The White Album: How Richard Hamilton Brought Conceptual Art to the Beatles, Contemporary Art

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Fifty years ago, in 1968, the Beatles faced the task of following up on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the album that Kenneth Tynan, the theatre critic at The Times in London, had described as “a decisive moment in the history of Western civilisation”. The sprawling 30-track double album that emerged was simply titled The Beatles. But no one ever calls it that. The name we do have for it is thanks to Richard Hamilton. The British artist was himself charged with following up on a titanic achievement – Peter Blake and Jann Haworth’s cover for Sgt Pepper. His solution was simple: to leave the cover almost completely blank; a minimal, conceptual response to the explosion of imagery and colour in Blake and Haworth’s design. Hence, in the popular imagination, The Beatles became the “White Album”.