Last Impression
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Interior, 1964
Richard Hamilton
Screen print from eight stencils on Crisbrook paper
22" x 31"
2004.9.67
Bequest of Robert Venn Carr, Class of 1938
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Links related to this story
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Beginning in 1986 and continuing for more
than a decade, University of Maine alumnus Robert Venn Carr Jr., donated
nearly 300 modern and contemporary prints to the University of Maine
Museum of Art. The collection includes some of the finest works on paper
by Pablo Picasso, Josef Albers, Alexander Calder, Käthe Kollwitz, Willem
de Kooning, Frank Stella, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, David Hockney,
Joan Miró, Robert Delaunay
and Richard Hamilton.
Richard Hamilton (b. 1922) became the seminal figure
in the formation of England's Pop idiom through his analytical
investigations of the media's influence on our perception of reality. As
an active member of London's progressive Independent Group in the early
1950s, he first studied the impact of popular culture on art and created
collages incorporating advertisements from mass-circulation newspapers
and magazines, a technique that served as the basis for Interior.
Hamilton claimed that any interior is "a set of anachronisms, a museum,
with the lingering residues of decorative styles that an inhabited space
collects." In this print, he contrasts an elaborately decorated interior
with uncluttered colored planes reminiscent of modernist architecture
and design. He made his first Pop collage in 1956. From 1957–61, he
taught interior design at the Royal College of Art.
Interior was on display for the first time at the
University of Maine Museum of Art in Bangor as part of an exhibition of
works in the Maine Print Project, a statewide collaboration of 25 art
museums and nonprofit arts institutions celebrating 200 years of
printmaking in Maine. At the museum, Interior and other works from
UMaine's permanent collection were exhibited concurrently with the
prints of Richard Estes and John Marin.
On campus as part of the Maine Print Project, the UMaine Department of
Art exhibited The Art of Printed Books and Artists' Multiples.
Interior remains on display, joined by three other works by Hamilton in
the permanent collection, during the museum's newest exhibition, Witty,
Sexy, Gimmicky: British Pop Art, Jan. 26–April 14.
Works in the Robert Venn Carr Jr., Collection can be
seen online at UMaine's Fogler Library Web site (www.library.umaine.edu/carr).
