[4] After spending World War II working as a technical draftsman, he re-enrolled at the Royal Academy Schools[4] but was expelled in 1946[6] on grounds of "not profiting from the instruction".

[8] In 1952, at the first Independent Group meeting, held at the ICA, Hamilton was introduced to Eduardo Paolozzi's seminal presentation of collages produced in the late 1940s and early 1950s that are now considered to be the first standard bearers of Pop Art.

At the ICA, Hamilton was responsible for the design and installation of a number of exhibitions including one on James Joyce and The Wonder and the Horror of the Human Head that was curated by Penrose.

It was also through Penrose that Hamilton met Victor Pasmore who gave him a teaching post in the Fine Art Department of Durham University at Newcastle upon Tyne, which lasted until 1966.

[10] Hamilton gave a 1959 lecture, "Glorious Technicolor, Breathtaking Cinemascope and Stereophonic Sound", a phrase taken from a Cole Porter lyric in the 1957 musical Silk Stockings.

In that lecture, which sported a pop soundtrack and the demonstration of an early Polaroid camera, Hamilton deconstructed the technology of cinema to explain how it helped to create Hollywood’s allure.

In the same year Hamilton organized the exhibition Man Machine Motion at the Hatton Gallery in the Fine Art Department at King's College, Durham (now Newcastle University).

The success of This Is Tomorrow secured Hamilton further teaching assignments in particular at the Royal College of Art from 1957 to 1961, where he promoted David Hockney and Peter Blake.

The research eventually resulted in Hamilton organising the preservation of the work by relocating it to the Hatton Gallery in Newcastle University Fine Art Department.

As early as 1964, when Pin-up and $he were loaned for a solo show of Hamilton's works at the Hanover Gallery in London, they were found to be cracked, with plastic lifting off the supporting surfaces.

This association with the 1960s pop music scene continued as Hamilton became friends with Paul McCartney resulting in him producing the cover design and poster collage for the Beatles' White Album.

[21] In 1969, Hamilton appeared in a documentary by filmmaker James Scott, in which he discussed the Swingeing London series and his preoccupation with mass media through a selection of his own work.

"[23] Hamilton realised a series of projects that blurred the boundaries between artwork and product design including a painting that incorporated a state-of-the-art radio receiver and the casing of a Dataindustrier AB computer.

As part of a television project, 1987 BBC series Painting with Light[24] Hamilton was introduced to the Quantel Paintbox[25] and subsequently purchased one for his studio to produce and modify his work.

Hamilton explained (in the catalogue to his Tate Gallery exhibition, 1992), that he saw the image of "the blanket man as a public relations contrivance of enormous efficacy.

[citation needed] In 1988, the Orchard Gallery, Derry did an exhibition and publication entitled, "Work in Progress" of the copper plate etchings Hamilton had been making since the 1940s.

[citation needed] His first preliminary sketches were made while at the Slade School of Art, and he continued to refine and re-work the images over the next 50 years.

Hamilton felt his re-working of the illustrations in many different media had produced a visual effect analogous to Joyce's verbal techniques.

[32] His work Le chef d’oeuvre inconnu – a painting in three parts, unfinished at his death, comprises a trio of large inkjet prints composed from Photoshop images to visualize the moment of crisis in Balzac’s novel The Unknown Masterpiece.

In 2010, the Serpentine Gallery presented Hamilton’s ‘Modern Moral Matters’, an exhibition focusing on his political and protest works[35] which were shown previously in 2008 at Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh.

For the season 2001/2002 in the Vienna State Opera Richard Hamilton designed the large scale picture (176 sqm) "Retard en Fer – Delay in Iron" as part of the exhibition series "Safety Curtain", conceived by museum in progress.

[37] In 2011 Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane showed a joint retrospective exhibition of both Hamilton's and Rita Donagh's work called "Civil Rights etc."

[41] His auction record is £440,000, set at Sotheby's, London, in February 2006, for Fashion Plate, Cosmetic Study X (1969)[42] For a 2014 retrospective at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, the government-owned museum insured 246 works of Hamilton for 115.6 million euros ($157 million) against loss or damage, according to an order published as law by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports.