JOSEF ALBERS (1888–1976) has sometimes been seen as an artist who spent most of his life teaching and who only attained renown with the Homage to the square paintings, produced over the last twenty-five years of his life (Fig.1). This late interest was largely due to the vogue for optical, minimal and other types of geometric abstract painting during the 1960s, when Albers was already in his seventies. Yet, much earlier, he had made a reputation as a practitioner while he was at the Bauhaus, where he was known for his work in glass as well as a designer of furniture. Although he produced virtually no painting at the school, where he was successively student, technical demonstrator and teacher from 1920 to 1933, his work in glass during this period can be considered as a kind of painting – or object-making directly related to painting – which was clearly perceived at the time as a fine-art practice rather than as applied art or design (Fig.2).

MEASURING BARELY ONE FOOT square, Richard Hamilton’s Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? is one of the most celebrated images in twentieth-century British art (Figs.12 and 13). It was created for the catalogue and used for one of the posters for the exhibition This is Tomorrow held at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, during August and September 1956. Collaged with images drawn chiefly from American illustrated magazines, it has become an emblem of the Age of Boom, the post-War consumer culture of the late 1950s. It has also become a manifesto for a movement. In one of the first accounts of British Pop art, published in 1963, it was presented as a catalytic work, and the next year was decreed ‘the first genuine work of Pop’. More recently it has been compared with the Demoiselles d’Avignon, has been hailed as ‘the starting point of planetary Pop Art’ and as the ‘perfect Pop work’. John Russell’s description over thirty years ago of the endless ‘pockets of meaning’ that can be found in ‘this little picture’ remains true today. Above all, it was a startling prognosis of the use of comic books, tinned food and burlesque nudes that formed the iconography of Pop art, and of the widespread use by artists of the metonymic language of advertising. Such a mythic status is all the more remarkable for an object not originally intended for display but as a design for lithographic reproduction. Despite this fame, however, the immediate origins of Hamilton’s collage have remained obscure. The new archival and source material presented in this article sheds light on these origins, addressing problems surrounding the authorship of the work. Newly identified sources for various parts of the collage allow for a revised interpretation of its contents.

In Robert Irwin’s most recent paintings one is confronted by what at first appears to be an immaculate white picture plane, about seven feet square, and nothing more. Some time must pass – a minute, or two, or three – before the viewer becomes fully aware of an indistinct, irregularly-shaped mass which seems to have emerged out of the white plane, roughly centered [. . .] after the elements of the painting have, so to speak, ‘emerged’ – [the encounter] is a history of hypnotic involvement between the viewer and the elements of color and whiteness before him [. . .] upon the quality of this involvement, the entire success or failure of the picture is staked [. . .] if what the viewer is experiencing is not art, there are no substitute gratifications to get him by.

IN THE EARLY 1950s Stuart Davis (1892–1964) produced a series of paintings and drawings that featured the word ‘champion’. Alfred Barr, Director of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, asked the artist to explain one of the works, Visa, a 1951 painting that had entered the Museum’s collection. Davis stated that the word ‘champion’ in Visa as well as in Little giant still life (1950; Fig.38), the first painting in this series, ‘was derived quite casually and spontaneously from a book of paper matches which has this word printed on it, and the design of the matchbook was singularly uninteresting and it was the challenge of the lack of interest in this case, rather than the direct stimulus of a subject, but nevertheless the matchbook was the source’. The logo for Champion spark plugs was printed on the cover of a matchbook that Davis possessed, and scholars have accepted it as the sole source for the central image in his ‘Champion’ series of paintings and drawings. This article briefly assesses the brand identity of Champion spark plugs, presents a possible second source of inspiration for Davis’s Little giant still life and considers his interest in the word ‘champion’.