British Season, Part II: Richard Hamilton and Tom Phillips

Richard Hamilton is best known as a painter and printmaker. Born in London in 1922, he seems always to have been something of a renegade — a subversive in the field of art. As a student he was extremely precocious, entering the Royal Academy in 1938 at the age of sixteen and studying there until the school's wartime closure in 1940. When it reopened in 1946 he re-enrolled, only to be expelled a short time later. He then spent three years at the Slade School which, he says, took his expulsion from the Royal Academy as an excellent recommendation for admission.

His student days finished, Hamilton taught and exhibited widely. He also played a leading role in the radical developments that transformed the British art scene in the 1950s and 1960s, and he has been internationally recognized as one of the major influences in the emergence of Pop Art.

Anyone looking at an unlabelled exhibition of Hamilton's work could be forgiven for thinking that it was the work of half a dozen different artists. There seems little in terms of style to relate Nine studies 1957-65, for example, to The transmogrifications of Bloom. Similarly, Kent State appears to bear no relation to the image Adonis in Y fronts. The sense of stylistic cohesion which we might normally associate with a particular artistic movement or a particular individual's artistic production seems absent from Hamilton's work. Nor does there seem to be a sense of linear progression towards the articulation of what we might call an artist's mature style, some end point towards which the artist seems consciously or subconsciously to have been heading. What we have in Hamilton is difference and diversity. Here we find a voraciousness for visual imagery drawn from widely varying sources and executed using an equally wide variety of technical means. This is true whether we are talking about a relatively simple image such as Adonis in Y fronts — a composite derivation from Life photographs of the Hermes of Praxiteles and an illustration from Playboy, with a title playing on the then popular song 'Venus in Blue Jeans' — or something more complex such as Picasso's meninas.

In some senses, Hamilton has consciously avoided the evolution of a particular pictorial signature which immediately identifies a work as his. Often the artist seems completely absent, the works having an almost mechanical feel to them. In others, such as My Marilyn, he consciously explores the tension between mechanically reproduced images and marks made by hand. What suggested the idea of My Marilyn was a number of publicity shots of Marilyn Monroe published after the actress's suicide. She had marked those she did not like with a cross, sometimes quite brutally, as though this were an act of symbolic negation directed against herself. Hamilton, in his typical fashion, made several works in a range of media on this theme. Here, painterly colours have been screenprinted over images derived from the star's own photographs, and in several frames he has used colour reversals or partially solarized images. But in essence, Marilyn's own marks remain unchanged. Hamilton's image seems to articulate a sense of simultaneous presence and absence, while the emotional poignancy of the composition seems further heightened by the simple and unadorned title — My Marilyn.

Mechanically produced images, then, have been a constant source of inspiration for Hamilton. He has been an acute verbal and pictorial analyst of popular culture, and much of the imagery of his earlier compositions derives from this source. A large group of works in a variety of media was inspired by Reyner Banham's investigations into car styling and sex symbolism. Hamilton, however, was less interested in the objects than in the various devices employed to glamorize them. Hers is a lush situation, from the portfolio Nine studies 1957-65, depicts various profiles of a smooth, sleek Chrysler convertible, while the title comes from the American magazine Industrial Design, which ended its analysis of the '57 Buick [sic] with the unintentionally farcical remark: 'The driver sits at the dead calm center of all this motion: hers is a lush situation'!

$he, from the same portfolio, is also concerned with advertising. Hamilton's analysis of the marketing of consumer goods led him to the conclusion that: 'The worst thing that can happen to a girl according to the ads is that she should fail to be exquisitely at ease in her appliance setting. Sex is everywhere, symbolized by the glamour of mass-produced luxury — the interplay of fleshy plastic and smooth, fleshier metal'.

Hamilton mined contemporary advertising material to build complex, ingenious and witty compositions in his search to articulate what it is that is 'epic in everyday objects and everyday attitudes'. What is unstated but implicit in the ad man's repertoire is that these glamorous qualities are elusive and unobtainable. They are constant chimeras, ever present yet constantly receding as one model is superseded by another newer, better, brighter, sexier model. Hamilton's use of an apparently machine-made finish, with the original, tangible subject seemingly concealed behind or sealed within this finish, subverts and distances the erotic allure of the imagery. It denies us its sensuality and mirrors the ultimate unobtainability of what the ad man so tantalizingly seems to, but in the end does not, offer us.

On first inspection, works such as Picasso's meninas seem to have nothing in common with My Marilyn or with images drawn from the portfolio Nine studies. They are worlds apart — both technically and stylistically. What they do share, however, is the fact that they are all appropriations. Picasso's meninas was Hamilton's contribution to a portfolio made in homage to Picasso. He chose as a basis for his work the great painting Las meninas [Maids-in-waiting], 1656, by Velázquez, which Picasso had also quoted. Here Hamilton takes us on a guided tour of Picasso's own stylistic evolution, from a Rose Period harlequin, an 'Analytic Cubist' Infanta, 'primitive' and 'neoclassical' onlookers, to a Guernica-like dog. At the easel, having displaced Velázquez, stands Picasso, with a hammer and sickle hung over his heart, while in the background is a mirror which in the original reflected the king and queen but which now shows Hamilton and his wife, thus inverting the normal balance of subject and object, creator and created.

Picasso's meninas is also an essay in technical virtuosity and stylistic wizardry, and in this respect it has affinities with works that have evolved out of Hamilton's interest in James Joyce's Ulysses. The composition In Horne's house celebrates the episode in Ulysses in which Joyce parallels the development of language with the long-delayed birth of a child in a Dublin lying-in hospital. Hamilton portrays Joyce's somewhat inebriated protagonists in the style of an Easter Island idol, an Egyptian frieze figure, a Belliniesque madonna, a Rembrandtesque young man and so on.

In A languid floating flower, we see Hamilton's humour surface once again. The title finds its comic echo in the visual transliteration of the repeated 'doodles' that hover over and within the picture plane, as though they are the visual manifestations of Bloom's distracted reveries as he sits soaking in his bath.

In 1987, Hamilton returned to the Ulysses theme to produce his colour etching Bronze by gold. 'Bronze by gold, Miss Douce's head by Miss Kennedy's head, over the crossblind of the Ormond bar. . . ' are the words which begin the 'Sirens' episode in Joyce's book. In the original Ulysses story, the Sirens attempted to lure Ulysses to his death with the promise of sexual favour. The two women behind the bar, Lydia Douce and Mina Kennedy, are two local temptresses. Lydia is linked with bronze by Joyce, and Mina is linked with gold. Hamilton identifies who is who by colour-coding the two women's hair. The imagery mirrors literally Joyce's sexual obviousness — two phallic beerpulls are being caressed tenderly by hands whose very placement seems to indicate their masturbatory action, while Miss Douce, her cup ready, waits for what is so clearly spelt out on the mirror behind her to occur, The entire sequence of works is, of course, based on appropriations from Ulysses.

What emerges, then, in any examination of Hamilton's oeuvre is that he produces clusters of works which mirror continuing preoccupations, each cluster having its own sense of stylistic unity. What unites the whole are shared strategies in terms of a work's origins and evolution. In addition, throughout his output there appear qualities of technical virtuosity and finish which indicate a stylistic focus that is peculiar to him, as well as concentrations of subject matter that are equally undeniably his own. It is these qualities, in the end, that come to define Hamilton's own unique style and serve to identify a work as unmistakably his.

Mark Henshaw

Tom Phillips wrote in 1974: 'My passions are for structures, connections, correspondence, and systems which link the sensual, visual and intellectual worlds'. The complex interplay of images and words which the artist builds up in all his work — painting, music and collage as well as prints — draws on two seemingly contradictory sources. One is the Western tradition of high culture since the Renaissance, while the other comes out of mass culture, popular icons like the Union Jack, advertising and photographic postcards. Phillips enjoys playing with words and pictures, and often takes a whimsical approach.

Art, music and literature are all important to Phillips, and to present his ideas and interpretations he must use all the tools of technique and media available. By not attaching himself to one particular style in his prints, he ranges over a wide field of imagery, choosing an individual approach to fit each work. On closer examination, however, his artistic 'handwriting', as it were, is unmistakable.

As well as lithography, screenprinting, and intaglio processes such as etching and aquatint, each of which may be aided by photographic techniques, Phillips delights in extending the boundaries of the picture plane. He has collaborated with musicians and poets, experimented with books, given performances and helped make television films. He is now exploring computer graphics, a 1980s development in the realm of visual literacy.

Born in London of a Welsh father and an English mother in 1937, Phillips began formal art training after studying Anglo-Saxon literature at Oxford. He attended Camberwell School of Art under Frank Auerbach, later remembering this period as three years of little apart from 'drawing from the life'. In the late 1950S and early 1960s this method of teaching came under attack as old-fashioned, rather than the thorough grounding in fundamentals necessary to European artists from Renaissance times. At art college Phillips was interested mainly in painting, seeing printmaking as inferior in status and achievement. After a few experiments with etching and wood-engraving, he did not attempt to make prints seriously until the late 1960s. 'l didn't think it was proper painting, I suppose', he said in 1984.

From 1966 to 1977 Phillips worked intermittently on a major project with the intriguing title A humument. Basing his project on the 1892 edition of an English Victorian novel by W.H. Mallock called A Human Document, Phillips 'treated' each of the 367 pages to produce another book entirely, as well as many individual prints, postcards and series. It has old and new characters such as Irma and 'toge', some narrative, poetry, manifestos, and a visual as well as literary discourse. Some subjects isolated by interviewer Kevin Power are 'a kind of funky Victorian tale, aesthetic statements, yourself [the artist], erotica, and a musical sense of language'.

A humument began in 1966 when the artist chose the first coherent book he could buy for threepence (2 cents) as the foundation for this encounter. He was fortunate, he wrote, as 'its vocabulary is rich and lush and its range of reference and allusion large. I have so far extracted from it over six hundred texts, and have yet to find a situation, statement or thought which its words cannot comprehend or its phrases be adapted to cover'. In mining this source Phillips has made such prints as the Pop comic strip Humument cartoon and A humument p.85. Variation lll, a portfolio of five photoscreenprints based on page 85 of the novel, as well as on the opera Irma, premiered in 1973 and recorded in 1977.

The concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) has the ideal of combining different media such as music, text, visual art and drama into one complete work. It was Richard Wagner's aim in his nineteenth-century operas, and had an earlier realization in Baroque churches. In A humument Phillips deconstructs Mallock's book to achieve a marriage of words and pictures that takes on a life of its own — playful and serious at the same time.

The pantheon of heroes in Phillips's work includes painters such as Raphael and Cézanne, Classical and Romantic composers such as Mozart and Brahms, as well as writers from Dante and Rilke to Samuel Beckett. For example, a 31-colour screenprint, After Raphael, explores the 'Golden Section', the ideal proportional relationship based on the human body. The print is based on the artist's reworkings of a painting of the 1490s in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, which is 'frequently attributed to the young Raphael'.

Phillips's works, while disparate in manner, may have some characteristics in common. Words are often displayed within the image, or set around it to form a border. In the photo-etching Oh Mozart, Mozart, stencilled capital letters present the title, a text and, as usual, the signature. The image, like many others, is recycled from a postcard. The artist takes this source and manipulates it to give new meanings. It gains resonance from its original use, but is divorced from the previous context by cultural and historical changes.

Series are one method whereby an idea can be investigated, presented in different guises, repeated for emphasis and varied for subtlety of interpretation. Ein deutsches Requiem — after Brahms combines references to the composer's German Requiem with lines from the Lutheran translation of the Bible. The pictures come from postcards collected when Phillips was visiting Kassel art school, and from the internal texts of A Human Document. The ironic Wie lieblich sind deine Wohnungen [How amiable are Thy tabernacles] shows high-rise buildings and an urban streetscape separated by a band of patterning.

The activity of making art, of being an artist, are major themes for Phillips. A walk to the studio, a series of six screenprints, documents objects encountered by chance between his house and workplace. The subjects of Sixty-four stopcock box lids were photographed in black and white, the bromides recoloured in accordance with the artist's notes taken on his walk to the studio, and then re-presented in eight rows of eight lids. The banal, utilitarian objects evoke skulls, the decay of the cast iron showing the wear of time and weather. In A grammar of ornament, pieces of discarded wrappers and patterned paper are assembled within a border from a playing-card. The title refers to a nineteenth-century book by Owen Jones, 'a treasure house of design and motif'.

Tom Phillips is not satisfied with the limits of a single medium. In his breathtakingly diverse project Dante's Inferno, for example, he translated the verse and produced 140 prints to accompany the text, on paper specially made to his requirements. Intaglio, relief, screenprinting and photographic processes combine in an inventive display which draws on history, philosophy, poetry and visual culture. There are recapitulatory references to Phillips's own work throughout. Dante in his study is a screenprint based on the artist's 1978 oil after Luca Signorelli's fifteenth-century painting. In the hardcover edition published by Thames and Hudson in 1980, Phillips provides notes to assist in deciphering the complex iconography he employs.

The critic Edward Lucie-Smith wrote in 1975 that 'Phillips's work is difficult to define in terms of style, because he tries to find a style suitable to the solution of each problem as it presents itself'. Excerpts from a Dante diary provides a fragmentary map of Tom Phillips's investigation of Dante — it also guides viewers in their exploration of his art. The evidence is collected and interpreted by the artist, presented for all to see, but the journey is our own.

Christine Dixon