I'm dreaming of a black Christmas, 1971

About the Work

Richard Hamilton chose a famous film scene as the subject of this work. 'White Christmas', with music by Irving Berlin, was the most popular feature film in America in 1954. And yet Hamilton's reference is not an exact repetition of the cinema hit but an adaptation of it, in which he reproduces the subject as a screen print in the inverted colours of a colour negative. Hamilton examined this scene in numerous variations over a period of several years and rendered it using different techniques and colour variations. The elevation of a popular medium, film, to art was one of the abiding themes of the British artist, who is regarded as having established Pop Art in Britain.