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Richard Hamilton, Pop Art and Braun

Also writing at The Guardian, Fiona MacCarthy on British pop artist Richard Hamilton:

Among the design cognoscenti of the period, Braun products were the creme de la creme, the must-have objects. I remember a time when no trendy living room would seem complete without its Braun stereo player. All image-conscious offices had Braun electric desk fans… The elegance and rigour of Braun products were drawn on by Hamilton in several of his most peculiarly disconcerting works. The Braun catalogues were plundered not only for the pop-up toaster but also the portable combination grill and even the immaculate typography.

His own admiration for Dieter Rams, Braun’s chief designer, verged on the ecstatic. Hamilton said: “I have for many years been uniquely attracted towards his design sensibility; so much so that his consumer products have come to occupy a place in my heart and consciousness that Mont Sainte-Victoire did in Cézanne’s.” All the same – and typically – this attitude of reverence did not prevent him from affixing to the top of his own Braun electric toothbrush the giant set of sugar-pink confectionery teeth his young son had bought him as a present from Brighton. The assemblage was later made into a multiple, The Critic Laughs(1968), complete with its own Braun-style packaging.

A retrospective of Hamilton’s work opens at the Tate Modern in London later this week.