Tate Modern, Richard Hamilton

Had a mind-expanding visit to the Richard Hamilton show at Tate Modern yesterday. I have to admit I knew very little of this artists beyond the iconic 'Just what is it ...', which gave me a vague association with 'pop'. But there was clearly much more to him than that. More comprehensive coverage is no doubt on offer elsewhere, so I'll just note down things that stuck. The assemblage of forms in the reconstructed exhibitions for the ICA in Room 1 brought out a love of material forms and a cool scientific sense, both of which informed the later spaces. Hamilton's fascination with pop iconography is coupled with a kind of analytical detachment which stops it acquiring the party spirit of, say, Peter Blake. There seems to be a kind of deconstruction of the corporatist world, but whatever critique is being made is oblique: Fun House (1956), festooned with movie images and accompanied by a jukebox seemed to fill the idea of fun with question marks, and felt like a journey back to The Twilight Zone.

Moving through the rooms, I loved the way Hamilton's mind would seize on something and play with it, sometimes for years. For example, he was struck by some photos of Marilyn Monroe which she herself had semi-erased, and built this into a collage which suggests the vulnerability behind the celebrity image. A painstaking perspectival adaptation of different makes of car tyre across time had all of Uccello's obsession to it, and the same beauty in the drawing, later harnessed to computer treatment of the data. Hamilton was fascinated by perspective and space, from early paintings recording the phenomenon of viewing landscape from a train window and sem-abstract paintings where dots are surrounded by different spatial fields, through to a late installation inspired by a German hotel looby, with a double staircase reflected in a central column.

An array of different techniques in the works on show manifest Hamilton's lifelong interest in the technology of art (he was one of the first to use computer modelling). The artist's reverence for Marcel Duchamp was inspiring, and rather touching, and makes him an artist more attuned to European developments than many of his contemporaries. It was a reverence that led to a reconstruction of 'The Bride stripped Bare' and a meticulous English version of the notebooks and other written materials associated with that work. A wry detachment in the strongest pieces again suggests Duchamp, too, and when this is lost the work weakens: I found the hospital installation in  which a televised Thatcher is literally talking down to an invisible patient from a TV screen rather shrill, and the equation of landscape art with Kleenex rolls and excreting 'caganers' (for that is what they are) never seemed to get anywhere beyond a few obvious statements about advertising imagery. By contrast, 'Swingeing London' is endlessly mysterious in its absence of apparent attitude, and brought to mind Gerhard Richter (in this same space not long ago) in its ambiguous authorial presence.

Not that Hamilton couldn't do politics. The triptych of Northern Ireland works stands up well, I thought: the formal patterns and sense of human fragility suggested interesting layered dialogues between the pieces. The room of various pictures of Hamilton by his friends (my, what a starry set) was curiously self-effacing, a kind of opposite of art as self-expression - art as submission. Gunslinging Tony Blair towards the end was fun, but the concluding series of conflated museum and domestic interiors, using techniques from oil paint to software, seemed to concentrate the strengths of this tirelessly imaginative creator: technical invention and control, deep fascination with spatial relations, a negotiation of space between private and public and an anti-romantic impersonal presence. The net result is to feel more involved in the contemporary world, without feeling called upon to validate one's sincerity through noisy emotive gestures - a hugely refreshing feeling in the age of twitterdom. A really strong show which taught me a lot about an artist who brought us pop but a great deal more.