The Different Cultures Covered in Ap Art History Pacific

Richard Hamilton, Simply What is It That Makes Today's Homes And so Unlike, so Highly-seasoned?, 1956, collage, 26 cm × 24.viii cm (Kunsthalle Tübingen, Tübingen)

Consumer products and mass media

In this iconic collage by the British artist Richard Hamilton, created in 1956, a midcentury living room is filled to the skirt with logos and cut-out images of consumer products. At center, a lampshade is emblazoned with the emblem for the auto manufacturer, Ford. The cover of a comic volume hangs as "wall-art" and a can of tinned ham sits on the coffee table, like a decorative vase. Found images and mass media artifacts are everywhere we look in this prototype—on the television, out the window, up the stairs, and on the floor.

Richard Hamilton, Just What is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, so Appealing?, 1956, collage, 26 cm × 24.8 cm (Kunsthalle Tübingen, Tübingen)

In fact, even the couple who occupy the room appear to us as commodities. The wife, a nude model, is perched seductively on the couch, while the husband, a Herculean body builder, shows off his covetable physique, wielding a suggestive Tootsie pop by his waist. Often interpreted equally a kind of idealized, modern-day "Adam and Eve," the couple are also products on brandish, no different from the branded and packaged goods that adorn their dwelling house.

The title of this art work takes the class of a question— Only What is Information technology That Makes Today's Homes And then Dissimilar, and so Highly-seasoned? — phrasing that echoes the titles of manufactures in popular magazines and which can be answered somewhere in the dizzying array of consumer imagery strewn beyond its the work's surface. The domestic space, Hamilton asserts, has become prime number real manor for the advertising industry, and is an arena in which middle form aspirations are on full display in the grade of futurist vacuum cleaners and television sets.

Following the victory of Allied forces in World State of war Two, the The states in item experienced a catamenia of economical compensation; factories that had been mobilized to create airplanes, artillery, and other military necessities were repurposed towards the manufacturing of popular culture, luxury items, and household products that were then exported worldwide. Produced amidst the inflow of American goods in the United Kingdom, Hamilton's collage is one of the kickoff works of what would be later known equally the Popular Art move: a genre which both celebrated and critiqued subjects such as consumerism, celebrities, and the cheapening of modern culture amidst the plough towards mass-production.

Pop Art's British origins

While many of the nearly recognizable names in Pop Art are American artists like Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Claes Oldenberg, who created paintings and sculptures inspired past comic books and advertisements throughout the 1960s, the movement actually originated in postwar London. In fact, a half decade before Warhol exhibited his famous Campbell's Soup paintings, it was Hamilton who gave the movement its first official definition. Describing his ideas to his friends, the architects  Peter and Alison Smithson, Hamilton wrote that:

Pop Art is: Popular (designed for a mass audience), Transient (short-term solution), Expendable (easily forgotten), Low cost, Mass produced, Young (aimed at youth), Witty, Sexy, Contemporary, Glamorous, Big business Richard Hamilton, Alphabetic character to Peter and Alison Smithson, 16 January 1957

Hannah Höch, Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany, 1919–20, collage, mixed media

The terms above were rarely used in relation to fine art, which is commonly ascribed a sense of timelessness, seriousness of purpose , and pregnant material value. Pop artists sought to challenge the elitism of the academic tradition , k uch similar the artists of the Dada motion of the World War I era, who challenged the mode in which art is often used as a symbol of socio-economic condition. Pop artists were interested in critiquing the status of art as a article object, and often depicted or made use of artifacts of popular civilization, advertisements, and mass media.

In U.k., Pop Art developed alongside a similar plow in intellectual history. For instance, the New Left writer Raymond Williams wrote an of import essay called "Culture is Ordinary" in 1958, which proposed that we should non think of "civilisation" as a term that applies only to pursuits of the leisured class. He wanted scholars to examine a broader definition of civilisation as a "whole way of life" whose expression is evident in popular films, novels, advertisements, and other mass-produced media. Art critic Lawrence Alloway, who coined the term "mass popular art" in 1955, likewise argued for the importance of fine art that engaged with mass communications and gimmicky visual culture. [1] Similarly, Pop artists like Richard Hamilton were interested in drawing our attention to the desires , culture, homes, and interests of regular, everyday people—not just the fiscal  elite.

The Independent Grouping and "This is Tomorrow"

While But What is It… is considered to be among the nigh foundational works of Pop Art, this small collage was initially not created as a piece of work of art. At only 12 inches square, information technology was produced every bit the embrace design for the catalogue of an exhibition called This is Tomorrow , an immersive, collaboratively produced installation of fine art and pattern that was conceived by a collective called The Independent Group, of which Hamilton was part.

An advertisement for the Whitechapel Art Gallery'due south futuristic exhibition 'This is Tomorrow'. 1956

The Independent Group was a accomplice of young artists, designers, architects, and writers affiliated with the Found of Gimmicky Arts, London. At the fourth dimension, the museum typically exhibited Modernist paintings and sculpture, but past the late 1950s this kind of art felt out-of-step with the contemporary moment. In the early on 1950s, members of the Independent Group met to discuss topics in visual culture that lay outside the traditional loonshit of fine fine art.

Eduardo Paolozzi, I was a Rich Man'due south Plaything, 1947, printed paper on carte, collage in Bunk!, 35.nine × 23.8 cm (Tate)

In 1952, Eduardo Paolozzi, for example, gave a lecture entitled 'Bunk!' that was illustrated by projections of collages fabricated from comic book clippings, mag advertisements, film stills, and photographs of celebrities. [ii]

In 1956, the Contained Grouping produced one of their nearly important exhibitions. Entitled This is Tomorrow, the bear witness was held at London'southward Whitechapel Gallery. It was divided into eleven immersive sections, each curated past a group of artists, architects, and other collaborators, who treated their contribution as a manifesto for contemporary, and future, visual culture. They each designed a poster and were given six pages in the exhibition catalogue.

Cardboard cutout of Robby the Robot in the This is Tomorrow exhibition, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 1965

Hamilton was a fellow member of Group 2, along with builder John Voelcker, and fellow artists such as John McHale. Theirs was among the near memorable displays in This is Tomorrow ; it featured boundless Op Art panels and a life-size collage of cinema posters and cardboard cut-outs. For instance, that famous printing photo of Marilyn Monroe—flirtatiously posing above a breezy subway grate in The Vii Yr Itch— was juxtaposed with Robby the Robot, an iconic graphic symbol in the 1956 science-fiction film, Forbidden Planet.

Pop Culture in the Space Age

Advertizement for Armstrong Royal Floors in Ladies' Habitation
Journal (June 1955)

Fine art historians take traced many of the original contexts for the images that Hamilton collages in Just What is It …? For instance, the artist began the collage with a backdrop drawn from an advertisement for Armstrong Imperial Floors, which was included in the June 1955 outcome of the American magazine Ladies' Abode Journal .

This domestic interior scene provides the basic setting into which Hamilton pasted new images, such as the Hoover Constellations vacuum cleaner, Stromberg-Carlson television, and Armour Star Ham, among other products.

All the same, not every collage element comes from the marketing earth.

Richard Hamilton, Just What is It That Makes Today's Homes Then Dissimilar, so Appealing?, 1956, collage, 26 cm × 24.8 cm (Kunsthalle Tübingen, Tübingen)

For instance, Hamilton topped his domestic space with a planetary "ceiling"—a view of World, which had been photographed using an aeriform camera at a summit of virtually 100 miles. (This came from the personal archive of fellow artist McHale, who used collage elements to form images of futuristic, robotic creatures). Its inclusion complicates the sense of scale in Hamilton's collage, as we movement from the intimate infinite of a residential interior to the expansive realm of the cosmos.

Information technology would exist another fifteen years earlier the publication of the outset photo of World in its entirety—the so-called "Blue Marble" captured by the Apollo 17 coiffure in 1972—but both the Cold War and Infinite Historic period were on the horizon, and public fascination with planetary vision was already palpable in popular culture. Equally Hamilton himself afterward wrote:

We seemed to be taking a form towards a rosy future and our irresolute, Hi-Tech, world was embraced with a starry-eyed confidence; a surge of optimism which took us into the 1960s. Though clearly an 'interior' in that location are complications that cause us to incertitude the categorisation. The ceiling of the room is a space-age view of Globe. The carpet is a distant view of people on a embankment. Information technology is an allegory rather than a representation of a room. [3]

As an apologue of the future—one marked by its fixation on "tomorrow"—Hamilton'south collage is one of the major works of the postwar historic period to truly represent what it means to be "contemporary."

Notes:

[one] Run into Lawrence Alloway, "Pop Fine art the Words," Topics in American Art Since 1945 (New York: W.W. Norton and Visitor, 1975), pp. 119–22.

[2] The Contained Group likewise produced several collaborative exhibitions that drew together fine art, photography, science, and blueprint. Amongst these were Parallel of Art and Life (1953), which celebrated new visual technologies such as microscopic or X-ray photography, and made it possible to run across visual phenomena that are invisible to the naked eye. They besides produced Man, Machine, and Motion (1955), which was themed around mechanical speed and travel. Hamilton himself conceived of the latter, and wrote that the included photographs were meant to cumulatively represent "a visual written report of man's human relationship to moving machines." Richard Hamilton, Lawrence Gowing, and Peter Reyner-Banham, Man, Machine, and Motility . [exh. true cat.] (Newcastle-Upon-Tyne: Rex's College, the University of Durham, 1955).

[3] Quoted in Richard Hamilton: Exteriors, Interiors, Objects, People [exh. cat.] (Stuttgart: Edition Hansjörg Mayer, 1990): p. 44.

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Boosted resources:

Tate: Independent Group

Tate: The Legacy of the Independent Group conference

Richard Hamilton, ed. David Sylvester and Richard Morphet (Millbank, London: Tate Gallery Publications, 1992). [exh. cat.]

This is Tomorrow, ed. Lawrence Alloway, Reyner Banham, David Lewis (London: Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1956). [exh. cat]

Hal Foster, The Get-go Pop Age: Painting and Subjectivity in the Art of Hamilton, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Richter and Ruscha (Princeton Academy Printing, 2011)

John-Paul Stonard, "Pop in the Age of Boom: Richard Hamilton's 'Just what is it that makes today's homes so unlike, then highly-seasoned?," The Burlington Mag 149, no. 1254 (September 2007): pp. 607–620

Cite this page equally: Dr. Allison Immature, "Richard Hamilton, Just What is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, so Appealing?," in Smarthistory, December 6, 2021, accessed May v, 2022, https://smarthistory.org/richard-hamilton-just-what-is-it/.

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