A living room that is all product

It pretends to be a fashionable modern living room, seen straight on, the kind of aspirational interior a furniture catalogue or a homes magazine would show you. There is a carpet, a sofa, a staircase climbing up at the right, a coffee table, framed pictures on the wall. It looks, at a glance, like an ad for a comfortable life. Then you start naming the things in it, and the room turns into something stranger: a catalogue of everything that was being sold in 1956, crammed into one space. Even the title is borrowed, it was lifted whole from a magazine advertisement.

Start with the two bodies, because they anchor the room. Standing on the carpet, center, is a flexed, oiled bodybuilder, a real man, the physique-magazine champion Irvin “Zabo” Koszewski, the masculine ideal posed for sale. (He is a Charles-Atlas type, the muscle-ad strongman, not Charles Atlas himself.) Reclining on the sofa to his left is a burlesque pin-up, near-nude, a fringed lampshade perched on her head, the feminine ideal, sold the same way. The man and the woman mirror each other across the room: both are advertisements made of skin, the body itself turned into product.

Now the thing the bodybuilder is holding, because it is the most-pointed-at object in twentieth-century collage. In one hand he grips an enormous lollipop, a Tootsie Pop blown up to the size of a tennis racket, and angled toward you so you can read its wrapper. The wrapper says, in fat block capitals, POP. It is a sweet; it is a gag; and it is, pointed at the viewer like that, the single word that would come to name a whole movement, though it didn’t name it from this picture.

Then the gadgets. A boxy television set sits to the right (a Stromberg-Carlson model in the source ad), and a reel-to-reel tape recorder (a Boosey & Hawkes machine) sits on the floor in the foreground, the new household gods, entertainment and recording technology installed as casually as a side table. On the wall, where you’d hang a family portrait or a landscape, Hamilton has framed a romance-comic cover (a Jack Kirby Young Romance), pulp pinned up like an old master. Up the staircase runs a Hoover vacuum-cleaner ad, its hose stretched absurdly far (“Ordinary cleaners reach only this far”). Brand marks dot the room (a Ford badge among them) and a tinned ham sits on the coffee table like a centerpiece.

And then look up. Where the ceiling should be (plaster, a light fitting, the top of an ordinary room) Hamilton has pasted a photograph of the Earth seen from space, the curve of the planet filling the room’s lid. It is the most quietly outrageous move in the picture: the cosmos itself pulled indoors and made part of the furnishings, the whole world available as décor. Stand back and take in the sum of it. There is not one surface in this living room that isn’t somebody’s advertisement. The home, the place that’s supposed to be private and warm and yours, has been built entirely out of things for sale.