Monster mash-up
This modern monster collages a blown-up photo of the 1960s Labour party leader Hugh Gaitskell with a painted hybrid of monster magazine bogeymen: a Phantom Of The Opera mask and an eye from a Jack The Ripper flick. The comically prim mouth and buckled chin are very much the politician’s own.
Gone nuclear
Its creator Richard Hamilton brought politics to pop art, beginning with this savaging of Gaitskell. A divisive figure, Gaitskell stirred the artist’s anger when he abandoned Labour’s anti-nukes stance and sided with the Tory government on nuclear deterrence.
This note’s for you
Hamilton began thinking about a work skewering Gaitskell with his wife Terry O’Reilly, a committed CND campaigner. They collected the source material together, including newspaper caricatures. When she died in a car crash in 1962 it took Hamilton a year to return to the project, which he made as a tribute.
Anger management
The work was also a reaction to what Hamilton saw as political apathy among his artist peers. It paved the way for searing works including his depiction of the dirty protests and hunger strikes of imprisoned IRA members.
Part of One Day, Something Happens: Paintings Of People, Towner Gallery, Eastbourne, to 8 Jan
