print;
artist postcard
- Museum number
- 2018,7009.60
- Title
- Object: Mother
- Description
-
Artist postcard: tinted photograph of the 'Sands and Promenade, Whitley Bay' as described by the caption on the front of the card in white letters; a flap which forms part of the image is lifted by a white tab to reveal a series of small black and white images of Whitley Bay; concertina postcard published by Bill Copley of Shit Must Stop. 1968
Photomechanical print
- Production date
- 1968
- Dimensions
-
Height: 127 millimetres
-
Width: 200 millimetres
- Curator's comments
- Unwilling to let the Whitley Bay theme rest, Hamilton continued to wrestle with it, in what can now be appreciated as his customary determination to pursue all possible implications of an image. Following the 1965 Whitley Bay postcard (2018,7009.61), early in 1968 he made at Kelpra Studio in London a screenprint of the subject, entitled People, and later in the same year produced a foldout postcard, published by the adventurous American artist Bill Copley in the first of his SMS [Shit Must Stop] multiples folders. The image on the front is taken from an old postcard of the Sands and Promenade, Whitley Bay, a flap in the middle folding up to let a concertina of eight smaller cards fall down, showing increasingly close blown-up images of this section of the beach, similar to that used in the screenprint People. On the postable back at the top is printed ‘A Richard Hamilton Novelty’ and at the bottom ‘Mother’ – the title of this concertina postcard was usually given, even by Hamilton himself, as To Mother, although it actually was/is Mother. Also in 1968, Hamilton made a sculptural version of this piece, over eight feet high, in an edition of one, made of cardboard and aluminium, with photographs of the same images in a hinged concertina - it was exhibited in the Hamilton retrospective at Tate Modern in 2014. Bill Copley, the SMS curator, had given Hamilton a small grant to allow him to begin work on a replica of Duchamp’s Large Glass for the 1966 exhibition at the Tate. Copley presented, through the Cassandra Foundation, Duchamp’s last work Étant donnés to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, immediately after the artist’s death in 1968.
- Location
- Not on display
- Exhibition history
-
2019, Feb 7 – 4 Aug, London, BM, G90, The World Exists To Be Put On A Postcard artists' postcards from 1960 to now
2022-23 6 Sept-22 Jan, London, BM, G90a '2 million prints: online for all'
- Acquisition date
- 2018
- Department
- Prints and Drawings
- Registration number
- 2018,7009.60