Richard Hamilton valuation
Made the collage that defined Pop in 1956, and designed the Beatles' White Album.
Richard Hamilton was born in London in 1922, worked as a technical draughtsman, and was a founder of the Independent Group at the ICA, whose discussions of advertising, science fiction and consumer imagery produced the collage Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing? in 1956 — usually taken as the first Pop artwork.
What a work by Richard Hamilton is worth
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Bio
Richard Hamilton was born in London in 1922, worked as a technical draughtsman, and was a founder of the Independent Group at the ICA, whose discussions of advertising, science fiction and consumer imagery produced the collage Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing? in 1956 — usually taken as the first Pop artwork. He reconstructed Duchamp's Large Glass, taught at Newcastle, designed the Beatles' White Album with its numbered sleeve and poster, and made politically direct work about Northern Ireland and about Blair and the Iraq war. He died in 2011.
Hamilton was a technically obsessive printmaker who combined screenprint, etching, collotype and digital processes in single sheets, often revisiting an image over years in successive states. Identifying the exact version, state and edition is therefore the substance of any valuation, and Lullin's catalogue of the prints is the reference. Editions are typically small. The paintings and the unique mixed-media works are scarce. Original White Album sleeves with low numbers and complete inserts belong to a separate collecting market that overlaps this one.
At a glance
- Born
- 24 February 1922, London
- Died
- 13 September 2011, London
- Movements
- Pop art, Contemporary art
Swingeing London 67, and the catalogue
Swingeing London 67 takes a press photograph by John Twine of Mick Jagger and Hamilton's dealer Robert Fraser, handcuffed together in a police van on the way to court on drugs charges in 1967. Hamilton made it into a series of paintings and into prints, among them an etching printed in Milan and published by Petersburg Press in 1968, and each version is a separate work.
Etienne Lullin's Richard Hamilton: Prints and Multiples 1939–2002, published in 2003 after an exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Winterthur, is the catalogue raisonné of the prints, and its numbers distinguish the many versions of his images. Tate Modern's retrospective in 2014 was the first to cover the whole of his career, from the exhibition designs of the 1950s to his last paintings.
Growth and Form, the Merzbau and Ulysses
Hamilton was expelled from the Royal Academy Schools in 1946 on the grounds that he was not profiting from the teaching, went on to the Slade, and in 1951 staged Growth and Form at the ICA, an exhibition of scientific models, diagrams and photographs drawn from D'Arcy Thompson's book. His students at Newcastle included Rita Donagh, later his partner, and Bryan Ferry, and with an Arts Council grant he had the Merzbau that Kurt Schwitters began in Cumbria moved to the Hatton Gallery there to preserve it. He also taught at the Royal College of Art from 1957 to 1961, where he encouraged David Hockney and Peter Blake.
He worked on illustrations to James Joyce's Ulysses for some fifty years, from sketches made at the Slade, and the British Museum showed them as Imaging Ulysses in 2002. In the 1970s he made multiples with the Zurich publisher xartcollection and collaborated with Dieter Roth, and later he made and altered images on a Quantel Paintbox. Collages such as Pin-up of 1961 and $he incorporate moulded plastic, which was already cracking and lifting by 1964, so condition needs close attention with any work of his that uses it.
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