If you don’t want Paolo Veronese to be a pop artist don’t visit Richard Hamilton at the Tate Modern
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- Richard Hamliton, Interior I, 1964. Oil paint, cellulose paint and printed paper on board. Tate.
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- Richard Hamliton, Interior I, 1964. Oil paint and printed paper with inlaid mirror. Kunsthaus Zurich.
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- Paolo Veronese (1528-1588). « The Supper at Emmaus », about 1555. Oil on canvas, 290 × 488 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris © RMN (Musée du Louvre)/Gérard Blot
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- In 2010 Hamilton was invited to contribute a painting to an exhibition about Balzac’s novella “The unknown masterpiece”, whose protagonist, a painter named Frenhofer, attempts to paint a perfect nude but instead produces an illegible “dead wall of paint”. HAmilton conceived an image in which three figures – Titian, Poussin and Courbet – stand over a reclining nude. The tripartite painting of this subject is his last work, completed on 9th September 2011.
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- Richard Hemilton, Untitled, 2011. Digital print on canvas, 3 parts. (Part 1).
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- Richard Hemilton, Untitled, 2011. Digital print on canvas, 3 parts. (Part 2).
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- Richard Hemilton, Untitled, 2011. Digital print on canvas, 3 parts. (Part 3).
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- Paolo Veronese (1528-1588), “Venus, Mars and Cupid”, about 1580. Oil on canvas, 163 × 125 cm © National Galleries of Scotland
Just a few hours after visiting Paolo Veronese’s “retrospective” exhibition at the National Gallery we went to the Tate Modern for another seminal show, dedicated to the european father of the Pop Art: Richard Hamilton. What have we discovered? That the two masters have many things in common, despite their art being separated by more than 500 hundred years.
The first thing we noticed is, for example, the attention they both pay to interiors. Hamilton uses them as a sort of perspectively distorted mental stage on which elements taken from the “popular” landscape are organized and correlated. On the other hand, a similar kind of “expressive”, or narrative, use of perspective characterizes a painting such as The supper at Emmaus (1555), one of Veronese’s most ambitious early works. The architecture on the background is a kind of open space questioning the boundaries between interior and exterior, slightly tending towards the right side of the canvas – the classic columns are not perpendicular with the floor. Moreover, the degree to which the religious and contemporary figures inhabit the same space is not just “extraordinary”, as the introductory exhibition’s guide reports, but also unexpectedly “pop”. The members of the noble family here depicted are yet to be identified, but considering they have been painted near Jesus in person they have to be at least popular, either on the Venetian mainland or in Venice. And what about the positions in which the heads of the characters on the scene have been painted? Isn’t it a perfect collage of elements coming from different sources? Then go back to Hamilton, and look at the way every fragment of the image works as an icon, and as a symbol too.
If you are not convinced yet about their affinity, then read what Hamilton wrote in 1957 in a letter to architects Peter and Alison Smithson:
Pop Art is:
Popular (designed for a mass audience)
Transient (short-term solution)
Expendable (easily forgotten)
Low cost
Mass produced
Young (aimed at youth)
Witty
Sexy
Gimmicky
Glamorous
Big business
July 18, 2015
