Lithograph and screenprint 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>
Soft pink landscape
Purchased 1981
abstraction
actions: postures and motions
adults
advertising
blur
colour
domestic
emotions, concepts and ideas
formal qualities
from recognisable sources
gestural
irony
landscape
landscape
lifestyle and culture
objects
people
photographic
product packaging
reading, writing, printed matter
sitting
society
standing
toilet paper
universal concepts
woman
wooded
<p>The print <i>Soft pink landscape </i>is based on a painting of the same title that Hamilton made in 1971-2 (Hungarian National Gallery, Ludwig Collection, Budapest). The painting, and its companion <i>Soft blue landscape</i>, 1976-80 (private collection) were produced in response to a group of advertisements for a new coloured line of Andrex toilet papers that became visible in the early 1960s. The adverts humourously introduced a giant roll of toilet paper, luxuriously packaged in floral-print paper, into a romantic woodland glade in which a misty-eyed feminine presence reclined seductively or hovered between leaves. Hamilton appropriated the imagery but reduced the scale of the toilet roll so that it is a more natural size. In both paintings, the landscape and its subjects are rendered loosely in an almost impressionistic style, while the roll of toilet paper – the colour scheme of its packaging identified in the painting’s title – is rendered more realistically so that it stands out from the soft, fluid imagery of the background. In the print it appears more homogenised. Hamilton commented:</p>
paper print lithograph screenprint
1 July 2003 – 15 February 2004
2004-02-15
4 August 2003 – 26 October 2003
2003-10-26
2003-08-04
Instituto Tomie Ohtake (Sao Paulo, Brazil)
16 October 2003 – 15 February 2004
2004-02-15
2003-10-16
Paco Imperial (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)
2003-07-01
A Bigger Splash: British Art from Tate 1960-2003
Tate partnerships & programmes
25 November 2011 – 28 February 2013
2013-02-28
25 November 2011 – 28 February 2013
2013-02-28
2011-11-25
Tate Britain (London, UK)
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/
2011-11-25
Richard Hamilton Lodge Display
Collection based display
Soft pink landscape
image: 730 × 918 mm
support: 724 × 915 mm
Purchased 1981
<p>The print <i>Soft pink landscape </i>is based on a painting of the same title that Hamilton made in 1971-2 (Hungarian National Gallery, Ludwig Collection, Budapest). The painting, and its companion <i>Soft blue landscape</i>, 1976-80 (private collection) were produced in response to a group of advertisements for a new coloured line of Andrex toilet papers that became visible in the early 1960s. The adverts humourously introduced a giant roll of toilet paper, luxuriously packaged in floral-print paper, into a romantic woodland glade in which a misty-eyed feminine presence reclined seductively or hovered between leaves. Hamilton appropriated the imagery but reduced the scale of the toilet roll so that it is a more natural size. In both paintings, the landscape and its subjects are rendered loosely in an almost impressionistic style, while the roll of toilet paper – the colour scheme of its packaging identified in the painting’s title – is rendered more realistically so that it stands out from the soft, fluid imagery of the background. In the print it appears more homogenised. Hamilton commented:
<br/></p>
<blockquote>Nature is beautiful. Pink from a morning sun filters through a tissue of autumn leaves. Golden shafts gleam through the perforated vaulting of the forest to illuminate a stage set-up for the Sunday supplement voyeur. Andrex discreetly presents a new colour magazine range. A pink as suggestively soft as last week’s blue – soft as pink flesh under an Empire negligée. The woodland equipped with every convenience. A veil of soft focus vegetation screens the peeper from the sentinel. Poussin? Claude? No, more like Watteau in its magical ambiguity.</blockquote>
<blockquote>Sometimes advertisements make me wax quite poetical. None more so than the series by Andrex showing two young ladies in the woods. I have, on occasions, tried to put into words that peculiar mixture of reverence and cynicism that ‘Pop’ culture induces in me and that I try to paint. I suppose that a balancing of these reactions is what I used to call non-Aristotelian or, alternatively, cool.</blockquote>
<blockquote>(Quoted in <i>Collected Words</i>, p.78.)</blockquote>
<p>
<br/>Concurrent with creating the first <i>Soft pink landscape </i>imagery, Hamilton had begun work on his <i>Flower-piece </i>paintings. The pink toilet roll that features in the foreground of <i>Soft pink landscape </i>features similarly in the foreground of the painting <i>Flower-piece I</i>, 1971-4 and the related prints <i>Flower-piece B</i>, <i>Flower-piece B – crayon study</i> and <i>Flower-piece B – cyan separation</i> (all 1975, Tate <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>, <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-crayon-study-p12107" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>P12107</span></a> and <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>). At the same time Hamilton was combining poses of models squatting, taken from fashion magazines, with the motif of rural defecation which he derived from a French postcard showing young people squatting in a forest as a result of drinking laxative waters in a small spa in the Lot. For the artist, the juxtaposition of ‘girls and toilet paper – glamour and shit’ (Hamilton, <i>Collected Words</i>, p.100) is related to the <i>memento mori</i> traditionally included in the still life painting from the renaissance onwards. Nine years after making the first <i>Soft pink landscape </i>study, Hamilton discovered that the image that had inspired his painting had been conceived by the Op-art painter Bridget Riley (born 1931) when she was working at the J Walter Thompson advertising agency in London. 
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<br/>In his usual way, Hamilton took the print through several stages before it reached its final state. He made four studies in 1972 experimenting with dye transfer and oil (<i>Soft pink landscape – study I – IV</i>, Ludwig Museum, Cologne) before putting the image on one side for several years. When he returned to it in 1980, he started with the painting, photographing it and making a collotype proof. He worked on this print with coloured crayons, gouache and a spray gun before taking it to Heinz Häfner in Stuttgart, where a collotype using seven colours was eventually finalised. Hamilton then took the print to Frank Kircherer, also based in Stuttgart, to screenprint marks that look like daubs and dribbles of paint and scribblings with coloured pencils all over the print, both on the image and in its white borders. Marks in white and pastel colours predominate on the upper half of the image; scribbles in red, purple, green, yellow and black in the lower margin give a sense of spontaneity, as though the artist is still working on the image. Hamilton’s addition of painterly marks to <i>Soft pink landscape </i>recalls the small abstract areas he painted onto the photographic surface of <i>People</i>, 1968 (<a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/hamilton-people-p01019" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>P01019</span></a>) as well as the geometric areas of monotone colour he added to the photographic collages in <i>Interior II</i>, 1964 (<a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/hamilton-interior-ii-t00912" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>T00912</span></a>), <i>Interior</i> 1964-5 (<a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/hamilton-interior-p04250" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>P04250</span></a>) and more recently, <i>Interior with monochromes</i>, 1979 (<a class="acno-pop" data-gtm-destination="page--artwork" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/hamilton-interior-with-monochromes-p07446" title="View the details of this artwork"><span>P07446</span></a>).
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<br/><i>Soft pink landscape </i>was produced in an edition of 136 plus fourteen artist’s proofs. Tate’s copy is number forty-six in the edition which was distributed by Waddington Graphics, London. The artist inscribed the title, his signature and the edition number in pencil on the print. 
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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, pp158-9, reproduced p.159 in colour.<b> </b>
<br/><i>Richard Hamilton: Prints 1939-83</i>, London and Stuttgart, 1984, p.78, reproduced in colour.
<br/><i>Richard Hamilton: Collected Words 1953-1982</i>, London and New York, 1982, pp.78-80.
<br/>
<br/>Elizabeth Manchester
<br/>September 2007</p>

Summary
2008-07-15T00:00:00
summary
SHORT_TEXT
<p><b>P07447</b> SOFT PINK LANDSCAPE 1980</p>
<p></p>
<p>Inscribed ‘R Hamilton’ bottom right and ‘Soft Pink Landscape’ and ‘46/136’</p>
<p>Collotype and screenprint. Collotype printing by Schreiber and screenprinting by Frank Kicherer, both in Stuttgart, published by Waddington Graphics, 28 3/4× 36 1/8 (72.9×91.7)
<br/>Purchased from Waddington Graphics (Grant-in-Aid) 1981
<br/>Lit: Richard S. Field, Image and Process, Stuttgart, 1983, section XV, no.60
<br/>
<br/>This <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>print</span></a> is closely related to a <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>painting</span></a> of the same title made in 1971–2 (and four studies of 1972, in oil and crayon over dye-transfer prints shown with it in an exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in 1975). The exhibition ‘Image and Process’ contained a four-colour collotype of the painting on which the print is based, another copy with painted and air-brushed additions, and the final six-colour collotype besides the final editioned version of ‘Soft Pink <a class="glossarylinktopopup" data-gtm-destination="article-page" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/l/landscape" title="Glossary definition for 'Landscape'"><span>Landscape</span></a>’ with <a class="glossarylinktopopup" data-gtm-destination="article-page" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/s/screenprint" title="Glossary definition for 'Screenprint'"><span>screenprinting</span></a>. While making the painted additions that were to be screenprinted, Hamilton made touches in the margin which were retained in the final version. The print is a pair to ‘Soft Blue Landscape’ 1979.
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<br/><b>Published in:</b>
<br/>The Tate Gallery 1980-82: Illustrated Catalogue of Acquisitions, London 1984
<br/></p>

Catalogue entry
2004-10-11T00:00:00
catalogue-entry
CATALOGUE_ENTRY
abstraction actions: postures and motions adults advertising blur colour domestic emotions, concepts and ideas formal qualities from recognisable sources gestural irony landscape landscape lifestyle and culture objects people photographic product packaging reading, writing, printed matter sitting society standing toilet paper universal concepts woman wooded