Richard Hamilton was an artist whose considerable ambition was to “get all of living” into his work. In his epoch-making collage of 1956,Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?,the living space is crowded with up-to‑the-minute objects of desire: the TV set, the vacuum cleaner, the tinned ham, the tape recorder, the body builder’s muscles, the cone-shape coolie hat perched on the sexy naked housewife on the sofa. Hamilton’s consumer’s catalogue is well observed and playful. But at a more profound level it is horribly disquieting. No other work of art of its period expresses so precisely the jarringly ambivalent spirit of the age.