Hamilton’s Odyssey into Ulysses

Lovely exhibition at the British Museum of drawings by Richard Hamilton drawn with the idea of producing an illustrated version of James Joyce’s Ulysses. The book didn’t happen but the drawings were lovely.

Hamilton said he was aiming “to make the pictorial equivalent of Joyce’s stylistic leaps” and each section did have a different artistic technique. I loved a picture for the section where the hero of the book Leopald Bloom takes a bath. The picture was a wonderful picture of him in his bath with the bath vertical in the picture with Bloom’s head in the foreground. It perfectly showed which bits of the body were above or below the water. It really reminded me of the wonderful scene of Daniel Craig in the bath in “Love is the Devil”, the film about Francis Bacon.

I also liked the pictures for “In Hornes House” which were a drinking scene but each figure was drawn in a different art historical way so there was an icon, a take on a Rembrandt self-portrait, a Cezanne like figure, a Renaissance virgin and even an Easter Island head. A wonderful surreal mismatch and yet your eye accepted.

The exhibition even made me feel I could tackle reading the book, I’ll get over it!

Review
Guardian


 

 

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