Although Richard Hamilton never achieved the celebrity of Andy Warhol or Damien Hirst he had a major impact on modern art, influencing them and many others after earning for himself the title of the father of Pop Art. There was more to him than that, though: in his long career he indulged in many different themes, producing work which was displayed over decades in innumerable exhibitions. His development took him through painting to printmaking, sculpture to typography and collage.
His work could occasionally verge on the savage, as when he depicted Tony Blair as a menacing pistol-toting cowboy posing against a world in flames. A previous work – and the subject displays Hamilton's remarkable longevity – satirised the then Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell for his refusal to abandon the British atomic bomb.
But though sometimes political, Hamilton was more often associated with observation and insight than with searing attacks. He was, however, often socially subversive, most famously with his collage, the brilliantly titled "Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?"
Made up mostly of cuttings from magazines, its theme was American consumer culture. It featured a male bodybuilder and a naked woman in the incongruous setting of a living room, surrounded by posters and household appliances in what was described as "a semi-ironic look at the mass-market imagery of the post-war age." Such techniques would later come to be regarded as commonplace, but its novelty meant it was hailed as "the first genuine work of pop."
Later it would be called the manifesto for a movement, which came as a surprise to Hamilton. He had written: "Pop Art is popular, transient, short-term, expendable, easily forgotten, low-cost, mass-produced, wicked, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous."
But what he presumed would be a fleeting phase has endured. "The thing that surprised me right from the start," he said in later life, "was that it wasreproduced more than any otherwork that I've ever done." He was surely punning when he added: "It's like being stuck with being a one-record pop star."
Another way in which Hamilton influenced the modern art scene was his enthusiasm for Marcel Duchamp, at a time when the Frenchman had been all but forgotten. One of his best-known works is his replica of Duchamp's "Large Glass", in Tate Modern, while his 1955 exhibition of paintings at the Hanover Gallery paid homage to the great surrealist.
Born in London in 1922, Richard Hamilton took art classes when he was 12 but left school at 14 to work for an engineering firm. A year later he moved to a commercial design studio before becoming a student at the Royal Academy Schools.
"There was no reason why I should have been interested in art any more than anything else," he once said. "My family had nothing to do with art and we didn't have any money. We didn't have any rich relatives who could have had some influence on it.
"I was just a lorry driver's son who had this aberration about wanting to be an artist. My father always said that you ought to get a real job, this was a waste of time. But they were always very tolerant and helped as much as they could."
He put in a spell of National Service, passing the time by reading James Joyce's Ulysses, which he found absorbing. In the 1950s he taught in Newcastle, where one of his pupils was Bryan Ferry; the Roxy Music singer would later cite Hamilton as a major influence on the band's aesthetic.
Hamilton also devised the exhibitions "Growth and Form" and "Man, Machine & Motion" for the ICA in London, before collaborating on the "This is Tomorrow" show which brought his collage to public and critical attention. As he explained it: "In the 1950s we became more aware of the possibility of seeing the whole world, at once, through the great visual matrix that surrounds us, a synthetic 'instant' view. Cinema, television, magazines, newspapers flooded the artist with a total landscape."
He credited his lifelong interest in James Joyce with dispelling any inhibitions about experimenting with different forms of expression. He explained: "Joyce let me into an enormous mystery in a way, which was that you don't have to think about style, that every chapter in Ulysses is in a different style. He is an absolute master of language, and some chapters are written in a progression of styles."
Hamilton connected in some ways with swinging London, meeting the Beatles and Mick Jagger. A drugs bust in which Jagger and an art dealer were arrested was famously depicted by Hamilton in the 1967 work "Swingeing London". He was also commissioned to help design the album The Beatles, usually referred to as "The White Album". He recalled Paul McCartney giving him three tea chests full of photographs for use in a collage inside the album sleeve.
Hamilton personally presented a suitably artistic face to the world, certainly in later lfe. One interviewer memorably described him as "looking like Abraham as depicted by a children's bible – the sprouting white hair, the magnificent high forehead, a set of teeth that resemble leaning tombstones in a crowded churchyard."
In a tribute to him the Gagosian Gallery said: "His fascination with the authenticity of the image in contemporary society, and the implication this has in political and moral terms, has held him at the vanguard of modern art. The art world has lost one of its leading figures, a hugely innovative talent and a great intellect, whose work crossed many fields. He was a pioneering artist of unparalleled skill, invention and lasting authority."
He was twice married, to Terry O'Reilly who died in a car crash in 1962, and to the painter Rita Donagh in 1991.
Richard Hamilton, artist: born London 24 February 1922; CH 2000; married 1947 Terry O'Reilly (died 1962; one son, one daughter), 1991 Rita Donagh; died 13 September 2011.
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