Date: 30-06-1992
Owning Institution: Tate
Publication: The Independent 1987 - 1999      
Subject:   20th Century    

RICHARD HAMILTON is known as the great image-manipulator of post-war British art, and most of his best-known works have taken the form of canny tinkerings with what came to hand: Towards a definitive statement on coming trends in men's wear and accessories, that weird distillation of early Sixties ideas of what it meant to be masculine, culled from underwear ads, sports photographs and shots of JFK; Swingeing London, a news picture of the drugs-busted Mick Jagger and Robert Fraser in the back of a police van, transformed into a grand, summary image of the times.

In advertising terms, you'd call Hamilton a visualiser, but he apparently prefers to see himself in a more Old Masterly light. The Tate Gallery's current Hamilton retrospective has evidently been staged with this in mind. The aim, it is said, is to ''present Hamilton as a painter engaged above all with the longstanding central concerns of art''. Hamilton the traditionalist? This is not entirely convincing. 

Not that he never was a traditional painter. Hamilton's paintings of the early 1950s are dry time-and-motion studies, whose subjects - a car, say, seen through the window of a moving train - are pretexts for demonstrations of the truancy of vision. They culminate in a painting of 1954 called Still Life? whose message is, precisely, that life is not still: a group of bottles on a tabletop, rendered in a style which oddly combines analytical clarity with the bleary- eyed vision of a drunk. These are essentially reruns of older forms of modern painting, and they are painted in an openly derivative, Cezannesque style.

What Hamilton seems to have taken away from his early work was the knowledge that painting, per se, was the last thing that interested him. And while the conventional painter's progress leads from derivativeness to the formulation of a personal manner, Hamilton's would follow a very different course. He made derivations his stock-in-trade, became an adept transformer of found images and mimic of found styles.

Hamilton discovered the nature of his talent when he turned to collage. In 1956, he created what has been remembered as the first work of Pop Art: Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing? It has aged well. The half-naked stripper still reclines on her sofa while her chum, the Charles Atlas-type, holds a lollipop marked ''Pop'' as if it were a dumb- bell. They are the Adam and Eve of Pop, at home in their consumer paradise.

Collage suited Hamilton's magpie tendencies. His paintings of the later 1950s were themselves collage-like, self-evidently adapted from scrapbook sources. He reworked photographs of the Chrysler Plymouth, as well as pinching details from an ad for the Exquisite Form bra and the lips of an American sex symbol of short-lived fame, called Voluptua, to create his Hommage a Chrysler Corp. - a marriage of Ideal Woman and Ideal Automobile in which each assumes the other's attributes, car sinuously sexy (and flesh-toned), woman diagrammatic and half-abstracted, like a designer's prototype.

There is a lot of sex in the art of Hamilton's Pop period, but it never looks like sex for the hell of it, good dirty fun, as it does in a lot of contemporary American Pop Art. Hamilton never created anything as brutally straightforward as American Pop's icons of modern culture. In Hamilton there are always implications, complications. Questions are asked. You seriously want us to believe that driving the Chrysler Plymouth guarantees attractiveness to women? Pull the other one (even if it is a nice idea).

Aah! is another painting about the sexual mythology of advertising. A woman's gloved finger, poised above the dashboard of another of Hamilton's auto-erotic-mobiles, hovers over the gearstick. A mischievous resemblance to the nearly-but-not-quite touching fingers of Michelangelo's God and Adam on the Sistine Ceiling is doubtless intended. Like Hommage, the painting is about displaced desire, and its frustration. The speech bubble in the middle of the painting might say ''AAH!'', but the ejaculatory sigh lacks an object: a limp phallic form dangles from the dashboard where you'd expect the ignition key to be. Hamilton may have suffered from the fact that his insights have now become the commonplaces of Media Studies seminars. But the fact is that no one else has made better art about the empty promises of consumer culture.

Hamiltons are visual teasers, pictures that set technical problems for their maker and ask questions of their audience. What if Bing Crosby had been black? I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas fancifully imagines it, a painting made from a photographic negative of a film still. Bing, suddenly hipper than hip, sports black shirt, white hat, yellow cardigan and blue jacket. Hamilton, dreaming of a black Christmas, turns briefly Surreal.

His technique lets him down when he goes for something more like straightforward figurative painting. His 1970s pictures of sylph-like girls in woodland settings with rolls of Andrex placed jarringly in the foreground (Hamilton's versions of the Dejeuner sur l'Herbe) are more cackhanded than may have been intended. Hamilton paints the figure meticulously poorly, so although the pictures do what they set out to do, noting the way in which the pastoral landscape tradition has been appropriated by advertisers, they still look like ciphers.

There is something schoolmasterly about Hamilton, who likes to take problems and look at them from all angles (which partly explains why he puts his works through so many stages - there are five variants of Swingeing London). This could be described as a conceptualist's version of Cubism. One of the consequences of Hamilton's ambivalence is that his work, seen in sum, seems to have little internal momentum - nothing driving it, inexorably, in one direction. Dispassionate, he is the opposite of the type of artist popularly symbolised by Van Gogh, or Picasso. This may be why some of his most recent work is disappointing, because in it you sense Hamilton trying to give vent to the emotions he has spent a lifetime successfully suppressing.

Treatment Room is a heavy-handedly Orwellian installation from 1984 that sees him railing against Maggie's heartlessness: a TV monitor, placed over an empty bed in what could be an operating room or a torture chamber, soundlessly transmits one of Mrs T's election broadcasts. Hamilton's most recent picture, War Games, speaks a similar language of political protest. It is a painting of Hamilton's television set, on which you see an image of the sandpit Peter Snow used on Newsnight to demonstrate the movement of troops during the Gulf war - model tanks in a cardboard landscape. It is about distance and filtration, about war perceived through a media veil. Red paint, like blood, drips from the bottom of the television set: ironic commentary, Hamilton's usual mode, gives way to a scream of outrage. Shouting doesn't suit him.

Hamilton's most affecting image of the terror of modern life is also his most understated. Lobby, 1987, is based on a postcard of the Hotel Europa, Berlin. Scaled up by Hamilton, in all its null, four-star tastefulness, it becomes an image of terrible emptiness, of bland Euro-homogenisation, emptily rendered. Since the handling of paint is as fastidiously soulless as the interior painted, you could say that Hamilton achieves painterly distinction by default, lighting on a subject that demands a form of careful dullness for its realisation. Hamilton stands confirmed as unquestionably one of the major artists of the post-war period. But not because he is a great painter. It has always been the thought that counts.