Lithograph on paper
Tate Collection
Works with images
General Collection
Collection
<a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/richard-hamilton-1244" aria-label="More by Richard Hamilton" data-gtm-name="header_link_artist" data-gtm-destination="page--artist">Richard Hamilton</a>
Flowerpiece B  crayon
Presented by Tyler Graphics Ltd in honour of Pat Gilmour, Tate Print Department 1974-7, 2004
domestic
flower
food and drink
fruit - non-specific
objects
plants and flowers
product packaging
reading, writing, printed matter
toilet paper
<p>These prints are related to a series of <i>Flower-Piece</i> paintings made by Hamilton in the early 1970s. The flowers themselves were based on an image on a laminated postcard with an illusory ‘three-dimensional’ effect. The addition of the Andrex toilet paper has been seen as counterbalancing the sentimentality inherent within the genre of painting flowers. It also reflects Hamilton’s fascination with advertising. He has described a lyrical, soft-focus advertisement for Andrex as being ‘like Watteau in its magical ambiguity’.</p><p><em>Gallery label, July 2008</em></p>
paper print lithograph
22 November 2004 – 4 April 2005
2005-04-04
15 November 2004
2004-11-15
Tate Modern (London, UK)
http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/
2004-11-22
Tyler Gift
Collection based display
Flower-piece B - crayon study
image: 465 × 318 mm
Presented by Tyler Graphics Ltd in honour of Pat Gilmour, Tate Print Department 1974-7, 2004
<p><i>Flower-piece B – crayon study</i>, like <i>Flower-piece B </i>(<a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/hamilton-flower-piece-b-p12106" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>P12106</span></a>) and <i>Flower-piece B – cyan separation </i>(<a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/hamilton-flower-piece-b-cyan-separation-p12105" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>P12105</span></a>), belongs to a series of prints Hamilton made from three paintings, <i>Flower-piece I</i>, 1971-4, <i>Flower-piece</i> <i>II</i>, 1973 and <i>Flower-piece III</i>, 1973-4, each based on one of three laminated three-dimensional postcards (<i>Flower-piece postcards a–c</i>, 1971-3, Collection Bombelli, Cadaqués). In his translation of postcard to painting, the artist tampered with the original image, adding a toilet roll to the foreground of one (<i>Flower-piece I</i>), a turd to the foreground of another (<i>Flower-piece II</i>) and abstracting the third into washes of colour (<i>Flower-piece III</i>). Hamilton had previously introduced a toilet roll to the cliché of a romantic landscape in his painting <i>Soft pink landscape</i>, 1971-2 (Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest; see <a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/hamilton-soft-pink-landscape-p07447" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>P07447</span></a> for a 1980 print based on this painting), where he was motivated by the association of ‘girls and toilet paper – glamour and shit’ (the artist quoted in <i>Collected Words</i>, p.100). In <i>Flower-piece I </i>the toilet roll is painted realistically so that it appears a solid presence, next to flowers and fruit painted with very thinned-down oils on a white canvas, suggestive of the texture of watercolour. On his treatment of flowers, Hamilton wrote: 
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<blockquote>Nothing is more likely to stimulate my interest in a new subject than to notice a major pictorial genre that I have left unexplored ... flowery allure is an irrelevant anachronism in the context of cultural ideas in our period. It takes perversity and a touch of irony to make it tolerable ... [my] compulsion to defile a sentimental cliché was perhaps, though unconscious initially, a conformity with a well-established tradition in the flower-piece – the convention of placing, often lower right a <i>memento mori</i>: an insect, a crab, a skull – some sinister motif which suggests that life is not all prettiness and fragrance ... the flower-piece genre should be, above all, about colour. Using paint to create colour effects, in this sense, is something that I have rarely found worthwhile, here it was to be the <i>raison d’être</i>.</blockquote>
<p>	(Quoted in <i>Collected Words</i>, p.100.)
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<br/>As the use of colour in depicting flowers could be relatively arbitrary, the subject offered Hamilton an ideal motif for a technical exploration of the difficulties of printing colour using different processes. Having experimented with the possibilities of etching and collotype in the <i>Trichromatic flower-pieces</i>,<i> </i>1973-4 and <i>Flower-piece A</i>, 1974, in 1975 Hamilton took <i>Flower-piece B </i>to the workshop of master-printer Ken Tyler in Bedford Village, New York State, to try his luck with lithography. Tyler had invited him to work on any project he chose. Hamilton had not previously been happy with the results he had achieved in the medium but was hopeful of changing this. He made two preparatory studies for the <i>Flower-piece B </i>works: <i>Flower-piece B – trichromatic study</i>, in colour pencils and wash and <i>Trichromatic study</i>, in pencil, wash, pastel and gouache<i> </i>(both Collection Bombelli, Cadaqués). With Tyler, he planned to make a lithograph in three colours and black, using four stones. To make a printable mark onto a lithography stone the artist must either draw directly onto the stone with a stick of black grease, or he may use a brush to apply a wash effect using a suspension of grease in water. Hamilton made <i>Flower-piece B – crayon study </i>using the former method. He commented: ‘Stones drawn with crayon are easier to work than wash drawings. To test this assumption a print study was made with four crayon drawn stones.’ (Quoted in Lullin, p.134.) He concluded that it was indeed relatively easy to achieve a satisfactory result using this method. He went on to test the second method in <i>Flower-piece B</i> (<span>P12106</span>). His drawing on the cyan stone for the <i>crayon study </i>was used to produce an addition version of the image, <i>Flower-piece B – cyan separation </i>(<span>P12105</span>).
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<br/><i>Flower-piece B – crayon study</i> is a four-colour lithograph on Arches Cover mould-made paper. It was produced in an edition of thirty-four plus ten artist’s proofs. Tate’s copy is the tenth in the edition. It is titled, signed and numbered by the artist on the lower edge of the paper in graphite. Tyler’s blind stamp is on the lower right corner and his workshop number is written in graphite on the verso, lower left corner: RH75-203.
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<br/><b>Further reading:</b>
<br/>Etienne Lullin, <i>Richard Hamilton: Prints and Multiples 1939-2002</i>, exhibition catalogue, Kunstmuseum Winterthur and Yale Center for British Art, New Haven 2003, pp.126-37, reproduced p.135 in colour.
<br/><i>Richard Hamilton: Retrospective</i>, exhibition catalogue, MACBA Barcelona and Ludwig Museum, Cologne 2003, p.73.
<br/><i>Richard Hamilton: Collected Words 1953-1982</i>, London and New York, 1982, pp.100-103.
<br/>
<br/>Elizabeth Manchester
<br/>September 2007
<br/></p>

Summary
2008-07-15T00:00:00
summary
SHORT_TEXT
<p>These <a class="glossarylinktopopup" data-gtm-destination="article-page" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/p/print" title="Glossary definition for 'Print'"><span>prints</span></a> are related to a series of <i>Flower-Piece</i> <a class="glossarylinktopopup" data-gtm-destination="article-page" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/p/painting" title="Glossary definition for 'Painting'"><span>paintings</span></a> made by Hamilton in the early 1970s. The flowers themselves were based on an image on a laminated postcard with an illusory ‘three-dimensional’ effect. The addition of the Andrex toilet paper has been seen as counterbalancing the sentimentality inherent within the <a class="glossarylinktopopup" data-gtm-destination="article-page" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/g/genres" title="Glossary definition for 'Genres'"><span>genre</span></a> of painting flowers. It also reflects Hamilton’s fascination with advertising. He has described a lyrical, soft-focus advertisement for Andrex as being ‘like Watteau in its magical ambiguity’.</p>

Display caption
2008-07-30T00:00:00
display-caption
DISPLAY_CAPTION
domestic flower food and drink fruit - non-specific objects plants and flowers product packaging reading, writing, printed matter toilet paper