Richard Hamilton - Flower Piece B

Richard Hamilton
Flower-piece B
Lithograph
1975
16.5” x 12”, framed
AP 13/16, from an edition of 75
Signed and numbered in pencil lower right

Richard Hamilton was the founder of Pop art and a visionary who outlined its aims and ideals. A lollipop from one of his early collages furnished the movement with its title. His visual juxtapositions from the 1950s were the first to capture the frenetic energy of television, and remind us of how strange the vacuum, tape recorder, and radio must have seemed for the first generations that experienced them. "Pop Art" the British artist declared, would be: "Popular, transient, expendable, low-cost, mass-produced, young, witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous, and Big Business." While less of a household name than Andy Warhol, it was Hamilton who laid the groundwork for Pop art, and first defined its aims and ideals.

These prints are related to a series of Flower-Piece paintings made by Hamilton in the early 1970s. The flowers themselves were based on an image on a laminated postcard with an illusory ‘three-dimensional’ effect. The addition of the Andrex toilet paper has been seen as counterbalancing the sentimentality inherent within the genre of painting flowers. It also reflects Hamilton’s fascination with advertising. He has described a lyrical, soft-focus advertisement for Andrex as being ‘like Watteau in its magical ambiguity’. (via Tate Museum)