Richard Hamilton ─ Swingeing London 67 (f)

One of the defining paintings of British Pop art, Richard Hamilton's Swingeing London67 (f) depicts two men--Mick Jagger and Hamilton's art dealer Robert Fraser--handcuffed together inthe back of a police van. The image is taken from a newspaper photograph that shows the two beingdriven from Lewes prison to Chichester Magistrates Court following their June 1967 arrest forpossession of drugs. The title is a clever and bitter play on words, conflating the"swinging" of 1960s-era London with the "swingeing" (to swinge is to beat orscourge) punishment meted out to new cultural heroes by the law. Hamilton's painting is far fromreportage; it portrays the historical clash of cultures between Pop (and Pop art) and theestablishment. In this illustrated study of Hamilton's celebrated painting, Andrew Wilson viewsSwingeing London 67 (f) as history painting, to be understood in the context of the struggle againstthe British state's attempt--aided and abetted by the popular press--to repress any expression ofpersonal liberation. Hamilton's Pop art idiom of figuration and media images was his way of refusingthe demands of an old aesthetic order. For him, Pop art was the expression of an open-ended,analytical, critical, and artistic process that reflected his own direct engagement with ethicalissues. With Swingeing London 67 (f), Hamilton offers not only a representational image but also atrigger for critical activity--an image of an event and an image of what determines the conditionsof that image.

Andrew Wilson, a curator, art historian, and art critic, has been Curator of Modern and Contemporary British Art at Tate Britain since 2006.