The collage that outlived a movement

Because the word POP sits so boldly on that lollipop, the picture is forever credited with naming the whole movement. It is a lovely story, and it is probably not true. The term “Pop art” grew up inside the Independent Group’s own conversation in the mid-1950s, and the British critic Lawrence Alloway did the most to carry it into wider use. (Alloway is often said to have coined it in a 1958 essay, but that piece actually used “mass popular art”; the words “pop art” had already turned up in print in 1956, in an article by Alison and Peter Smithson.) And the first artwork to actually contain the word “POP” wasn’t Hamilton’s at all: it was a 1947 collage by Eduardo Paolozzi, I Was a Rich Man’s Plaything, where the word puffs out of a toy pistol, nearly a decade earlier. The naming was a group affair, not a christening by this one lollipop. So the “POP” on Hamilton’s sweet is a celebrated coincidence, not a documented baptism. Enjoy the pun; don’t bank the etymology.

Hamilton liked the idea enough to return to it. There are later versions, and it matters which one you are looking at. In 1992 he made a digital reworking, Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different?, built on a Quantel Paintbox computer and swapping in a female bodybuilder; in 2004 he made another, the wryly titled Just what was it that made yesterday’s homes so different, so appealing? (upgrade). Those are separate works. The famous one, the founding one, is the small 1956 paper collage, cut and pasted by hand, the one first printed in black and white for This Is Tomorrow.

And that 1956 original now lives a little improbably far from the London it was made in. It belongs to the Sammlung Zundel (the Zundel Collection) and hangs at the Kunsthalle Tübingen, a museum in the south-German university town of Tübingen. The exact route it took from Hamilton’s table in 1956 to a German collection isn’t fully laid out in the public record, but the destination is firm: the most reproduced image in British Pop art is, today, a German museum holding.

It is worth ending on the modesty of the thing. A picture made of cut-up magazines for the catalogue of one London show, by a method anyone with scissors could copy, became the image that taught people what Pop art was before there was a Pop art to point to. Hamilton took the home, the most private room of modern life, and showed that it had quietly filled up with things for sale, the bodybuilder, the pin-up, the gadgets, the brands, the planet on the ceiling, and the lollipop in the middle that says, whether or not it named anything, exactly what all of it is.