Richard Hamilton was the most influential British artist of his generation. Often described as 'the father of Pop art', he produced experimental and multilayered work in a range of media that both explored and crystallized the postwar world of consumer capitalism and popular culture in an attempt to 'get all of living' into his art. Seminal works such as his collage Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing? from 1956 and his silkscreen and related series based on a news photograph of Mick Jagger Swingeing London 67 came to define an era in which new commodities and technologies, mass production, mass media, and celebrity came to the fore, and challenged the hierarchical values of 'high' and 'low' art. Later works tackling subjects such as the Troubles in Northern Ireland and the Gulf War contained a serious political message, as he continued to be 'passionately responsive to his own time', as one critic put it. His groundbreaking exhibitions and installations, first as a leading member of the Independent Group in the 1950s, and later at venues such as the Venice Biennale, influenced curatorial practice in the latter twentieth century and into the next. His importance to fields beyond contemporary art was demonstrated when he was asked to design the cover of the Beatles' so-called White Album in 1968.In this book, acclaimed cultural commentator and writer Michael Bracewell presents a concise introduction to this deeply complex artist. Written from a personal perspective, it discusses Hamilton's all-embracing work in relation to the music, film, and popular culture of the day in a rich new interpretation of his art and ideas. The book covers the full scope of Hamilton's practice, and includes examples from the various media in which he worked, from collage, print and painting to sculpture and photography, as well as the many diverse subjects of the modern world that he addressed. With photographs and quotes from Hamilton throughout, this attractive volume will appeal to anyone wanting to understand his iconic and pioneering work and its lasting cultural legacy.

Richard Hamilton has always been ahead of his time through use of material from popular culture and new technologies, often posing questions about how the media captures political events. This book brings together the famous 'protest' paintings as well as new political works that reveal the artist's incisive thinking.

An illustrated study of Richard Hamilton's famous Pop art painting of Mick Jagger and art dealer Robert Fraser in handcuffs. One of the defining paintings of British Pop art, Richard Hamilton's Swingeing London 67 (f) depicts two men--Mick Jagger and Hamilton's art dealer Robert Fraser--handcuffed together in the back of a police van. The image is taken from a newspaper photograph that shows the two being driven from Lewes prison to Chichester Magistrates Court following their June 1967 arrest for possession of drugs. The title is a clever and bitter play on words, conflating the "swinging" of 1960s-era London with the "swingeing" (to swinge is to beat or scourge) punishment meted out to new cultural heroes by the law. Hamilton's painting is far from reportage; it portrays the historical clash of cultures between Pop (and Pop art) and the establishment. In this illustrated study of Hamilton's celebrated painting, Andrew Wilson views Swingeing London 67 (f) as history painting, to be understood in the context of the struggle against the British state's attempt--aided and abetted by the popular press--to repress any expression of personal liberation. Hamilton's Pop art idiom of figuration and media images was his way of refusing the demands of an old aesthetic order. For him, Pop art was the expression of an open-ended, analytical, critical, and artistic process that reflected his own direct engagement with ethical issues. With Swingeing London 67 (f), Hamilton offers not only a representational image but also a trigger for critical activity--an image of an event and an image of what determines the conditions of that image.

Who branded painting in the Pop age more brazenly than Richard Hamilton, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, and Ed Ruscha? And who probed the Pop revolution in image and identity more intensely than they? This book presents an interpretation of Pop art through the work of these Pop Five.

Looks at artistic and gastronomic creativity through one of the world's most revolutionary chefs, Ferran Adria. This book compiles the discussions of the artists, chefs, critics, gallerists, and curators who took part in two round tables at elBulli, presenting the voices of 12 potent personalities of the art and gastronomic worlds.

Examines the development of pop art from its roots to its rise in popularity, and discusses how it was once considered outside the limits of art but is now celebrated in the Western world.