Research

Richard Hamilton

One of the founders of the Pop Art movement.

This is his description of Pop Art: "Popular (designed for a mass audience); transient (short-term solution); expendable (easily forgotten); low cost; mass produced; young (aimed at youth); witty; sexy; gimmicky; glamorous; and last but not least, Big Business." [Quoted in History of Collage by Eddie Wolfram, p. 159]

Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing? 1956

Richard Hamilton's famous fifties collage Just what it is that makes today's homes so different, so appealing? was made with normal collage techniques by cutting and pasting parts of the pictures from magazines in one day. He began by making a list of topics to be presented in the image: man, woman, humanity, domestic appliance, food, cars, cinema, TV, telephone, comics, tape recorder, history and space.


Just what is it that makes today's homes so different? 1992
This print updates the images for the nineties following the same list but using new computer technologies to scan picture elements electronically from a range of sources such as magazines, photographic prints, transparencies, and even a circuit board. Other details were 'grabbed' directly from video tape or shot with a Kodak DCS 200 digital camera and transferred into a computer. A variety of proprietary software prepared the material for transfer into a Quantel Paintbox to be masked, cut out, resized, put into perspective and pasted into the image. The process, which included learning to use the new technology, took many weeks.


Source: http://collection.britishcouncil.org/html/work/work.aspx?a=1&id=39513&section=/theme/