THE ABSTRACT PAINTINGS of Richard Hamilton from the early1950s have received little attention and have been consideredmostly as ‘early work’. The first time they were exhibitedtogether, in Hamilton’s solo exhibition at the Hanover Gallery,London, in January 1955, they were regarded by many of thecritics who briefly reviewed the show as overtly intellectual aswell as transitional.1 Furthermore, the more abstract worksproved particularly idiosyncratic and difficult to understand,whereas the more figurative ones painted in 1954 were singledout for praise.2 To look closely at the first abstract paintings and raise questions about them from angles different from thoseindicated by Hamilton himself in his writings is the purpose ofthis article. Considering these large white-ground canvases suchas Particular system (Fig.33), Respective (Fig.34) and d’Orientation(Fig.35) as the starting point for Hamilton’s pictorial researchinto figurative representation allows us to track the coherenceand continuity of his path through the 1950s and beyond. Theenvironment of the Slade School of Fine Art, where Hamiltonenrolled in 1948, fostered an up-to-date knowledge of the recenttheories of human perception and showed how these could be applied to art in order to rethink key considerations such asperspective and proportion. Hamilton’s career needs to bereviewed in relation to an institution that was dramaticallychanging after the Second World War and whose emerging priorities helped form certain concerns that continued to engagehim as an artist.At the moment when he applied to the Slade School of Fine

Art, Richard Hamilton had to provide an additional statement in filling in his application form, which aptly summarises his previous education and work experiences:

Studied at R.A. until the closing in 1940. I was then trainedby the Government to become an engineering draughtsman.On the re-opening of the schools after 6 years national serviceI returned for 2 terms. The attempt to resume art studiescaused me to become liable for military service and I am calledinto the forces for 2 years. It is very important that I return tostudy after the long interruption and circumstances make itimpossible to return to the Academy when I am released.3

After being expelled from the Royal Academy schools in July1946 for reasons that are still unclear, he was consigned to eighteen months of military service in the Royal Engineers in

Aldershot. After this period, during which he married his firstwife, Terry, Hamilton applied to the Slade School on 7th April1947. Recommended by the Slade Professor, RandolphSchwabe, he was admitted to study for the Diploma in Fine Arts.As he was still on military service, he could not start his courseuntil the 1948–49 academic year. Archival evidence shows thathe actually remained there until 1951. He did not take any finalexaminations and was never awarded the Diploma.Hamilton’s first year at the Slade coincided with a low point

in the history of the institution.4 The School had moved toOxford during the Second World War and had then returned toLondon in still inadequate premises. Moreover, Schwabe was illand became less and less present in the administration of theSchool. Young artists who were studying there immediately afterthe War needed to find sources of inspiration for their art otherthan the very traditional ones still being taught. This was the casefor Eduardo Paolozzi and William Turnbull, both of whom leftLondon for Paris in 1947 and 1948 respectively; Hamilton visitedPaolozzi in Paris in 1950, but decided not to leave the School.However, the environment he found on his arrival was effectively

1 See exh. cat. Richard Hamilton: paintings, London (Hanover Gallery), 1955 (a copyof this catalogue is in the Hanover Gallery material, Tate Archive). Exhibited were, aslisted in the catalogue: Particular System, Refraction, d’Orientation, Superexposition, Train-sition I, Trainsition II, Trainsition III, Trainsition IIII, Study Re Nude, Re Nude Painting,Carapace, and Still Life?. Superexposition, Trainsition I and Trainsition II were destroyedby the artist so only a photographic record of Superexposition is extant. 2 See, for example, A. Forge: ‘Round the London galleries’, The Listener (13th Jan-uary 1955) and S. Bone: ‘A show by nine young artists. Variation in style’, ManchesterGuardian (14th January 1955), where the authors’ attention is entirely drawn to the

Trainsition paintings, whereas the earlier ones are not mentioned.3 Richard Hamilton’s application form to the Slade School, University CollegeLondon (cited hereafter as UCL) Records Office.4 A fundamental work on the history of the Slade School of Art, as well as aninvaluable source of documentary material, is the unpublished ‘Slade ArchiveReader’, compiled by Stephen Chaplin, student at the Slade under Coldstreamfrom 1952 to 1955 and the Slade Archivist from 1990 to 1997, after extensive study of the Slade School Archive; the manuscript is in the UCL Library SpecialCollections.

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33. Particular system, by Richard Hamilton. 1951. Canvas, 101.5 by 127 cm. (Privatecollection, on long loan to Museo Nacional Centro de Reina Sofía, Madrid).

Richard Hamilton at the Slade School of Fine Art (1948–51) and his ‘abstract’ paintings of the early 1950sby GIOVANNI CASINI

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outlined by George Charleton, a former student and then Lec-turer of Drawing, in an article published in The Studio in late 1946. He argued that ‘the essence of the Slade is its tradition[. . .] Broadly, this tradition is founded upon the study and admi-ration of the Old Masters [. . .] the basis of the Slade tradition isthe intense study of constructive drawing [. . .] It seems evidentthat many artists have found a classical training essential’.5 In1948, the school Hamilton enrolled in was still an academy in theproper sense. This approach was not irrelevant to Hamilton’seducation and he later said of himself: ‘I’ve always been an old-style artist, a fine artist in the commonly accepted sense; that wasmy student training and that’s what I’ve remained’.6

However, in one year the situation was to change radically.Schwabe died in September 1948 and William Coldstream wasappointed Slade Professor from October 1949. The same datealso saw Rudolf Wittkower take up his position as DurningLawrence Professor in the History of Art, bringing to the SladeWarburgian art history. The relevance to Hamilton of his periodat the School has always been underestimated following his ownremark that he certainly learned less from teachers than from fellow students, referring to Nigel Henderson in particular.7Nevertheless, Hamilton recognised Coldstream’s importancewhen he claimed that he was interviewed by the artist for admission to the school.8 The truth of this statement is contra-dicted by the fact that Coldstream, who had been teaching atCamberwell School of Art beforehand, actually took over at theSlade one year after Hamilton had started his studies there.9 Thisassertion might be viewed, however, as an acknowledgement ofColdstream’s impact on the School and on Hamilton himself.The watershed marked by Coldstream’s arrival manifested

itself in a new general approach to the study of fine arts, influencedtheoretically by Wittkower’s thought at the time. WhetherHamilton attended Wittkower’s courses or not is uncertain, but since they were intended for second and third year studentsit seems likely at the very least. According to Wittkower, astrong intellectual background was necessary for the modernartist to address effectively ‘the great intellectual and emotionalproblems of his time’.10 In his inaugural lecture, on the themeof The Artists and the Liberal Arts (30th January 1950), he madea plea for the fine arts and the ‘liberal arts’ to be once again anintegrated whole as they had been during the Renaissance. Heconcluded: ‘The past has taught us that without the fire ofinspiration the liberal arts degenerate into dead scholarship,while the imagination of the artist without the backing of theliberal arts is condemned to sterility’.11 His final remarks wouldhave been of the greatest interest to an artist like Hamilton,who was to try during the next year to bridge the gap betweenart and science in the exhibition Growth and Form. He hadalready started working on that project at the time of Wittkow-er’s lecture. Moreover, during his first year, the art historianlectured on the ‘history of ideas on proportion in the visualarts’,12 possibly following his researches published in 1949 in the book Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism.13Hamilton’s ‘love for systems’14 would have been well nourishedby Wittkower’s analysis of the mathematical ratios used byRenaissance architects.15 There followed lectures on patronage,the history of modern drawing and seminars on ‘ideas of spacein the history of the arts’.16Coldstream outlined the educational direction to be taken

by the School as a whole in his first report to the Slade sub- committee. There he described an attempt to ‘widen the scopeof the Anatomy and Perspective lectures’:

5 G. Charleton: ‘The Slade School of Fine Art 1871–1946’, The Studio (October1946), p. 119.6 R. Hamilton: Collected words, 1953–1982, London and New York 1982, p.64.7 ‘It is often the case that the value of an education is derived from other students. Icertainly learned less from “teachers” than from my fellows. Nigel Henderson, alsoat the Slade after long wartime delays, disposed of his knowledge of the world ofModern Art with an easy wit and charm’; ibid., p.108 ‘William Coldstream interviewed me; he regarded my expulsion from the RA asan excellent recommendation and I was accepted’; ibid., p.109 It is true that in 1947 Coldstream was invited by Randolph Schwabe to teach atthe Slade on the days when Allan Gwynne-Jones was absent, but it is unlikely that hewould have been asked to interview new applicants.10 R. Wittkower: ‘The artist and the liberal arts’, Eidos 1 (1950), p.11.

11 Ibid., p.17.12 The Slade’s Annual Report mentions a number of students coming to attend Witt -kower’s lectures from the Courtauld Institute of Art, the Architectural Associationand other schools in London; see Annual Report, 1950–51, Slade School Archive(cited hereafter as SSA), ARC/2007/77, n.p. 13 Reyner Banham pointed out the influence of this book on Hamilton’s generation inhis famous essay on Alison and Peter Smithson, ‘New Brutalism’; see R. Banham: ACritic Writes: Essays by Reyner Banham, Berkeley 1996, p.13: ‘The general impact of Pro-fessor Wittkower’s book on a whole generation of post-war architectural students is oneof the phenomena of our time. Its exposition of a body of architectural theory in whichfunction and form were significantly linked by the objective laws governing the Cosmos(as Alberti and Palladio understood them) suddenly offered a way out of the doldrum ofroutine-functionalist abdications, and neo-Palladianism became the order of the day’.

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34. Respective, by Richard Hamilton. 1951. Oil on hardboard, 91.5 by 122 cm. (Pallant House Gallery, Chichester).

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35. d’Orientation, by Richard Hamilton. 1952. Oil on hardboard, 117 by 160 cm.(Private collection).

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Mr Barnicot [Lecturer in Anatomy] has already shown in hislectures a much more liberal interpretation of the subject thanis usual in presenting it to Art Students. He has not confined histeaching to a description of the superficial form of the humanbody, but has also used the nature of the form taken by livingthings in general. Mr Nuttal Smith [Lecturer in Perspective andStudents Tutor], in his Perspective Lectures, is also workingtowards a wider approach. He is making a successful attempt to teach not only the conventional perspective of Art Schools,but also something of the nature of vision.17

The study of the anatomy of ‘living things in general’ was alsoinfluenced by D’Arcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form, whichhad become a common reference for a number of artists.18 More-over, Stephen Chaplin, referring to his own experience as a student at the Slade from 1952 to 1955, remarked that themajor change brought to the School by Coldstream and the newmembers of staff he hired was an emphasis on perception andproblems of representation, which was no longer conceived a priori, but started from what the eye saw and focused on the‘nature of vision’ itself.19 After Coldstream’s arrival the Schoolsaw a considerable increase in the teaching staff. In 1949–50 former members of the Euston Road School including WilliamTownsend, Claude Rogers and B.A.R. Carter (Perspectiveteaching with Nuttal Smith) were appointed. In addition, LucianFreud, John Buckland Wright (Etching and Engraving), Robert

Medley (Stage Design), Lynton Lamb and Andrew Forge alljoined the staff. The importance of Buckland Wright in relationto Hamilton’s work on his Reaper series of etchings (1949) iswidely acknowledged.20 The contribution of the other membersof the staff and of Coldstream himself to the change in the envi-ronment of the School has yet to be examined in relation toHamilton’s student years. The ‘Slade tradition’ described by Charleton can be traced

back to the first Slade Professor, Sir Edward Poynter, and the primacy he gave to drawing in relation to life-room studies, asopposed to drawing from casts. His successors Alphonse Legrosand Henry Tonks developed Poynter’s ideas in such a way thatdrawing practice at the Slade came to be associated with severe,constructive linear drawing. Under Schwabe, who had been astudent under Tonks and succeeded him in 1930, littlechanged. However, this ‘analytic’ tradition was reinvigorated,as noted by Chaplin, through more recent developments, par-ticularly a reading of Cézanne, that took place not within theSlade School, but at the Euston Road School before the SecondWorld War, and at Camberwell School of Art immediatelyafter.21 Coldstream had been a co-founder of the Euston RoadSchool along with Victor Pasmore and Claude Rogers and was

14 D. Sylvester: ‘Hamilton’, first published in 1991, reprinted in idem: About ModernArt: Critical Essays, 1948–96, London 1996, p.280.15 ‘The conviction that architecture is a science, and that each part of a building,inside as well as outside, has to be integrated into one and the same system of mathematical ratios, may be called the basic axiom of Renaissance architects’; R.Wittkower: Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, London 1949, p.89.16 See Slade Annual Report, op. cit. (note 12), where it is also noted: ‘In the autumn,Professor Wittkower went to Milan as President of “The International Congress onProportion in the Arts”, when he lectured on “Proportion in the Art of the MiddleAges and Renaissance”’; see also Chaplin, op. cit. (note 4), chapter 9, section 10 (n.p.).17 Report to the Slade sub-committee from the Slade Professor, 28th November1949, signed by Coldstream, part II, SSA, UCL Records, ARC/2007/78, n.p.; alsoreferred to in Chaplin, op. cit. (note 4), chapter 9, section 9 (n.p.).

18 ‘The widening of the field of study of Anatomy in relation to the Visual Arts wassuccessfully continued and Professor J.Z. Young lectured to students and staff on anumber of occasions on the subject of “Growth and Form”, and also on “Perception”,while Mr. Jongkheere gave a course of lectures on “The Psycholgy of Vision”’; seeSlade Annual Report, 1950–51, SSA, UCL Records, ARC/2007/77, n.p.19 E. Chambers and S. Chaplin: Two Slade Students, 1947–1955: J.A.W. Simons andStephen Chaplin, London 2001, p.9.20 ‘Hamilton warmly remembers his print teacher, recalling that he “only went toJohn Buckland Wright’s classes. He was encouraging and generous to me, he evenoffered a measure of respect that I was not used to as a student”’; see J. Wilson: Growthand Form: Richard Hamilton’s prints at the Slade, in C. Allison, ed.: Slade Prints of the1950s: Richard Hamilton, Stanley Jones and Bartolomeu dos Santos, London 2005, p.7.21 Chaplin, op. cit. (note 4), chapter 10, section 13 (n.p.).

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37. Chromatic spiral, by Richard Hamilton. 1950. Oil on wood, 54.3 by 48.5 cm.(Tate, London).

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36. Refraction, by Richard Hamilton. 1952. Oil on plywood, 107.5 by 112 cm.(Tate, London).

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teaching at Camberwell as Head of Painting from 1948. Beforethe War the Euston Road School had been much associatedwith Camberwell due to a prominent realist tendency. It wasboth through teachers and students (such as Andrew Forge) that the ethos of the Euston Road School was carried into theSlade. A return to the direct representation of the visual object,a form of modern realism, had been a shared purpose of some of the Euston Road artists, which then continued atCamberwell. ‘Bill Coldstream’s concept of a new objectivity [. . .] was based on purely optical phenomena tied strictly to the measurable properties of both the visual object and the picture plane’,22 Pasmore noted. The critical split between‘objective representational painting and objective abstractpainting’, embodied by Coldstream and Pasmore respectively,took place at the moment when the former became Slade Professor and the latter started making his first abstract works.Pasmore was, in fact, the ‘culture-hero’23 of a move towardsabstraction in British art generated by the group defined by thebook Nine Abstract Artists (1954).24 Constructed abstract art, asit was soon relabelled,25 firmly rejected any process of abstrac-tion starting from nature and introduced a new approachfocused on the process of image making. True abstraction

should be the result of ‘a method of construction emanatingfrom within’ the work of art.26 These mutually exclusive artistictendencies arose from similar premises and continued to co-existthroughout the 1950s.The debate concerning abstract art taking place in England at

the beginning of the 1950s is essential to contextualise Hamilton’searly work (Figs.33–37), as well as the influence of Cézanne. ‘Mypaintings at this time were “abstract”; a few surviving examplesdemonstrate one clear preoccupation – the use of minimal ele-ments to articulate the picture surface’, Hamilton wrote.27 Eventhough his words reveal an artistic consciousness which couldhardly be related to the moment when the works were made,Hamilton’s breadth of interests can be taken as fact. The use of the adjective ‘abstract’ in inverted commas makes us wonderabout the meaning he wanted to give to that word. Writing in1978 Hamilton wished to relate his work of the early 1950s tomajor modernist concerns going back to Cézanne and Cubism.28He focuses on the structural devices developed by Cézanne andsees them in relation to abstract qualities in his own work:

These paintings took a major characteristic of Cézanne’smethod, that of structuring the surface through straight linear

22 Letter to B. Laughton (1982), in idem: The Euston Road School: A Study in ObjectivePainting, Aldershot 1986, p.325.23 L. Alloway, ed.: Nine Abstract Artists: their work and theory, London 1954.24 Ibid., p.3; M. Martin: “‘Statement”’ December 1967’, in A. Bowness: ‘The Con-structive Art of Mary Martin’, Studio International 898 (March 1968), p.121.25 As noted by Alastair Grieve, ‘abstract’ was the term most commonly used byboth artists and critics; see idem: Constructed Abstract Art in England after the SecondWorld War: A Neglected Avant-garde, New Haven and London 2005, p.12. How -ever, Kenneth Martin used the label ‘constructionist’ in 1952 and Anthony Hillderived from Max Bill the expression ‘concrete art’. Alloway spoke in 1957 of‘British constructivists’. Finally, Mary Martin gave a clear definition of ‘constructed

abstract art’ in 1967, distinguishing it from Constructivism; see Martin, op. cit. (note24), p.121.26 See V. Pasmore: ‘The artist speaks’, Art News and Review 2 (24th February 1951), p.3.27 Hamilton, op. cit. (note 6), p.13.28 See R. Hamilton and M. Pauseback, eds.: exh. cat. Richard Hamilton: Studies/Studien1937–1977 Bielfeld (Kunsthalle), Tübingen (Kunsthalle) and Göttingen (Kunsthalle),1978, p.60.29 Ibid.30 Ibid.31 E. Loran: Cézanne’s Composition: Analysis of his Form with Diagrams and Photographsof his Motifs, Berkeley 1946, p.8.

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38. Seated nude, byWilliam Coldstream.1952–53. Canvas,106.7 by 70.7 cm.(Tate, London).

39. The Earl Jowitt,by William Cold-stream. 1945–51.Canvas, 110.6 by76.2 cm. (Privatecollection).

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relationships, and investigated it in a very narrow sense. Thetheoretical arguments justifying the primacy of the paintingas surface had been much discussed in the early part of thiscentury – considerations which had led to an assumption thatthe logical consequence of Cézanne’s example must be acommitment to the perfect integrity of the painted surface;so ‘abstract’ painting was granted its motivation. In my ownstudent musings on these questions this hypothesis appeared,by observation, to be fallacious.29

What makes a surface really flat and what devices an artistshould use to preserve its ‘integrity’ are issues visible in Hamil-ton’s paintings – and related studies – Chromatic spiral (Fig.37) andInduction (1950; private collection). Both were exhibited for thefirst time in an Institute of Contemporary Arts show of work byyoung artists at the Warner Theatre in Leicester Square in June1951, along with works by Eduardo Paolozzi and William Turn-bull. The two paintings display stick-like units – ‘minimal ele-ments’ – on a background that is not monochromatic. ‘It wasevident that no single mark, not to mention agglomerations ofmarks, could hope to stay put optically, on a surface. The pictureplane could only triumph as a monochrome – preferably white’,Hamilton later noted.30 Therefore he accepted the contradictionarising between perfectly abstract and non-representationalpainting and the inevitable tendency of the observer to mentallyconstruct depth even in this kind of painting. Hamilton startedusing facet-planes to articulate the surface, reflecting on Cézanneand hermetic Cubism in his speculation on the border betweentrue flatness and a sense of space.If we take into consideration an influential text on Cézanne

published in 1943, Erle Loran’s Cézanne’s Composition: Analysisof his Form with Diagrams and Photographs of his Motifs, we realisethat the author is convinced that ‘the extraordinary influence thatCézanne has had on Abstract art is markedly bound up with hisabandonment of scientific perspective’.31 If this statement couldbe true for Hamilton, it is also relevant to other artists such asColdstream, Rogers, Townsend and even Carter, who wererethinking perspective in more empirical and phenomenologicalterms. Traditional perspective systems were widely discussed and studied at the Slade after Coldstream’s appointment. Pierodella Francesca’s Flagellation of Christ was analysed jointly byCarter and Wittkower32 and Mantegna’s use of perspective wasalso a favoured topic. Hamilton himself stated that ‘having anunfashionable [. . .] predisposition towards an illusory represen-tational space it was likely that perspective would form a majorpart of my student interests’.33 Any perspectival system, being aschematic and two-dimensional representation of a three-dimen-sional reality, brings with it distortions. However, the uncannycombination of Renaissance principles and empiricism filteredthrough Cézanne and the ‘Euston Road approach’ does notseem paradoxical if considered from the point of view of the

‘nature of vision’. Moreover, Loran’s book and his attempt toexplain through schematic diagrams crucial elements inCézanne’s œuvre, such as perspective and distortion, in relation tothe structure of space had demonstrated that even a painting by Cézanne could be reduced to a diagram or a scheme, not dis-similar from the analysis of a work by Piero or Mantegna. It isfrom this point of view that Coldstream’s ‘architectural’ mode ofprocedure,34 which closely resembles what from Cézanne’s‘unfinished’ watercolours appears to have been his method,needs to be considered. In his painting, Coldstream was continuing to develop a

sophisticated system of locational marks in his search for andrecording of relationships. The resulting scaffolding is visible,although not stressed. As noted by Lawrence Gowing, ‘measure-ment was not merely a habit, it was the indispensable conditionof doing anything. The notation of dot and dash that was the sign of proportional relationships took on a mysterious beauty’.35Colin St John Wilson commented on Hamilton’s work duringand after his period as a student at the Slade in relation to Cold-stream’s: ‘there the notation for describing the location of a moving object is very similar in form but is entirely abstract,and the ideographs constitute the sole content of the work’.36 Ifwe compare the red crosses and dashes in Hamilton’s Particularsystem, Respective and d’Orientation, a painting he made one yearafter he left the Slade, with those present in Coldstream’s Seatednude (Fig.38), the first major work he finished after beingappointed Slade Professor, they appear almost identical. Therewas a consensus that the influence of his methods ‘permeated’ the Slade environment rather than being directly taught.37Therefore, even though Coldstream nearly stopped paintingbetween 1948 and 1953, his method continued to develop andchange and this could have been known only inside the School. If we compare The Earl Jowitt (Fig.39) to Seated nude we can

see a much more evident use of locational marks in the latter.38 Asearly as 1937 Coldstream had described himself as occupied with‘putting things in the right place’.39 He explained his technique ofmeasuring to David Sylvester in 1962: ‘It’s the old idea: you lookat what you’re painting and you hold your pencil or brush out in the plane – in the picture plane, you see – and I say you putyour arm straight out and hold the brush up vertically and youmark off with one eye shut [. . .] a little bit’.40 The inconsistencyof measuring using one eye only prior to painting with two eyes,noted by Sylvester, shows the arbitrary side of such a carefulprocess of picture-making. One of Hamilton’s remarks on hispreoccupations at the beginning of the 1950s shows a similarreflection in relation to perspective:

Classic perspective requires a fixed viewpoint; to be morespecific, it depends on one rigidly locked eyeball. In any perspective construction it is not only necessary to define thespatial location of each element of a scene but also the height

32 See R. Wittkower and B.A.R. Carter: ‘The Perspective of Piero della Francesca’s“Flagellation”’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 16 (1953), pp.292–302.33 Hamilton, op. cit. (note 6), p.12.34 For this definition, see C. St J. Wilson: The artist at work: on the working methods ofWilliam Coldstream and Michael Andrews, London 1999, p.19.35 L. Gowing: ‘Remembering Coldstream’, in idem and D. Sylvester: exh. cat. ThePaintings of William Coldstream, 1908–1987, London (Tate Gallery) 1990, p.19.36 Wilson, op. cit. (note 34), p.26.37 See B. Laughton: William Coldstream, New Haven and London 2004, pp.158–69.38 However, see the remarkable description of Coldstream working on Jowitt’s portrait provided by William Townsend: ‘I had promised to sit [. . .] for a couple of

hours in the Lord Chancellor’s robes [. . .] I sat for two hours while Bill screwed andstretched his eyes in agonies of penetration and balanced rulers on an extended finger in the search for statements of pure location, and in the course of it put downsome fifty touches of yellow ochre and black to establish a fragment of the surfaceof one of the sweeping panels of the front of the robe’; W. Townsend in A. Forge,ed.: The Townsend Journals: an Artist’s Record of His Times, 1928–51, London 1976,pp.78–79.39 W. Coldstream: ‘How I paint’, The Listener 453 (15th September 1937), pp.570–72, quoted in Gowing, op. cit. (note 35), p.11.40 D. Sylvester: ‘An unpublished interview, 1962’, in Gowing and Sylvester, op. cit.(note 35), p.28.

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and distance of the eye in relation to the subject. It is possible,if not particularly rewarding, to superimpose basic perspec-tive layouts in such a way as to determine the graphic resultsof moving through a series of varying relationships to a space.For example, notations can be devised which will plot lateralmovements of an eye parallel with the picture plane, ormovement toward a subject [. . .] Such diagrams can alsoinform about vertical changes in the terrain.41

This use of notations or diagrams to overcome a traditional wayof using perspective is akin to Coldstream’s. Moreover, as notedby Wilson, the marks in Coldstream’s paintings ‘that are the codefor registering points of anatomical location begin to take on arole quite separate from the role of depiction and become insteadmarks relative to the canvas itself – that is to say, distances fromtop, bottom, edge or corner of its format in a purely planar read-ing’.42 Coldstream remarked on his intense pleasure in noticingmutual relationship between measurements, which had nothingto do with the painted subject.43The process of figuration slowly taking place in Coldstream’s

paintings seems to be stripped to the bone by Hamilton, whoseinterest focuses on the process itself, not on its result. In hisabstract works of 1949–51 Hamilton had chosen not to representparticularised space (this remained true of the Reaper etchings).Starting from 1951, he made space pictorially through colour andnon-figurative marks. The canvases acquired larger dimensionsand the involvement of the spectator became, as noted by ReynerBanham, ‘an almost exact function of the uncertainty of the posi-tion of the vanishing point’.44 In Particular system (Fig.33) Hamil-ton introduced for the first time clearly diagrammatic encircledblack discs, which Richard Morphet saw as ‘centres of vision’.45Can they be the ‘notations [. . .] which will plot lateral move-ments of an eye parallel with the picture plane’ that Hamiltonreferred to? If we look at Respective (Fig.34), we can see that oneof the discs is cropped at the right edge of the canvas. We almostexpect to see its other half at the opposite side of the canvas, butit does not happen (whereas it does in d’Orientation; Fig.35), pro-viding a further example of how Hamilton’s systems are unpre-dictable. In the lower part of Respective, in fact, two black dotslook similar to the other ‘targets’ in the painting, but the black cir-cle, as well as the shading surrounding it, are omitted or, better,appear to have been erased with white paint. The viewer is leftwondering what were the reasons for removing whatever mighthave been there. Furthermore, Hamilton started ‘to populate thediagrammatic space with token life forms abstracted from primi-tive organisms’46 related to his research for Growth and Form. It istrue that we can spot a sea urchin and a microorganism in Partic-ular system (Fig.33), a part of a jellyfish in d’Orientation (Fig.35) anda sea urchin again in Refraction (Fig.36), but the presence of these

images retains the appearance of a superimposition and they donot fit into the perspectival system. In his treatment of Klee,Michel Foucault described the artist’s paintings in terms of a‘floating space’, indicating that the dimension involved is not flat,but suggests rather a surrounding, dynamic space.47 A similarspace is found in Hamilton’s paintings.The year 1951 was a particularly important one for Hamilton.

It was his last year as an art student and marked his transition tohis involvement with the I.C.A. and shortly afterwards with theIndependent Group. Moreover, it was the year of the Festival of Britain, and Hamilton curated the seminal exhibition Growthand Form as the I.C.A.’s contribution to it. He also made the curi-ous etching Self-portrait (Fig.41) at that time. While visually itrefers to Thompson’s book,48 it can be seen as a tribute to Klee,whose Pedagogical Sketchbook presents motifs like the pendulum,the arrow and the spiral (Fig.40).49 The composition itself, a parody of a portrait, reminds us of Klee’s Portrait of an equilibrist(1927; Fig.42), exhibited at the Tate in 1945–46, or Mask of fear(1932; Fig.43). Significantly, Klee’s popularity was rising at theend of the 1940s.50 Immediately after the War a major retrospec-tive of the Swiss artist’s work was organised at the NationalGallery, London;51 in 1948 a selection of Klee’s writings waspublished with an introduction by Herbert Read;52 and the yearafter a small monograph on Klee written by Douglas Cooperappeared in the Penguin Modern Painters series.53 Finally, Klee’sPedagogical Sketchbook was translated by Sybil Moholy-Nagy andpublished in 1953.54 Particularly important for Hamilton wasDavid Sylvester’s critical writing on Klee. Sylvester, who hadfirst met Hamilton in 1941,55 had seen an important Klee showorganised in 1948 in Paris and published an article on the lateKlee at the end of the year. His way of describing this phase canbe seen as the best approach to a consideration of Hamilton’sabstract canvases of 1951–53:

41 Hamilton, op. cit. (note 6), p.15.42 Wilson, op. cit. (note 34), p.26.43 Sylvester, op. cit. (note 40), pp.27–28.44 R. Banham: ‘Vision in motion’, Art (5th January 1955), p.3.45 R. Morphet, ed.: exh. cat. Richard Hamilton, London (Tate Gallery) 1970, p.22.46 Hamilton, op. cit. (note 6), p.15.47 M. Foucault: This is not a pipe, with illustrations and letters by R. Magritte; transl.and ed. by J. Harkness, Berkeley and London 1983, pp.32–33.48 ‘In Self-Portrait the most primitive of life-forms combine to create an ironic like-ness of the artist’s own countenance. The right side of the face is formed from a bull’ssperm, the mouth is a sea urchin, the left ear a spiralling shell. The flatworm, anorganism with a remarkable capacity to regenerate, forms the bow tie’; see E. Lullin:Richard Hamilton: Prints and Multiples 1939–2002. Catalogue raisonné, Winterthur and

Düsseldorf 2003, p.42.49 Even though the English version was only published in 1953, examples from PaulKlee’s Pedagogical Sketchbook were illustrated in Siegfried Giedion’s Mechanisation takescommand, a crucial source for Hamilton’s Reaper etchings; see S. Giedion: MechanizationTakes Command, a contribution to anonymous history, New York 1948, pp.105 and 111.50 Many useful remarks on Klee are in Grieve, op. cit. (note 25), pp.215–18.51 Exh. cat. Paul Klee, 1879–1940, London (Tate Gallery) 1945.52 P. Klee: On Modern Art, with an introduction by H. Read, London 1948.53 D. Cooper: Paul Klee, Harmondsworth 1949.54 P. Klee: Pedagogical Sketchbook, London 1953.55 ‘We met in 1941, when I was seventeen and he was nineteen and, having donetwo years at the Royal Academy Schools, was working as a jig and tool draughtsman[. . .] They invited me one evening to a flat off Baker Street and Richard showed me

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40. Elements from Paul Klee’s Pedagogical Sketchbook reproduced in SiegfriedGiedion’s Mechanisation Takes Command, 1948.

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The last works of Klee undermine your perceptual habits.Their motifs are germinal motifs of the physical world. A motifmay be geometric, or it may be a diagram of an object. But allbecome ideograms of movement in nature. The movement ofthe motifs themselves defines the fluid space they inhabit.Macrocosm in microcosm, the world in a grain of sand, thedefeat of the anthropocentric.56

Considering that Hamilton first entitled many of his paintingsand etchings of 1950 Microcosmos,57 Sylvester’s influence is veryprobable. Klee’s diagrams and signs are akin to Hamilton’s‘minimal elements’ and ‘token life forms’. It should also be saidthat Microcosmos: heteromorphism (also the poster for Growth andForm) and Microcosmos: on formal relations58 were selected for theexhibition of British Abstract Art which Anthony Hill, one ofthe ‘nine abstract artists’, organised in London at Gimpel FilsGallery in August 1951. The spectrum was quite broad but thecritic Basil Taylor identified in his review for The Listener thepervasive influence of Klee rather than that of Mondrian.59

Sylvester goes on to give a phenomenological reading of Klee’swork, emphasising the spectator’s relationship with it:

These are pictures without a focal point. They cannot be seen bya static eye, for to look at the whole surface simultaneously,arranged about its centre – or any other point which at first seems a possible focal point – is to encounter an attractive chaos.The eye must not rest, it must allow itself to be forced away fromthe centre to find a point at which it can enter the composition[. . .] Even the most diffuse compositions in the Renaissance tradition lead the eye to a single, usually central, point of focus,a point at which all formal and spatial relations are concentrated[. . .] A Renaissance picture is a building, an established and complete entity. A Klee is an organism in growth.60

Encircled black discs in Hamilton’s Particular system (Fig.33),Respective (Fig.34) – both first exhibited in the I.C.A.’s YoungPainters show held in October–November 195261 – and d’Orien-tation (Fig.35) play the same destabilising role in relation to thespectator’s gaze. The loss of an identifiable vanishing point andtherefore of perspective opens the painting to interaction withthe viewer. Sylvester’s criticism later diverged from Hamilton’sinterests, but I would argue that, at this point, he exerted a con-siderable influence on the artist.62 In 1991 Sylvester wrote on

a portfolio of etchings – elaborate figure-compositions, nudes done in line in whichvolume was conveyed by linear oval shapes within the forms, like contours on a map,which delineated the areas that would have been highlighted in a tonal drawing’; seeSylvester, op. cit. (note 14), p.280.56 Idem: ‘Klee – I’, first published as ‘Auguries of Experience’, Tiger’s Eye 6 (Decem-ber 1948), reprinted in idem, op. cit. (note 14), p.35.57 For instance, even Chromatic spiral and Induction, when first exhibited at the WarnerTheatre in 1951 were both called also Microcosmos. This collective title is commonlyexplained as a reference to Béla Bártok’s piano compositions titled Mikrokosmos. Evenif this analogy with musical harmony is to be trusted, it still probably relates toSylvester’s ideas. For example, see Sylvester, ibid., p.36: ‘Every note of the atonal scaleis equally important; likewise each point in a Klee, whose point of departure corre-sponds to the first note of a tone-row’.

58 No work by Hamilton is still known with this title. However, it seems likely thatOn formal relations later became Structure. The work probably exhibited at Gimpel Filsis an untraced oil on canvas, of which a black-and-white reproduction is at the WittLibrary, Courtauld Institute of Art, London, not the related print; see Lullin, op. cit.(note 48), n.40, p.41.59 B. Taylor: ‘Abstract painting in England’, The Listener 1171 (9th August 1951),p.230, quoted in Grieve, op. cit. (note 25), p.16.60 Sylvester, op. cit. (note 56), pp.35–36.61 Exh. cat. Young painters, London (Institute of Contemporary Arts) 1952.62 Sylvester expanded further his phenomenological reading of Klee, introducing theconcept of afocalisme; see D. Sylvester: ‘Klee – II’, first published as ‘Paul Klee. LaPériode de Berne’, Les Temps Modernes (January 1951), reprinted in idem, op. cit. (note14), pp.38–47.

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43. Mask of fear, by Paul Klee. 1932. Oil onburlap, 100.4 by 57.1 cm. (Museum of ModernArt, New York).

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41. Self-portrait, by Richard Hamilton. 1951. Etching andaquatint on paper, 30 by 19.6 cm. (Tate, London).

42. Portrait of an equilibrist, by Paul Klee. 1927. Oil andcollage on cardboard over wood with painted plasterborder, 63.2 by 40 cm. (Museum of Modern Art,New York).

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SIR, I am writing with reference to the article published in theJune 2015 issue of The Burlington Magazine, ‘A newly discoveredilluminated manuscript by Jean Colombe and his workshop’, byDaniele Guernelli. Guernelli claims that Ms.V, which forms partof the National Library, Malta, collection, was ‘newly discov-ered’ and ‘unpublished’ (p.388). This is incorrect. It ignores myarticle ‘Malta’s link with Les Très Riches Heures du Duc deBerry’, Treasures of Malta 19,1 (2012), pp.12–22, in which I provided a preliminary analysis of the manuscript and attributedit to the early Jean Colombe.

MARTINA CARUANA

SIR, I was not aware of Martina Caruana’s article. It was not listed on Kubikat, the most important up-to-date site for bibli-ography of the history of art. When I was in the National Libraryof Malta in spring 2013, I asked about their manuscripts, and noone was able to give me a single bibliographic reference to theircollection. Moreover, the manuscript was not listed in the lit-erature on Colombe (in particular, not in Marie Jacob’s Dansl’atelier des Colombe . . ., Rennes 2012), so I felt sure of its statusas an unpublished codex. I apologise for this unwitting oversight to Martina Caruana and to your Magazine.

DANIELE GUERNELLI

Hamilton with a reference to Merleau Ponty’s Cézanne’s Doubt(first published in French in 1945) and spoke of his ‘love ofusing this spectral late Cézannesque language’.63

In 1951, invited by Coldstream, Sylvester started to lectureat the Slade, and his topic for that year was ‘Klee, Cubism andArchitecture’.64 Also delivered at the I.C.A. in October 1951,his lecture expanded an article he had published in the Architec-tural Review in February 1951. Sylvester’s concern was the relationship between architecture and painting, with particularattention to modern art. He roughly defined two attitudestowards the pictorial representation of architecture. The‘romantic’ one focused on the evocative power of an architec-tural setting and therefore looked at places remote in space andtime. The ‘classic’ tendency involved the representation ofarchitecture ‘for the sake of its intrinsic worth as a means oforganizing forms in space and of communicating a state of mind through the inherent expressiveness of shapes and theirrelations’.65 Sylvester saw the Cubists as the main exemplars of‘classic’ modern artists: ‘Indeed, in the non-illusionistic languageof modern painting, it is possible to create geometric designswhose function is identical with that of invented architecturein illusionistic painting without their having any representa-tional significance whatever’.66 In his analysis, Sylvester finallysingled out Klee as an example and a source of inspiration forcontemporary architects: as did Klee, the modern architectshould seek to create ‘organic forms and relations’ not as asuperimposed ornament, but as part of a ‘total structure whichobjectifies forces and laws’.67

A more general recognition of Klee’s influence in Britaincame from inside the Slade School. In 1955 Andrew Forge,teacher there since 1949, identified two main ways into Klee’swork: ‘the one – figurative, poetic, mysterious – is parallel todreaming; the other – abstract, mathematical and lucid – is parallel to thought’. Pasmore was especially involved with thislast approach to Klee and had been particularly inspired by Klee’s Sun and town exhibited in the I.C.A.’s inaugural exhibi-tion. While Pasmore was pursuing with great coherence anupdated form of abstract art more and more detached fromnature, Hamilton was seeking new ways of analysing the visualworld, ultimately so that he could go back to representation.Constructed abstract art put a great emphasis on the proceduralaspect of picture making. Considered from this perspective,Coldstream’s peculiar working method could paradoxically turnhis experimental realism into abstraction. This happened inHamilton’s work in 1951–52. He made instrumental use ofColdstream’s ‘architectural’ mode of procedure, reducing it to its diagrammatic inner structure, its ‘architecture’. If Coldstreamwas sensitive to measured relationships in his attempt to realise‘not a picture but a life painting of the strictest kind’,68 Hamiltonevidently felt that such an aim was too ambitious and wished toproceed in a more cautious way. Starting from the tabula rasaidentifiable in the white-ground of his paintings of the early1950s, he worked with a sort of methodologically scepticalapproach. What else could be a more solid starting point for acareer dedicated to representation than to reveal the scaffoldingthat lay beneath figuration?

63 ‘It is in a manner associated with late Cézanne, especially the water-colours, andoften imitated and exaggerated by Hamilton since as far back as 1950, a manner inwhich the paint is so transparent and so sparely applied, by contrast with the wide areasof bare white, that there is no sense at all of certainty as to whether the painting beforeus is finished or unfinished [. . .] Beyond it lies doubt whether Hamilton’s love of usingthis spectral late Cézannesque language derives from his sharing the widespread beliefthat it is the language ideally suited to conveying the modern artist’s doubtingapproach to the questionable task of representing reality or whether it simply derivesfrom having a fastidious nature, being miserly with paint, wanting to keep one’s fingers

clean’; Sylvester 1996, ibid., pp.282–83.64 See Slade Annual Report, 1950–51, SSA, ARC/2007/77, n.p.65 D. Sylvester: ‘Architecture in modern painting’, Architectural Review 109 (February1951), p.81.66 Ibid., p.87.67 Ibid., p.88.68 This remark comes from William Townsend’s journal (14th June 1954); quoted inB. Laughton: ‘Coldstream and Giacometti in London’, British Art Journal 9 (Spring2009), p.82.

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Letters

A manuscript by Jean Colombe and his workshop

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