When advertising became fine-art material

To feel why this small collage is a break and not just a clever poster, consider what serious art was still supposed to be made of in 1956. Even the most modern painting drew its imagery from “high” sources: the human figure, landscape, myth, the formal puzzles of abstraction, the long tradition running back through the Paris avant-garde. When modern life did get into art, it was filtered through the artist’s own hand, a Cubist still life, Léger’s machine forms. Advertising, comics, brand logos, pin-ups: that was “low” material, the province of commercial designers, beneath the dignity of a gallery wall.

Hamilton walked straight across that line. He made a finished art object out of nothing but consumer and advertising imagery, magazine ads, a comic cover, brand marks, a pin-up, a bodybuilder, a photo of a tinned ham. Nothing is ennobled by being painted; the commercial image is admitted into art exactly as it came off the press. And the subject he chose for it is the sharp twist of the knife: the aspirational home, the very dream the ads were selling, reassembled until it reads as a catalogue of desire, every object in the room a thing you are meant to want and buy. The break Pop runs with is right here: that the imagery of advertising and mass culture is now legitimate, even primary, art material, and that the act of quoting and arranging found commercial images is itself the work.

A year after he made the collage, Hamilton wrote the sentence that reads almost like a caption to it. In a letter to the architects Alison and Peter Smithson, dated 16 January 1957, he set down a definition of the new thing he and his friends were after, not painting, but the popular culture they admired, with a list of the qualities he wanted art to take from it:

“Pop Art is: Popular (designed for a mass audience), Transient (short-term solution), Expendable (easily forgotten), Low cost, Mass produced, Young (aimed at youth), Witty, Sexy, Gimmicky, Glamorous, Big Business.”

, Richard Hamilton, letter to Peter and Alison Smithson, 16 January 1957

Eleven qualities, and every one of them describes the living room you just looked at. The text travels in slightly different forms: Hamilton wrote it as a stacked list with those little parentheticals, but some sources run it as one sentence, some drop the bracketed asides, and some give the date only as “1957.” The substance is stable. Read it back against the collage and the two line up almost item for item: Popular, Mass produced, Sexy, Glamorous, Big Business. The picture is the argument made in scissors and glue; the letter is the same argument made in words.