Richard Hamilton

Richard Hamilton  1922-2011

 Richard Hamilton

 A detail from Richard Hamilton's The Balzac

Richard Hamilton - Interior II 1964

Richard Hamilton 1922-2011

Richard Hamilton    - Interior II 1964

Like Hamilton’s later prints, A dedicated follower of fashion, 1980 (Tate P07448) and The marriage, 1998 (P78290), the painting Interior II was developed from a discarded photograph the artist discovered by chance. Hamilton was teaching art at Newcastle Polytechnic when he found a still from the film Shockproof (1949, director Douglas Sirk, screenplay by Samuel Fuller) lying on a classroom floor. The 1948 photograph became the generator for a series of works playing on the representation of an interior space. Hamilton was struck by the carefully arranged composition of the still, photographed in a specially constructed set. He explained:
Everything in the photograph converged on a girl in a ‘new look’ coat who stared out slightly to right of camera. A very wide-angle lens must have been used because the perspective seemed distorted; but the disquiet of the scene was due to two other factors. It was a film set, not a real room, so wall surfaces were not explicitly conjoined; and the lighting came from several different sources. Since the scale of the room had not become unreasonably enlarged, as one might expect from the use of a wide-angle lens, it could be assumed that false perspective had been introduced to counteract its effect – yet the foreground remained emphatically close and the recession extreme…