February Art: the sea
2 February is James Joyce’s birthday (and the day on which A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses were published), so who better to illustrate it than the protean father of European pop art Richard Hamilton, who from a young age was obsessed with Joyce and the bric-a-brac of modern culture. Not, though, his black and white prints for Ulysses; instead, a shimmering scene of bathers which might or might not borrow from a photograph, where each figure is a point in a pattern of light and (if you look closely enough) a just-discernible individual.
The prose of A Portrait becomes rhythmically imbued by Stephen Dedalus’s obsessive viewing of a girl standing alone and still, her skirts drawn up, gazing out to sea, ‘in the likeness of a strange and beautiful sea-bird’. Taken together, Hamilton’s Bathers II (only recently lent to Tate Modern) might almost be fowl or flesh; taken apart, they start to make their own rhythms.
thebicyclops 