Sacrificing art for ideas

Richard Hamilton: Modern Moral Matters
Serpentine Gallery, until 25 April

This year is the 40th anniversary of the Serpentine Gallery, that most welcoming of exhibition venues — the gallery in the park — with its wide views and well-appointed rooms. Expectation rises as the visitor walks through gardens burgeoning with spring, even if it is raining. To start its anniversary year, the Serpentine has mounted an exhibition of Richard Hamilton’s political work entitled (in homage, presumably, to Hogarth) Modern Moral Matters. The show is a real disappointment: the blinds are down to focus the visitor’s attention inward, which might be acceptable if there were riches to be seen. Instead, the galleries are scarcely filled with one of the thinnest exhibitions in a public space I’ve seen for years. I’m staggered that it’s taken three people to curate it.

Don’t get me wrong: I’ve great respect for Richard Hamilton (born 1922), as member of the Independent Group, progenitor of Pop Art and as a painter and printmaker. He’s an artist of considerable probity and international reputation, who has had more retrospective exhibitions than most artists dream of. But his historical status is, to my mind, seriously qualified and even undermined by his lengthy obsession with photography. It is that, rather than his other abiding interest — in making ‘protest’ works, though nothing dates faster than most political art — which accounts for his rather anomalous position today. Norbert Lynton summarised Hamilton’s work as ‘dedicated to exploring style as a symbolic and synthetic language in art and in high-commercial and common advertising, to offering a discourse requiring intelligent attention, and to questioning the traditional distinction between high art and low-brow, popular imagery’. Hamilton’s master is Duchamp, which makes him a kind of adoptive granddaddy for today’s pseudo-conceptual artists, if his abundant learning does not prevent him from recognising their bathetic idiocies.