A poster for a show called This Is Tomorrow

In the years after the Second World War, London was grey, rationed, and broke, and the brightest, most abundant thing on the horizon was America, not the real America, but the one that came over in glossy magazines: refrigerators the size of wardrobes, cars with fins, kitchens full of gadgets, advertisements for a comfort that bombed-out Britain could only read about. A loose circle of young London artists, designers, architects and critics had started meeting at the Institute of Contemporary Arts to talk about exactly this stuff (ads, Hollywood, science fiction, car styling, comic books) not to sneer at it but to take it seriously, as the real folk culture of the modern world. They called themselves the Independent Group, and they are, in hindsight, where Pop art was first thought up.

One of them was a sharp, methodical painter and teacher named Richard Hamilton (1922–2011). In the summer of 1956, the group took part in an exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London with a title that captured the whole mood: This Is Tomorrow. It was a show about the near future, built by collaborating teams who each put up an environment of art, architecture and design; Hamilton’s own team paired him with his fellow group member John McHale and the architect John Voelcker. Hamilton was asked to make an image for the catalogue and the poster. What he made was a collage: a picture assembled by cutting images out of printed sources and pasting them down, rather than by drawing or painting them.

And the first surprising thing about it is its size. People who know it only from posters and book covers imagine something wall-sized; the actual object is about ten and a quarter inches tall by nine and three-quarter inches wide, roughly the size of a single sheet of letter paper. A small thing, made for reproduction, that would go on to be called the first iconic work of an entire movement. In the This Is Tomorrow catalogue it was printed in plain black and white; the version we know in color is the original collage itself, which is the one we are going to look at.