Painting Maps. Richard Hamilton's Paintings of the Early 1950s and Urban Planning in Post-War Britain

Starting from Richard Hamilton’s contribution to the Live Architecture Exhibition, which was organised as a section of the Festival of Britain (1951), this paper seeks to contextualise his paintings of the early 1950s in the architectural discourse of post-war British society and in the centrality of town planning within the reconstruction effort. I read architectural models a­s diagrams, in parallel to Hamilton’s fascination with the photographic medium, with a specific interest in the two opposite poles of microscopic and aerial photography. Relating the bird’s-eye view to the history of modernism and situating Hamilton’s paintings in the lineage Cézanne-Cubism-Abstract Art, I discuss the meaning of a­bstraction in such works, connecting it to the diagram and theories of perception. I use this framework to shed new light on Hamilton’s ambiguous approach to abstraction and figuration and offer a new take on a rather underestimated part of his artistic production.