) Photo Credit:Tate

By then, Hamilton's eclectic vision of contemporary culture was widely accepted within progressive circles, in large part due to his own influence, though also to the writing of his friend and fellow Independent Group member, the design critic Reyner Banham, and the French cultural theorists Roland Barthes and Jean Baudrillard. Hamilton continued to pursue his interest in design and to champion cultural inclusivity for the rest of his life. Fraught and ambivalent though art's relationship to design still is, it would be far more so without him and what the art critic David Sylvester described as 'his consuming obsession with the modern -- modern living, modern technology, modern equipment, modern communications, modern materials, modern processes, modern attitudes.' Given Hamilton's importance in the evolution of British design culture, what role did it play in his development as an artist? And what impact did he have on our understanding of design, and its rapport with art?

The Occulist Witness’ (1971)
The Occulist Witness' (1971); Photo Credit: Private Collection

The antipathy towards design in post-war Britain was not confined to the visual arts, but reflected a broader distrust of industrialisation and mechanisation that had emerged among the intelligentsia during the 19th century. Britain had led the Industrial Revolution in the late 1700s when, for a brief period, the frenzied mills of pioneering industrialists like the Staffordshire potter Josiah Wedgwood seemed so exhilarating that intellectuals and socialites set off from London on factory tours of Manchester and the Midlands. By the early 1800s, the enthusiasm for industry had faded and the stereotype of the 'dark, satanic mill' was born. Factories were seen as dirty and dangerous, their wares as shoddy, their workers as subversive and their owners as vulgar, even by their own children who were mostly educated at private schools where, as the economic historians Correlli Barnett and Martin Wiener have written, they imbibed the values of the landed aristocracy, including a disdain of commerce, industry and science. By the late 1800s, such prejudices were lent intellectual weight by William Morris, John Ruskin and other members of the Arts and Crafts movement, who advocated a revival of rural craftsmanship. Their beliefs proved pervasive in Britain even during the early 20th century when the influence of Russian Constructivism transformed perceptions of industrial design elsewhere in Europe, by giving it a moral and political purpose as a means of translating scientific and technological advances into products and services that could help millions of people to become happier, healthier and more productive.

‘Advertisement’ (1975)
Advertisement' (1975) Photo Credit: Private Collection

All but a tiny minority of Britons remained inured to the Constructivist zest for modernity until the Thirties, when the modern movement gained momentum as émigré artists, architects, designers and intellectuals sought refuge in Britain from the Nazis' growing power in Europe, but its popularity proved short-lived. As the Second World War loomed, many of the émigrés left for safer havens, including Walter Gropius, László Moholy-Nagy and other former teachers at the Bauhaus art and design school in Germany, who settled in the United States. After the war, the British public associated technology with the horror and destruction caused by the Blitz and the atom bomb, rather than with social and political progress. The late Forties and Fifties were golden years for science, when many of the innovations developed for military use during wartime were translated into technologies that transformed daily life. Most of those breakthroughs were made in the secrecy of scientific research centres, like Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, where the transistor was invented in 1947, and the electrical engineering department of the University of Manchester, which staged a demonstration of the first stored memory computer the following year. Thrilling though those innovations now seem, few people outside scientific circles were aware of them at the time. The flurry of interest in design and technology in British cultural circles during the pre-war era had been replaced by indifference, if not hostility.

‘Table with Ashtray’ (2002)
'Table with Ashtray' (2002); Photo Credit:Private Collection

Not for Hamilton. Born into a working-class family in London in the early Twenties, his formative influences were very different to those of the typically privileged, privately educated establishment grandees who had been, as Banham put it, 'isolated from humanity by the Humanities'. Conversely, he and Hamilton, like several other members of the Independent Group, shared childhood memories of enjoying Hollywood Westerns at the local cinema and devouring comic books and popular music. 'There is one very good reason why the IG was with it so long before anyone else,' wrote Banham. 'The key figures ... were all brought up in the Pop belt somewhere. American films and magazines were the only live culture we knew as kids.'

‘Glider (after Duchamp)’ (1965)
'Glider (after Duchamp)' (1965) ;Photo Credit: Private Collection

As well as deriving great pleasure from popular culture, Hamilton was highly knowledgeable about its production, in particular about design's role in the process, thanks to the succession of jobs he took on to make ends meet while studying painting and establishing himself as an artist. After leaving school at 14, he had to wait two years before starting a course at the Royal Academy Schools. He worked as an office boy in the advertising department of an electrical engineering firm, then joined the display team of the Reimann School, which was founded in 1937 as Britain's first commercial art school by two Jewish émigrés from Germany, Albert and Klara Reimann. Hamilton's job there was to build sets for exhibitions of work by the teachers and students, but he was allowed to attend life-drawing classes in his free time. Working at the school introduced him to typography, art direction, photography, fashion, set design and other aspects of 'commercial art,' as well as the modernist thinking of the Reimanns and the émigré artists and designers they employed as teachers, Alex Kroll among them.

‘Bathroom - Fig. 2’ (1999-2000)
'Bathroom - Fig. 2' (1999-2000) ; Photo Credit: Private Collection

During the war, Hamilton received a similarly impromptu yet thorough grounding in technology when the Royal Academy Schools closed and he was sent to a Government Training Centre to study engineering draughtsmanship. He was then employed as a 'jig and tool' draughtsman at the Design Unit Group, a ramshackle operation run by the bandleader Jack Jackson for Electrical & Musical Industries, which owned various engineering firms and the record company EMI. Jackson and his team were intended to deploy their engineering skills to help the war effort, but Hamilton spent much of his time organising lunchtime concerts of recordings he found in the archives. Even so, he had a zest for engineering, possibly inherited from his father, who had worked as a driver and shared his love of cars with him, and fell in with a group of acoustical engineers who devoted their spare time to constructing sound equipment. After the war, he returned to the Royal Academy Schools and later enrolled at the Slade, but his wartime work at EMI, followed by a stint of National Service with the Royal Engineers, imbued him with a nuanced understanding of the engineering side of design, and its relationship to science and technology, that complemented his knowledge of commercial art.

Lobby
Lobby' (1985-1987); Photo Credit: Private Collection

When Hamilton left art school, that combination of skills enabled him to earn a living while starting his career as an artist. He considered working in fashion illustration, hence his interest in Kroll's 'studio sessions' at Vogue, and took on other commercial projects, including designing corporate logos for both Churchill Gear Machines and Granada Television. His experience of set building at the Reimann School served him well when curating exhibitions, including Growth and Form (1951) and Man, Machine and Motion (1955), and his first teaching assignments were in the design departments of art schools.

The White Album’ (1968)
The White Album' (1968); Photo Credit: Private Collection

Hamilton taught typography and industrial design at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, then joined the Fine Art Department of the University of Newcastle in 1953 as a lecturer in design where he ran a Basic Form course. Victor Pasmore had taught furniture design at the Central School before setting up the Basic Design course with Hamilton in Newcastle. At the time, so few professional designers were able or willing to teach design that young artists were often pressed into doing so. Hamilton was unusual in being better equipped for the role than many of his peers, but it would be foolish to romanticise his commitment to design teaching. He saw the Basic Design course as a means to an end, having taken it on in the hope of being allowed to teach art too, and of stopping teaching as soon as he could support himself and his family as an artist.

Beatles
The Beatles' (1968); Photo Credit: Private Collection

Nonetheless he made the most of the design resources available to him at Newcastle, drawing on the university's printing equipment and photography department, hitherto used mostly for medical research, for the exhibitions he curated at the Hatton Gallery, and their accompanying posters and catalogues. One of his students, Mark Lancaster, recalls Hamilton's enthusiasm for the university's photocopier, an early version of the machine. When Hamilton returned to London, he would post material to Lancaster in Newcastle asking him to photocopy it and send the copies to him by mail.

Critic Laughs
The Critic Laughs' (1968); Photo Credit: Private Collection

Hamilton enjoyed the sybaritic side of Pop culture in Newcastle, going to lunchtime dances at the Majestic Ballroom and rock 'n' roll concerts at City Hall, and was fascinated by fashion, unusually so for an Englishman of his generation. Marcus Price, who ran Newcastle's most fashionable menswear shop, told the cultural historian Michael Bracewell how Hamilton would drop in with his own discoveries, including original Wrangler cowboy shirts from the USA with enormous cuffs and mother-of-pearl studs. Encouraged by Banham, Hamilton sustained his interest in international developments in design and technology, reading the latest periodicals and writing for several of them, particularly those edited by another IG colleague, Theo Crosby, such as Living Arts and Architectural Design.

Kent State
Kent State (1970) ; Photo Credit: Tate

Hamilton's concept of design, which he elaborated in Persuading Image, a 1960 essay for Design magazine, was thoughtful and open-minded, but neither original nor iconoclastic. He accepted the orthodox definition of design as a commercial force, rather than seeing it as a more fluid instinctive process, 'not a profession but an attitude', as Moholy-Nagy had phrased it in his 1947 book Vision in Motion. Nor did he share the political ambitions for design championed by the Italian artist and design theorist Bruno Munari during the Fifties and Sixties. The publication of Persuading Image prompted a feisty debate among designers, but the controversy reflected the conservatism of British design culture, rather than any radicalism on Hamilton's part. Yet his design judgements were generally astute.

Swingeing London
Swingeing London 67(f)' (1968-9); Photo Credit: Tate

Hamilton was equally adept at identifying excellence, being among the first to appreciate the growing importance of the new design school at Ulm in West Germany during the Fifties and at spotting mediocrity, especially in what were popularly considered to be sacred cows, like the whimsical 'festival style' inspired by the Festival of Britain and the showmanship of the French-born doyen of American commercial design, Raymond Loewy. Often his judgements were rooted in his technical knowledge, as illustrated by his Glorious Technicolor, Breathtaking Cinemascope and Stereophonic Sound, a lecture he gave in Newcastle and London in 1959, which included an inspired analysis of the cultural impact of technological change on cinema, television and photography.

The Solomon R. Guggenheim (Gold)’ (1965-1966)
The Solomon R. Guggenheim (Gold)' (1965-1966) ; Photo Credit:Louisiana Museum of Modern Art

Critically, Hamilton drew repeatedly on his interest in design and technology in his work as an artist. In his 1956 essay entitled Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing? he critiqued consumer culture by collaging images of aspirational objects and phenomena of the era: among them, a tape recorder, tinned ham, a male bodybuilder and topless female model, a poster for a pulp novel and the blazing neon lights of a cinema. For his 1957 Hommage à Chrysler Corp and the following year's Hers is a lush situation, he explored the role of sexuality in the design of the most fetishised consumer products of the time, American cars.

The Solomon R. Guggenheim (Neopolitan)’ (1965-1966)
The Solomon R. Guggenheim (Neopolitan)' (1965-1966) ; Photo Credit: Tate

Other artists occupied similar terrain, including Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein in the United States, and Eduardo Paolozzi and Peter Blake in Britain, but thy tended to be jolly and celebratory. Hamilton's approach was more diagnostic, though not cynically so. It is evident from his work that he recognised -- and enjoyed -- the sybaritic nature of his subjects, but his choices and mode of analysis were more precise and sophisticated than those of his contemporaries. Both Hommage and Hers were based on Banham's research into the strategic use of design by the American automotive industry. The former juxtaposes elements of the cars featured in Chrysler and General Motors' advertisements with particular parts of a woman's body to illustrate how, say, the curves of the headlamps mimic the lines of her breasts. The contrast between the first two words of the title Hommage à, which allude to the 'high art' of Cubism in early-20th-century Paris, and the American corporate jargon of Chrysler Corp signals the satirical sub-text, while 'Corp' serves as a double entendre by alluding to corps, the French word for body. Hers portrays the lips of the movie star Sophia Loren hovering above various emblems of automotive styling, including chrome tail fins and a wraparound windscreen through which the driver can see flashes of the towering UN headquarters in New York.

Fashion-plate
Fashion-plate (Cosmetic Study V)' (1969) ; Photo Credit: Private Collection, Courtesy of Simon Dickinson, London

Hamilton found the title in the closing words of a review of a 1955 Buick in the American magazine Industrial Design: 'The driver sits at the dead calm centre of all this motion, hers is a lush situation'. Not that he had spotted those words at random: the review was written by Deborah Allen, a talented young American design critic who he and Banham admired greatly.

Towards a definitive statement on the coming trends in men’s wear and accessories (a) Together let us explore the stars’ (1962)
Towards a definitive statement on the coming trends in men's wear and accessories (a) Together let us explore the stars' (1962). Photo Credit: Tate

He returned to those themes in $he, an oil painting and collage completed in 1961 in which he explored the sexualised imagery of domestic appliance advertising. 'The worst thing that can happen to a girl, according to the ads, is that she should fail to be exquisitely at ease in her appliance setting,' Hamilton explained in an essay for Architectural Design. 'Sex is everywhere, symbolised in the glamour of mass-produced luxury -- the interplay of fleshy plastic and smooth, fleshier metal. This relationship of woman and appliance is a fundamental theme of our culture; as obsessive and archetypal as the Western movie gun duel.'

Untitled (2011)
Untitled (2011); Photo Credit: Private Collection

By then, Hamilton had also begun an analysis of male narcissism in advertising by collaging stereotypically 'manly' images of the space race, a transistor radio, stock market listings, motor racing, classical archetypes of male beauty and the face of President John F Kennedy in Towards, a definitive statement on the coming trends in menswear and accessories whose subtitles included 'Together let us explore the stars' (a quote from one of Kennedy's speeches) and 'Adonis in Y fronts'. The title came from an annual feature on male fashion in Playboy magazine to which Hamilton added the conditional first word, 'Towards', arguing that fashion was too fluid a field for any prediction to be 'definitive'. He later deconstructed fashion photography in his 1969 Fashion-plates, in which the facial features of different women, including Jane Holzer's hair and Verushka's lips, were collaged into new 'faces'. The collages reveal the intensity of Hamilton's interest in fashion, including glimpses of the black models who were then becoming popular with designers like Yves Saint Laurent. They were also eerily accurate in anticipating the way that contemporary art directors digitally enhance their subjects by erasing anomalies to create 'flawless' representations of female beauty.

Citizen
The Citizen' (1981-3);Photo Credit: Tate

By the mid-Sixties, the representation of design in Hamilton's work had changed radically. He continued to depict the outcome of the industrial design process through the marketing imagery with which it was presented to the public, but was focusing on mass-manufactured products of exceptional quality and portraying them as 'high design', the industrial equivalent of 'high art'. Rather than poking fun at consumer culture as he had once done, or revelling in its sexiness, kitsch and jollity as fellow Pop artists did, Hamilton depicted the industrial artefacts that he considered worthy of thoughtful consideration with a seriousness that was markedly more subversive than his earlier satire, beginning with the Braun electric grill in his 1965 Still-life.

ivam, institut valenCià D’art moDern, Generalitat
Self-Portrait 13.7.80' (1990) ; Photo Credit: Ivam, Institut Valencià D'art modern, Generalitat

Hamilton had become aware of Braun's electronic products during the late Fifties, possibly because of his interest in the Ulm School of Design, which he had visited in 1958. Founded five years before with the aim of perpetuating the spirit and values of the Bauhaus, the Hochschule für Gestaltung (HfG) swiftly developed a singular approach to design education, specifically with regard to industrial design, which was grounded in rigorous research into the materials, finishes and processes used to manufacture a product, and its subsequent performance and durability. Several of Ulm's teachers, including Hans Gugelot and Wilhelm Wagenfeld, a student of Moholy-Nagy's at the Bauhaus, acted as consultants to the brothers Artur and Erwin Braun, who had inherited the Braun electronics company after their father's death in 1951. By the mid-Fifties, the Brauns were putting HfG's industrial design principles into practice by applying the transistor and other wartime technologies to audio products, such as radios and gramophones, and working with Gugelot and other designers to define a restrained visual language, distinguished by its use of carefully chosen modern materials in clean shapes and subtle, carefully coded colours. Among those designers was a young architect, Dieter Rams, who would later become head of design at Braun.

yesterday’s homes
Just what was it that made yesterday's homes so different, so appealing? (upgrade)' (2004); Photo Credit: Tate

During the Sixties and Seventies, Braun was feted as the apogee of industrial design, playing a similar role in consumer culture as Apple has done in recent years. Thoughtful, disciplined and unobtrusive, its design aesthetic was the opposite of the flamboyantly styled American cars and electrical gizmos in Hamilton's earlier work. The company's marketing material was designed in the same quietly imposing style as its products. When Hamilton used a promotional image of the electric grill in Still-life the effect was respectful, almost reverential; so much so that his playful decision to replace the brand name Braun with its English equivalent Brown in identical typography seemed to signal his qualms about tinkering with something so impeccable, rather than presenting it as a jocular parody.

He adopted a similar approach in the Toaster series, beginning by using chromed steel and Perspex to reconstruct one of the HT 2's panels, and supplanting Braun's brand name with his surname (a device he would repeat in his 1975 Advertisement by replacing Ricard, the trademark of the French pastis, with Richard). Hamilton's decision to use metal and Perspex in the original Toaster has been read as an attempt to replicate the experience of encountering an industrial object, as has the contrast between the mirrored surface of the steel and the fuzziness of the unfocused background. But when the piece was damaged while being shipped back to Hamilton's studio from an exhibition in Germany, the insurance company refused to pay up, arguing that the shards of metal and plastic could not belong to a work of art. Eventually, the insurer backed down, and Hamilton remade the work. When he was asked several years later to comment on Rams' achievements for an exhibition of his products in Berlin, Hamilton stated: 'My admiration for the work of Dieter Rams is intense and I have for many years been uniquely attracted towards his design sensibility; so much so that his consumer products have come to occupy a place in my heart and consciousness that Mont Sainte-Victoire did in Cézanne's.' The allusion evoked the Cubist 'high art' reference in the first two words of Hommage à Chrysler Corp.

Towards the end of his career, Hamilton revisited his preoccupation with Braun by making a new edition of Toaster for a 2009 exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery in London, but his most compelling tribute to the company's design purism could very easily have debunked it. The Critic Laughs was a series of ready-made objects he produced in the late Sixties and early Seventies, inspired by an impromptu decision to attach the giant sugar teeth, which his son had brought back from holiday as a souvenir, to the top of his own Braun electric toothbrush, rebranded as Hamilton (1968). Ghoulish though the results look, the tacky fake teeth enhance the refinement of Braun's beautifully resolved device. A similar sense of reverence is apparent in Hamilton's other mid-Sixties studies of design aesthetics: a series of fibreglass and cellulose reliefs mimicking the spiralling form of the Guggenheim Museum in New York and an intriguing failure -- his unsuccessful attempt to replicate the patterns of the treads of five car tyres manufactured in different three radios in the paint and plaster of Broadcast.

A decade after completing the Lux project, Hamilton worked with OHIO Scientific, a computer company owned by the Swedish group Isotron, on the development of a minicomputer, which he named -- and branded -- the 01-110. The project proved to be unexpectedly complicated, not least because Isotron was taken over by the Diab Data group in 1986, but the 01-110 was finished in time for an exhibition at Moderna Museet in Stockholm. Hamilton insisted that it was operative throughout the show, as he would in later exhibitions, presumably to demonstrate that it was capable of executing a practical function alongside its role as an artwork.

Neither work would be deemed remarkable if judged solely on its design merits, though nor were Hamilton's commercial design projects, such as his corporate logos for Churchill and Granada. Conceptually, the Lux 50 is the more original of the two, but not when compared to other technological concepts of the era. Stylistically, both products aspire to Braun's subtlety and discipline, but lack its finesse. Like Donald Judd's furniture, Hamilton's amplifier and computer are interesting not in terms of their design, but for what their ambiguity tell us about his evolution as an artist. The Lux 50 and 01-011 were intended as provocations to the stereotypical distinctions between both disciplines. As they fulfil one essential requirement of industrial design by executing their practical functions as an amplifier and computer respectively, why should they also be deemed to be artworks? Because someone calling himself an artist conceived them? Because they were exhibited in an art gallery? Or because, as works of art, they were free from the threat of obsolescence that haunts conventional versions of the same products, once their technology was superseded? Hamilton treated both projects as research exercises through which he could study their respective industries, just as today's 'speculative designers' such as Daniel van der Velden and Vinca Kruk of the Dutch design group Metahaven use the design process as a medium of intellectual enquiry to slake their curiosity about political phenomena. But his chief preoccupation was, once again, to analyse their affects: this time in terms of how the objects were perceived typologically as examples of art and design.

The legacy of Hamilton's fascination with design as an artist, teacher, lecturer, essayist and occasional designer still resonates in the work of other artists of his generation, including Ed Ruscha, Franz West and Isa Genzken, and younger ones such as Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Christoph Büchel, Nairy Baghramian, Mark Leckey and Helen Marten. His influence is equally evident on the emerging genre of conceptual designers, including Julia Lohmann, Christien Meindertsma and Dunne & Raby, which, like Metahaven, use the design process as a medium of research, often into the affects of design culture, and produce work whose principal function is to enable them to conduct such investigations. Resonant though Hamilton's reappraisal of the relationship between design and art has proved to be, the spirit with which he conducted it has been equally valuable: thoughtful, empathic, passionate, rigorous and, above all, optimistic.








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