A significant association copy of this early Richard Hamilton-designed catalogue for the Hatton Gallery’s 1957 Gods and Men exhibition, with a Pop Art flavour (though not fully “young, witty, gimmicky, glamorous, and Big Business,” as he later wrote) from the library of Holland and Hamilton’s University of Durham colleague, fellow artist and art lecturer, Lawrence Gowing, and, indeed, commanding: “return to L.G.” on its title page.
Lawrence Gowing, then Professor of Fine Art at King’s College, University of Durham (now the University of Newcastle), had recruited Richard Hamilton in 1952 to teach design; he later developed a ‘basic course’ for first-year students with Victor Pasmore, remaining on the staff until 1966, and, as this catalogue indicates, collaborated on exhibitions at the Hatton Gallery, designing and printing the posters and catalogues in house. The intellectual father of Pop Art (or ‘Pop Daddy’) also exhibited his own work at the Hatton Gallery, which two years earlier, in 1955, hosted his important photographic installation Man, Machine and Motion, ahead of its move to the ICA.
The Gods and Men exhibition featured Stephen Tomlin’s head of Lytton Strachey, lent by Julia Strachey (“Mrs Lawrence Gowing” and, previously, Mrs Stephen Tomlin), as well as three
Epstein busts, at the modern end, plus C19th carvings from New Zealand, New Ireland, the Solomon Islands, Luba, and New Britain, and Egyptian, Egypto-Roman and Romano-British wood and stone heads. [ref: 3664]