For the great Pop artist Richard Hamilton, photography was implicated in modern painting from the beginning (Courbet, Manet, Degas …), and fundamental to his art is the exploration of this continued implication. Over his long career, Hamilton worked through several photographic formats as either source or structure of his pictures: the magazine advertisement, the publicity still, the fashion shoot, the postcard. At the same time, he often found painterly effects already present in these formats. In his “tabular pictures” from the late 1950s to the middle 1960s, Hamilton was especially drawn to seductive passages in photographic sources that move from focus to blur, from finish to facture, and back again. Central to his work, then, is the tracking of the increased mediation not only of visual art but of our human sensorium as well.

Reception to follow in A&A’s new suite on the 3rd floor of the Princeton University Art Museum. The suite is home to the Department of Art & Archaeology and its research units: the Index of Medieval Art and Visual Resources (which includes the department’s archives).

Hal Foster ’77 is the Townsend Martin, Class of 1917, Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. Foster is a renowned American art critic, historian and academic. Known for his critical theory, he co-edits the magazine October and has authored influential works such as The Return of the Real (1996), Design and Crime, and Other Diatribes (2002), and his most recent book, Fail Better: Reckonings with Artists and Critics (2025).

Sponsored by the Department of Art & Archaeology