On the Rapport Between Portray and Images in Pop Art | 2026 A&A Reunions Lecture

For the good Pop artist Richard Hamilton, images was implicated in trendy portray from the start (Courbet, Manet, Degas …), and elementary to his artwork is the exploration of this continued implication. Over his lengthy profession, Hamilton labored by a number of photographic codecs as both supply or construction of his photos: the journal commercial, the publicity nonetheless, the style shoot, the postcard. At the identical time, he usually discovered painterly results already current in these codecs. In his “tabular pictures” from the late Nineteen Fifties to the center Sixties, Hamilton was particularly drawn to seductive passages in photographic sources that transfer from focus to blur, from end to facture, and again once more. Central to his work, then, is the monitoring of the elevated mediation not solely of visible artwork however of our human sensorium as nicely.

Reception to comply with in A&A’s new suite on the third flooring of the Princeton University Art Museum. The suite is dwelling to the Department of Art & Archaeology and its analysis items: the Index of Medieval Art and Visual Resources (which incorporates the division’s archaeological archive).

Hal Foster is the Townsend Martin, Class of 1917, Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. Foster is a famend American artwork critic, historian and tutorial. Known for his vital concept, he co-edits the journal October and has authored influential works resembling The Return of the Real (1996), Design and Crime, and Other Diatribes (2002), and his most up-to-date guide, Fail Better: Reckonings with Artists and Critics (2025).

Sponsored by the Department of Art & Archaeology