Richard Hamilton, Artist

Pin-up

Richard Hamilton (British,1922–2011)

1961. Oil, cellulose, and collage on panel, 53 3/4 x 37 3/4 x 3" (136.5 x 95.8 x 7.6 cm) including frame. Enid A. Haupt Fund and an anonymous fund. © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / DACS, London

One of the founders of Pop art in Britain, Hamilton took his theme for this work directly from popular culture, using pictures from Playboy and other men’s magazines as his sources. While the work references these ubiquitous photographs of sex symbols, it is also a modern treatment of a conventional subject of painting—the odalisque, or reclining nude. Hamilton approaches this tradition through a variety of pictorial modes: the hair is a stylized cartoon, the breasts appear both in drawing and in three-dimensional relief, and the bra is a photograph applied as a collage. "Mixing idioms," Hamilton has said, "is virtually a doctrine inPin-up."

Source is Museum of Modern Art