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Pop
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thing: food, books, magazines, pictures, air tickets, foreign currency."

American material dated the week before could be as rare in London, as a new cache of Bronze Age objects for the archeologist. "But Today We Collect Ads" was the title of an article published early in 1957 by Peter and Alison Smithson, the husband-and-wife team of architects. American advertising was the source, equally, of Richard Hamilton's "Homage to Chrysler Corp.," a key work of the nineteen-fifties in English painting. The ads in question were cut out and passed from hand to hand like sacred relics. Enthusiasms proliferated, taking on an obsessional importance and generating a hunger for exact knowledge which was all out of proportion to its final rewards.

A particular prominence was assigned, for instance, to ads which featured a young actress named Vikki Dougan. In memoirs of the period, individual ads featuring Miss Dougan are traced from house to house in ways that recall the hunt for a respectable provenance which plays so large a part in the authentication of Old Master paintings. Of an Esquire photograph of Miss Dougan, Richard Hamilton remembers: "I first saw it decorating a wall in the Smithsons' home. I gained my own copy from a student's pinboard in the interior design department of the Royal College of Art. Lawrence Alloway gave me the data on her; the photograph had impressed him sufficiently to make him regard it as a file-worthy document. It turned up again recently as one of a group of pin-ups in a painting by Peter Phillips."

Brief as it is, that passage gives us the essence of English Pop: the close-knit group of enthusiasts, the phenomenon of instant scholarship in relation to what was by its very nature ephemeral, and the oblique, free-running sense of fun. Reyner Banham later described English pop as "the revenge of the elementary schoolboys" - meaning by this that it was meant to subvert the domination of the English art world by a privately educated elite. It was an act of well calculated effrontery to suggest in the mid-fifties that what Hamilton called "paintings by and about our society" were more worth making than paintings derived from the past of France, or of Italy.

When the totality of Richard Hamilton's work as a painter was on view not long ago at the Guggenheim Museum, the visitor was reminded that in 1957 Hamilton had produced a tiny collage measuring 10 inches by 9, in which he introduced virtually all the basic motifs of Pop Art, whether American or English. Hamilton never chose to cash in on the manifold intimations of his little picture. It was not so much as mentioned in the lengthy text of the Whitney catalogue. Yet an attentive visitor to the Whitney would have found there work after work which is epitomized in Hamilton's collage of 1957, which bore the title "Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing?"
Hamilton was right in there, for instance, with the quirks of furnishing which assume such overwhelming proportions in Claes Oldenburg's "Bedroom Ensemble" of 1963. He was right there with the brand-name canned food (enthroned in his collage on a side table, like a Renaissance bronze) out of which Andy Warhol was to get so much mileage. He was right there with the well-over-life-size figure of the movie star which was to dominate key paintings both by Warhol and by John Rosenquist. He was there with the comic-book image which Roy Lichtenstein developed to stunning effect in the early sixties. He was there with the word "Pop" itself (on the cover of what looks to be a squash racket). He was there with the new technology: the king-sized image on the television screen and the echoes of space travel in the ceiling. He was there, finally, with the commercialized sexuality which was to play an important part in American Pop. 
He was there with these things at a distance of more than 3,000 miles and at second or third hand-- at a time when James Rosenquist, Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Tom Wesselmann, Jim Dine and Robert Indiana were still a long way from finding their