Richard Hamilton at the Slade School of Fine Art (1948-51) and his "abstract" paintings of the early 1950s

Richard Hamilton’s abstract paintings from the early 1950s have received little attention and have been considered mostly as ‘early work’. Looking closely at them and raising questions about them from angles differing from those indicated by Hamilton himself in his writings will be the purpose of this paper. Considering these large white-ground canvases such as Particular System, Respective and d’Orientation as the starting point for Hamilton’s pictorial research into figurative representation allows the coherence and continuity of his artistic path through the 1950s and beyond. The environment of the Slade School of Fine Art, where Hamilton enrolled in 1948, fostered an up-to-date knowledge of the recent theories of human perception and showed how these could be applied to art in order to rethink key issues such as perspective and proportions. Hamilton’s career needs to be reconsidered in relation to an institution that was dramatically changing after the Second World War whose emerging priorities helped form concerns that would continue to engage him as an artist.