Born in London in 1922, Richard Hamilton studied painting at the Royal Academy of Arts from 1938 to 1940. In the years 1941 to 1945 he worked as a draughtsman, an industrial designer and for an advertising agency, organising concerts on the side. In 1946 he again took up the study of painting, and in 1948 he transferred to the Slade School of Fine Arts, from which he graduated in 1951. In the following years he held a number of teaching posts. Together with the critics Lawrence Alloway and Reyner Banham, the sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi and others, he founded the Independent Group at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1952. This group aimed to integrate mass media with high art. He began corresponding with Marcel Duchamp in 1956, and in 1966 organised the Duchamp retrospective in London’s Tate Gallery. Together with Duchamp he came to know Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg in Los Angeles. He would later work more and more with Dieter Roth. Hamilton participated in documenta 4, 6 and 10 in 1968, 1977 and 1997. He is considered a forerunner of Pop Art and in the 1980s became a pioneer of computer art. In 1992 the Tate Gallery in London devoted a major retrospective to him. In 2007 the city of Frankfurt awarded him the Max Beckmann Prize. Hamilton died in London in 2011.
