English
b. February 24, 1922, Pimlico, London, England —
d. September 13, 2011, Northend, England

Richard Hamilton was an English painter and collage artist known as one of the earliest proponents of Pop Art. In 1956, he completed his first major collage work: Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?, a seminal image in Pop history, depicting a variety of domestic and cultural ephemera in an inventive, collaged visual space. Hamilton continued a lifelong relationship with, and examination of, popular media. In his celebrated collages, Hamilton explored the relationship between fine art, product design, and popular culture.

Richard Hamilton was given major retrospective exhibitions have been at the Tate Gallery, London, 1970 and 1992, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1973, MACBA, Barcelona and Museum Ludwig, Cologne, 2003. In May 2014 a major retrospective was held at the Tate Modern in London in his honor. His works have also been shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Throughout his career Hamilton has exhibited internationally.

Richard Hamilton’s print Las Meniñas came about as a result of a commission: Hamilton was invited by the Propylaen Press, Berlin to contribute to their portfolio Hommage à Pablo Picasso, celebrating Picasso’s ninetieth birthday in 1971. Basing his print on Picasso’s Meniñas, an etching that plays an art-historical game by combining the composition of the celebrated painting by Diego Velázquez, Las Meniñas, 1656 (Museo del Prado, Madrid), Hamilton drew the Infanta (the Spanish princess) in the style of Picasso’s Analytical Cubism of 1912. The lady-in-waiting standing on her left is depicted in the flat graphic language Picasso developed in the 1930s. Behind her, another female attendant is depicted in Picasso’s neo-classical style of the early 1920s and a male figure is drawn using spare lines and the vocabulary of African forms that Picasso was using around 1907. The female dwarf of the seventeenth century original has become a version of Picasso’s Seated Woman, 1927.