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
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
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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
More on Wikipedia.
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.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
