ArtStuff Happened · Art
POP ART · WORK

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

Richard Hamilton · 1956

A modern living room, the size of a sheet of letter paper, built entirely out of American magazine ads, a bodybuilder, a pin-up, a tinned ham, and a giant lollipop that reads POP. The founding image of British Pop art.

The canvas
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Richard Hamilton, Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?, 1956. Collage on paper. 10 1/4 in × 9 3/4 in.
Kunsthalle Tübingen (Sammlung Zundel), Germany. Sammlung Zundel, held at the Kunsthalle Tübingen
Look closer
Find these on the canvas above
  1. The lollipop that reads POP
    Held upright by the bodybuilder, center, the giant disc on a stick angled toward the viewer
    The muscleman grips an oversized Tootsie Pop lollipop, big as a tennis racket, and its wrapper spells POP in block capitals. It reads at once as a sweet, a sight gag, and a label. It is often pointed to as a likely source of the movement’s name, but that is a celebrated coincidence, not a settled fact: the term “Pop art” grew up inside the Independent Group’s own talk, and the first artwork to contain the word “POP” was Eduardo Paolozzi’s 1947 collage, not this one. A lovely pun, with the naming held as a maybe.
  2. The bodybuilder
    Foreground center, the posed muscleman standing on the carpet
    A flexed, oiled bodybuilder, the male body sold as a sales image. He is a real man, Irvin “Zabo” Koszewski, lifted from a physique magazine (a Charles-Atlas TYPE, not Charles Atlas himself). He is the masculine half of the room’s pairing of bodies as product.
  3. The pin-up on the couch
    Left of center, the seated near-nude woman lounging on the sofa
    A burlesque pin-up reclines on the settee, a fringed lampshade on her head, the female body offered up exactly as the muscleman offers the male one. The two figures mirror each other across the room: both are advertisements made of skin.
  4. The TV and the tape recorder
    Right, the boxy television set; lower foreground, the reel-to-reel machine on the floor
    A television (a Stromberg-Carlson model in the source ad) and a reel-to-reel tape recorder (a Boosey & Hawkes machine) sit in the room as the new domestic gods. Entertainment and recording technology are installed as furniture, as central to the home as the sofa.
  5. The romance comic on the wall
    Upper left, the framed picture hung where a painting would go
    Where a family portrait or a landscape would hang, Hamilton frames a romance-comic cover (a Jack Kirby Young Romance) like a gallery painting. Pulp pinned up where a Rembrandt belongs, the old hierarchy of high and low turned upside down on the wall.
  6. The vacuum ad, the brand marks, and the Earth ceiling
    The Hoover ad running its hose up the staircase at right; brand marks scattered through the room; overhead, the planet filling the ceiling
    A Hoover vacuum-cleaner ad sends its hose absurdly up the stairs (“Ordinary cleaners reach only this far”); brand marks dot the room, a Ford badge among them; and the ceiling, where plaster should be, is a photograph of the planet seen from space. The cosmos itself is pulled indoors and made part of the décor. Every surface in the room is somebody’s advertisement.
The story · 5 chapters
~18 min total
1
London · 1956
A poster for a show called This Is Tomorrow
A loose circle of artists, designers and critics in London, the Independent Group, were chewing over American advertising and mass culture as if it were serious material. Hamilton built this small collage as the catalogue image and poster for their 1956 Whitechapel exhibition, This Is Tomorrow.
2
The making
Cut from American magazines, composed by hand
Nothing in it is drawn. The American magazines came largely from John McHale; the finished collage came out of Hamilton’s room. Just how the credit splits between them is genuinely contested. The artist’s job here is choosing and placing the mass-produced image, not painting it.
3
The canvas
A living room that is all product
The bodybuilder with the POP lollipop, the pin-up on the couch, the boxy television and the tape recorder on the floor, the framed romance comic on the wall, the brand marks, and a ceiling that is the Earth seen from space.
4
The break
When advertising became fine-art material
A finished art object assembled out of nothing but ads, logos, a comic, a pin-up and a tinned ham, with the aspirational home reframed as a catalogue of desire. A year later Hamilton wrote the one-paragraph definition of Pop that reads like a caption to this very picture.
5
After
The collage that outlived a movement
Reproduced in black and white in the catalogue, then claimed for decades as the first iconic work of Pop. Hamilton reworked the subject in 1992 and 2004; the small 1956 original now hangs in Germany, in the Sammlung Zundel at the Kunsthalle Tübingen.
10¼″ × 9¾″
Dimensions
1956
Made
Kunsthalle Tübingen
Now at
Provenance
Every hand it passed through
1956
Richard Hamilton (the artist)
London
Made in 1956 as the catalogue image and poster for the This Is Tomorrow exhibition, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, where it was reproduced in black and white. The American source images were largely supplied by John McHale (with Magda Cordell); Hamilton assembled the collage. How much McHale shaped the design is disputed, his family later claiming a larger hand than Hamilton allowed.
1956–today
Sammlung Zundel · Kunsthalle TübingenMuseum
Tübingen, Germany
Now in the Kunsthalle Tübingen, Tübingen, as part of the Sammlung Zundel (the Zundel Collection) held there. The full chain of ownership from 1956 to Tübingen is not detailed in the public record; the destination is firm. On view.