Richard Hamilton, a British Pop Art pioneer who depicted former British prime minister Tony Blair as a cowboy and designed the cover of the Beatles’ “White Album,” has died. He was 89.
The Gagosian Gallery, which represents Mr. Hamilton, said he died Sept. 13 at an undisclosed location in Britain. It did not give the cause of death.
Mr. Hamilton was often called the “Father of Pop Art” — Britain’s answer to Andy Warhol — and he was credited with coining the name for a movement marked by its ironic and iconic use of commercial and pop culture imagery.
Mr. Hamilton was born in London on Feb. 24, 1922. He studied at the Royal Academy Schools and the Slade School of Fine Art, and he made his name in the 1950s with “Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?” The collage shows a physically idealized naked couple — with the man holding a red lollipop marked “Pop” — in a product-laden home. It was a seminal work of Pop Art.
For a half-century Mr. Hamilton produced images that were striking and often political, including Mick Jagger in handcuffs after a drug raid, portraits of prison protesters in Northern Ireland and an image of Blair as a cowboy in a 2007 piece titled “Shock and Awe.”
“I was really disgusted with his performance after starting the Iraq war, and being involved in starting it, and his hypocrisy,” the artist told an interviewer last year.
Still seething at Blair’s alliance with then-President George W. Bush, Mr. Hamilton said:
“When [Blair] went to America and was staying with Bush, he stayed at the ranch, and they came out for a walk for the cameras with their thumbs in their pockets.”
He added that Blair “was 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,” he said.
The image was made using a photograph of Blair’s head. The rest of the figure was Mr. Hamilton’s assistant, who was “about half the size of Tony Blair, but with a computer you can stretch things.” The assistant wore a cowboy shirt someone had given Mr. Hamilton, as well as guns and holsters bought from an Arizona mail-order company.
Mr. Hamilton was just as exercised about Iraq in 1991, when the U.S. led a military campaign to chase Saddam Hussein’s forces out of Kuwait. Mr. Hamilton’s “War Games” showed a TV with tanks and flags on the screen, blood dripping from underneath.
Many of Mr. Hamilton’s hard-hitting Northern Ireland pieces depicted the prison near Belfast, where republican inmates in the 1980s refused to wear prison uniforms, refused to leave their cells and staged hunger strikes.
An installation called “Treatment Room” depicted an Ulster hunger striker’s hospital chamber, with a corner sink, a bed with a rumpled blanket and a TV set overhead that beamed muted footage of then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
One of Mr. Hamilton’s best-known works is the antithesis of Pop Art’s colorful cacophony: the monochrome cover of the Beatles’ 1968 “White Album,” a simple white square embossed with the band’s name. Mr. Hamilton also designed the collage-style poster that came with the album.
Mr. Hamilton began an odd correspondence with Paul McCartney, who had invited him to design the cover. Each would send the other a postcard with the correct name but an unlikely address. “It was a test to see whether it would find its way,” Mr. Hamilton recalled with a hearty laugh. “I don’t know if any didn’t.”
Mr. Hamilton also worked for decades on a mammoth project to illustrate James Joyce’s novel “Ulysses.”
He told Britain’s Guardian newspaper that acclaim had come because “I’ve lived longer than all my peers.” But others saw him as a major artistic figure.
Tate gallery director Nicholas Serota said Mr. Hamilton was “one of the most influential and distinctive artists of the postwar period.”
“Greatly admired by his peers, including Warhol and [Joseph] Beuys, Hamilton produced a series of exquisite paintings, drawings, prints and multiples dealing with themes of glamor, consumption, commodity and popular culture,” Serota said.
Mr. Hamilton’s work has been shown around the world, and pieces are included in major collections, including those of New York’s Metropolitan Museum and Museum of Modern Art.
The Gagosian Gallery said that until a few days ago, Mr. Hamilton had been working on a major retrospective that will travel to Los Angeles, Philadelphia, London and Madrid in 2013-14.
Mr. Hamilton’s first wife, Terry O’Reilly, died in 1962. They had two children. He married Rita Donagh in 1991. Besides his wife, survivors include his son.
— From News Services
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