Somersault, Microcosmos and Microcosmos 3 were executed during the period of Richard Hamilton’s involvement with the Growth and Form exhibition, held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London in the summer of 1951. The exhibition was the new organisation’s contribution to the Festival of Britain, and explored the theme of nature and science in relation to visual media. Growth and Form was a key book by leading British biologist, D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson and common reading amongst British artists at that time, and was the inspiration which lay behind the show. The works betray a concern with the dynamic of growth, mapped out across the picture plane. Microcosmos means the cosmos in miniature and Hamilton was creating a hermetically sealed world, with simple points and planes. The exhibition, Growth and Form, was concerned with different views of nature and the universe in different scales, from the microscopic to outer space, from x-rays to photographs of sun spots. Hamilton combined his reference to the mini-universe with a nod to the musical piece by Bartok, Mikrokosmos which comprised a 6-volume series for the piano, beginning with basic exercises which could be played by anyone. Hamilton was indicating the simplicity and ordinariness of his subject. He was working with the bare necessities of a painting, the canvas background with minimal, abstract marks. These consist of connecting lines and points against an anonymous, plain background. Microcosmos 3 is also prescient of Hamilton’s Trainsition series of four paintings from 1954, inspired by his weekly train journey to Newcastle, where he was teaching on the Basic Design course. The vertical and horizontal lines, squares and amber hues predate this important series.

Somersault was completed after the Microcosmos series and relates to Hamilton’s exploration of the work of photography pioneer, Eadweard Muybridge, also an inspiration for Francis Bacon during this period. The motion of the physical, full body roll is encapsulated by circles which indicate the main joints of the body. This diagrammatic approach to creating an art work was also inspired by Hamilton’s war time experience as a jig and tool draftsman.

Hamilton had his first one-man show at the Hanover Gallery in 1955, then run by Erica Brausen. Paintings 1951-55 was a critical success and the playwright Benn Levy and his wife, the actress Constance Cummings bought several works from the show. The exhibition was reviewed by fellow Independent Group members, Lawrence Alloway in Art News and Review and Reyner Banham in the broadsheet, Art. Hamilton’s exhibition also formed the subject for the Independent Group’s first session in February 1955, which according to the meeting summary ‘…centred around the use of the photographically defined new reality (with a stress on popular serial imagery) in a fine art context; its legitimacy and effectiveness in relation to paintings as individual gestures’ (see A. Massey, ‘Appendix 2: The Independent Group Session 1955’, The Independent Group: Modernism and Mass Culture in Britain, 1945-59, Manchester, 1995, p. 142). These are important works in the early oeuvre of a leading British artist, revealing something of his early inspiration in photography and science, before he launched into a fascination with the imagery of popular culture and created some of the world’s first Pop Art works.

We are very grateful to Professor Anne Massey for preparing this catalogue entry.