Important South African and International Art, Decorative Arts & Jewellery

Live Auction, 16 October 2017

Day Sale
  • Richard Hamilton; I'm Dreaming of a Black Christmas
  • Richard Hamilton; I'm Dreaming of a Black Christmas


Lot Estimate
ZAR 170 000 - 250 000

About this Item

Richard Hamilton
British 1922-2011
I'm Dreaming of a Black Christmas

signed and numbered AP 10/15 in pencil in the margin

From an edition of 150

colour collotype and screenprint with hand colouring
sheet size: 75 by 100cm; image size: 51 by 76cm

Notes

Another example from this edition included in the Metropolitan Musuem of Art in New York.

"Hamilton first referenced Irving Berlin’s popular holiday ballad in an oil painting (1967–68) with reversed colors based on a color-negative film still of Bing Crosby in the famous 1954 film White Christmas. Hamilton used yet another negative, taken from his earlier painting, as the basis for this print. The painting’s reversed colors now appear in positive, an eerie echo of its cinematic source. Hamilton complicates the process from film still to painting to print (and from positive to negative and back again) with marks that look like paint: some are photographic transfers, some are silkscreened replicas of painterly strokes, and some are handmade additions."

The Metropolitan Museum of Art. (2017) I'm dreaming of a black Christmas, [Online], Available: metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/491682 [11 August 2017].