Richard Hamilton at the Ideal Home Exhibition of 1958: gallery for a collector of brutalist and tachiste art

This essay develops a close reading of Richard Hamilton's Gallery for a Collector of Brutalist and Tachiste Art, his contribution to the Daily Mail's Ideal Home Exhibition of 1958. Included in the Gallery for a Collector was Hamilton's 1957 painting Hommage à Chrysler Corp. The essay treats both the gallery and the painting as `meta-aesthetic¿ practices that register something of the aesthetic historicity of their social and cultural moment. To demonstrate how the work relates to the historicity of perception (sensorial, social and political perception) and to the material culture of the time, the essay sets out a number of possible contexts for attending to the painting and the Ideal Home installation.