Nothing in it is drawn
The most important thing to understand about how this picture was made is that Hamilton did not paint or draw a single mark of it. Every element is a photograph or an advertisement, cut out of a magazine with scissors and glued into place. The bodybuilder is a real photo of a real bodybuilder; the pin-up is a real pin-up; the television, the tape recorder, the tinned ham, the comic on the wall, each is an actual scrap of printed mass culture, lifted whole and reassembled into the shape of a living room.
The raw material was largely American, and it largely came from a friend. John McHale (1922–1978), a fellow member of the Independent Group and Hamilton’s teammate on the show, had been in the United States and shipped back a stack of American magazines, the glossy ad-heavy kind Britain didn’t yet produce. (McHale and the artist Magda Cordell are usually credited with feeding Hamilton this American image-bank.) Just how the credit for the picture splits between the two men is genuinely contested. Hamilton always called the collage his own, made in a single morning at the Cordells’ flat, with Cordell and Terry O’Reilly hunting down the photographs. McHale’s family later told it differently: that McHale supplied not just the magazines but a worked-out design for where each piece should go, and that Hamilton’s hand was closer to assembly than to authorship. Hamilton called that version absurd. What no one disputes is that the American image-bank was largely McHale’s, and that the finished object came out of Hamilton’s room; where exactly the authorship sits between them is a question the two camps never settled.
That division of labor, however it splits, is the whole point of how Pop would work. In an older idea of art, the artist’s skill is in the making of the image, the drawing, the brushwork, the modeling of light. Here the skill is in the choosing and the placing. The images already exist, churned out by the millions by advertisers and printers; the work is to curate and arrange them so the room adds up to an argument. The hand that used to draw now cuts and pastes. The talent has moved from the wrist to the eye.