Richard Hamilton

Richard Hamilton, who has died aged 89, was an artist famous for his paintings, collages and sculptures who pioneered British Pop Art in the 1950s and conceptual art in the 1980s.

He influenced artists from Andy Warhol to Damien Hirst and also had a significant impact on the visual style of groups such as The Beatles and Roxy Music.

With Leith-born Eduardo Paolozzi and other artists and architects he founded the Independent Group in 1952. It pushed what was to become known as Pop Art and has been recognised as one of the defining movements in post- war British art.

London-born Hamilton grew up in Pimlico and left school with no qualifications. But he discovered an ability for draughtsmanship as an apprentice working at an electrical components firm.

He enrolled in evening classes at St Martin’s School of Art which eventually led to his entry into the Royal Academy Schools, where he studied from 1938 to 1940, earning his living with jobs in the advertising industry.

After spending the Second World War working as a technical draftsman he re-enrolled at the Royal Academy Schools but was expelled in July 1946 for ignoring his teachers.

After National Service in the Army he studied at the Slade School of Art in London and began exhibiting at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) where he also produced posters and leaflets and taught at the Central School of Art and Design.

In 1952, at the first Independent Group meeting, held at the ICA, Hamilton was introduced to Paolozzi’s collages – produced in the late 1940s and early 1950s and now considered to be the precursors of British Pop Art.

Also in 1952, he was introduced to the work of one of his heroes, Marcel Duchamp, through the artist and historian Roland Penrose, whose collection is now housed at the Scottish National Gallery of Moden Art.

At the ICA Hamilton was responsible for the design and installation of an exhibition devoted to James Joyce’s Ulysses. Joyce was another hero.

In 1956 Hamilton produced his landmark collage, featuring a bodybuilder and titled Just What Is It that Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?

Initially intended as a poster for the seminal This is Tomorrow exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery it has been acknowledged as the first great work of British Pop Art.

It was thanks to a Penrose contact that Hamilton landed a teaching post at Newcastle University, which lasted until 1966.

Among his students were Roxy Music founder Bryan Ferry and Ferry’s visual collaborator Nicholas De Ville. Hamilton had a recognised influence on the band’s striking visual style and he described Ferry as “my greatest creation”.

Hamilton also taught at the Royal College of Art from 1957 to 1961 and promoted younger artists such as David Hockney and Peter Blake. He was also very active in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and parodied the then leader of the Labour Party, Hugh Gaitskell, for rejecting a policy of unilateral disarmament.

In 1962 his first wife Terry was killed in a car crash and this was followed by Hamilton’s first visit to the US, where he befriended Duchamp. This led to Hamilton curating the first and, to date, only British retrospective of Duchamp’s work, at the Tate Gallery in 1966.

In the mid-60s Hamilton began to combine elements of photography and painting in his pictures.

He was taken up by the Eton-educated art dealer Robert Fraser and produced a celebrated series of prints titled Swingeing London, based on the arrest of Fraser, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards for possession of drugs.

This association with Fraser led to meetings with Paul McCartney which resulted in Hamilton producing the cover design and poster collage for The Beatles’ White Album.

The design, a white square with the embossed name of the band and a grey number in the corner, contrasted with the colourful cover of the group’s preceding album, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. It is the only Beatles’ album cover not showing the band members.

During the 1970s, Hamilton enjoyed international acclaim and met his second wife, the painter Rita Donagh.

The couple set up a home and studio in Oxfordshire and he began to explore further mixed-media, which led to his work with digital media and groundbreaking work in conceptual art.

Hamilton enjoyed retrospectives at galleries around the world, including at the Tate Gallery in London in 1970 and 1992, in Barcelona, and Cologne.

In 1992 the Tate Gallery in London showed a retrospective and the following year he represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale, where he was awarded the Golden Lion.

In February 2002, the British Museum staged an exhibition of Hamilton’s illustrations of James Joyce’s Ulysses, entitled Imaging Ulysses and in 2003 Museum Ludwig in Cologne hosted a work show organized in co-operation with the artist himself, entitled Introspective.

Richard Hamilton was made a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour in 2002.

He is survived by his wife, Rita, and son Rod.