Nov 14, 2013 - Sale 2331

Sale 2331 - Lot 236

Price Realized: $ 35,000
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 6,000 - $ 9,000
RICHARD HAMILTON
Sign.

Enamel on steel plate, 1975. 350x800 mm; 13 3/4x31 1/2 inches. Signed and numbered 25/36 in brush and black ink, lower right verso. Published by Museum Hessen, Kassel.

London-born Hamilton (1922-2011) is widely credited as one of the earliest Pop artists. His seminal, 1956 collage Just What is it that Makes Today's Homes so Different, so Appealing?, showing a scantily-clad, gym-chiseled couple set in a 1950s living room, is considered by many scholars to be among the first Pop Art works. Hamilton trained during mid-century in London and had his first exhibition at the Hanover Gallery, London, in 1955. His early paintings, collages and projects reveal a deep influence from the Dadaists (notably Marcel Duchamp, whose work he studied closely; he curated the first British retrospective of Duchamp's work, in 1966) to modernists such as Kurt Schwitters and George Grosz.

From his early career, as an art instructor at Newcastle Upon Tyne, where one of his students was the Roxy Music founder Bryan Ferry, to his rise to international acclaim as a foremost Pop artist during the 1970s, Hamilton had a close association with the music industry as well. From the mid-1960s, he was represented by the London art dealer and socialite Robert Fraser, and produced a series of screenprints documenting the arrest of Fraser and Mick Jagger, of the Rolling Stones, for possession of drugs, in 1967. Through his friendship with Paul McCartney, Hamilton came to design the iconic cover and poster for the Beatles' White Album, 1968.

In the current work, a sign in enamel on steel for which he used his first name, Hamilton appropriated the ubiquitous label design of the French liquor distiller Pernod Fils and their famous Pernod Ricard. Meyer 10.