Also this issue: Prints and the Revolution IMPRINT hits the streets with an art invasion. -Lori Hill Book Tour With the “Art on the Page” exhibit, more than just politicians are getting booked at City Hall. -Robin Rice The Passion of Dracula -Steve Cohen The Etching Club of London: A Taste for Painters' Etchings -Karen Williams

August 29-September 4, 2002

artpicks

Museum Studies 6: Richard Hamilton

by A.D. Amorosi

The Philadelphia Museum of Art's Gallery 182 has long been hallowed ground to modernists and avant-garde arrivistes intent on devouring all that was the elusive Marcel Duchamp. Arguably modern art's most influential artist, the dada daddy championed by collectors (the Arensbergs) and revered amongst peers (South Philly's Man Ray) put his stamp on this city, not only by fashioning his last ever installation -- the creepy cabin-esque Étant Donnés -- in the gallery named for him. The famously cranky Duchamp handed over personal papers and diagrams that reveal the kiddish eroticism in his work as well as his erudite fondness for linguistic studies. He gave over ready-mades like bicycle wheels and caged sugar cubes. But Duchamp also gave the PMA his most famous work, 1915-23's The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass). Pressing pistons, glass cages and chocolate grinders all figure prominently in Duchamp's most luxurious work.

When it comes to the absurd, Brit pop art godfather Richard Hamilton is no slouch. Based first as a U.K. cubist, his avant-cred grew when he founded the Independent Group at London's ICA, an organization designed to put forth and discuss the role of new technology in old art forms. By the late '50s/early '60s, he became notorious for his pop art collages as well as for his pursuit of a dramatic dialogue with the work of Duchamp.

Hamilton and Duchamp become one for PMA's Museum Studies 6. Now 80, Hamilton has focused on The Large Glass by creating an exact-sized replica done in computer-generated French roadmap design. Along with the map (that will hang next to the Glass) Hamilton has superimposed an English translation of Duchamp's PMA-housed working notes, uniting, in effect, skeleton and flesh -- art and the written ideas that preceded it. With that, Duchamp and Hamilton unite in an invisible framework of high art and low avarice for a kinky, kinetic ride as educational as it is erotic.

Museum Studies 6: Richard Hamilton, Aug. 31-Nov. 3, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 26th Street and the Parkway, 215-763-8100.

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