Richard Hamilton, Tate Modern

The Tate’s retrospective of Richard Hamilton –godfather of Pop Art and the artist who gave the movement its definition – is currently the talk of the art world. It’s the gallery’s third Hamilton retrospective in its history (following Tate shows in 1970 and 1993) and the second in London since his death in 2011, but this is the first exhibition to fully home in on the contrasts between his early installation work at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, the genre-defining collages that came to symbolise Pop, and his final political paintings of 2010-2011.

‘Pop Art is’ Hamilton explained in 1957, ‘popular, transient, expendable, low-cost, mass-produced, young, witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous, and Big Business.’ This definition came to form the doctrinal heart of Pop, and it explicates the ideas at play in one of his most famous early works, the groundbreaking Fun House (1956) installation: a mock-up of a room in a typical consumerist 1950s household, swathed with prints and posters from the Hollywood and youth culture magazines du jour. Here it’s recreated alongside one of the show’s undoubted highlights: the seminal collage Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing? (1956). Together, with their cheeky conflation of 1950s brand enthusiasms, these became the poster-pieces of the early Pop Art movement.

While pop-culture was Hamilton’s career-long preoccupation, what this show does particularly well is track the emergence of a political slant to his work in the 1960s.This produced  the  key works Swingeing London (1968-1969), born of Hamilton’s outrage at the indictment of Mick Jagger and Hamilton’s art dealer friend Robert Fraser for heroin possession in 1967; the masterfully-painted Northern Ireland diptychs The Citizen (1981-1983) and The Subject (1988-1990), based on BBC footage of the infamous Maze Prison near Belfast; and Shock and Awe (2010), a portrait of a gun-toting Tony Blair whom Hamilton remembered, following his 2002 visit to George W Bush’s Texan ranch, as being ‘so pleased with himself… Thinking of his role in relation to the Iraq war, I began to see this gunslinger as something like a cowboy.’ 

For Pop Art aficionados and the uninitiated alike, this exhibition is a must-see survey of an artist whose work consistently hacked at the heart of the zeitgeist, and masterful manipulated its iconography.