RICHARD HAMILTON WRITER ARCHIVE

The edition size was 80 just a little smaller than that for the album with which the poster was first included. The poster was reproduced as an edition of digital prints in 2007, one of which is in the Tate Collection. For me that was a great lesson that I was getting from the hands of someone like Richard Hamilton, a whole week of his thoughts. McCartney remembered “a very German interior to the studio, very Bauhaus, very 60s modern”, and was particularly awed by the moment at the end where Hamilton applied five small white pieces of paper to provide negative space among the jostling photographs. Hamilton composed a brilliant collage, a process a rapt McCartney witnessed over the course of a week at the artist’s studio in Highgate, north London.

RICHARD HAMILTON WRITER ARCHIVE

Photo: PictureLux / The Hollywood Archive / Alamy Stock Photo. Publicity photo of The Beatles (George Harrison, Ringo Starr, Paul McCartney and John Lennon) at Abbey Road Studios, 1967. McCartney claimed responsibility for this element of the design. “They were able to get them to print the thing exactly as I wanted except that they put the title The Beatles, of course, blind embossed, which I wouldn’t have done,” he said. Philosopher Michael Sandel critiques Hamilton for its oversimplistic multiculturalism. In 2019, writers for The Guardian ranked Hamilton the second-greatest theatrical work since 2000. That Hamilton’s idea was accepted is testament to the sway that the Beatles had with their record company: “They were so powerful with EMI that they could do whatever they liked,” Hamilton said. Hamilton premiered on Broadway at the Richard Rodgers Theatre (also home to Mirandas 2008 Broadway debut In the Heights) on July 13, 2015, in previews. It is also a knowing Pop-art strategy, bridging high and low culture, and perhaps a sardonic nod to the Beatles’ avant-garde pretensions. It is a brilliant conceit: turning a mass-produced commodity, by one of the globe’s most popular bands, into a limited edition, so that each individual copy of the White Album was a unique work. This was adopted, and the first 2 million copies were machine-stamped. He had the idea of numbering each copy, “to create the ironic situation of a numbered edition of something like 5 million copies”. English artist Richard Hamilton (1922-2011) seated at a table in his studio at 25 Hurst Avenue in Highgate, London.

Richard hamilton writer