At the beginning of the 1950s, advertising renews with the increase of mass-cultural consumption in the United Kingdom; Richard Hamilton is among the first artists to integrate the features of the new visual culture into his work. He creates his collage Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing? from the typical elements of comic strips and ads in 1956, which became known as the icon of Pop art. His paintings from this period feature the abstractions of advertisements (mostly car ads) and female characters represented solely by sexual traits in a way that sexuality and commodity get mixed up. In Soft Pink Landscape he deals with a detail taken from an advertisement again. In the centre of the picture, two women, "angel-like" in the English way and lightly clothed, stare at the single – more or less – sharp spot on the picture: a roll of toilet paper of a well-known brand labeled "soft" and "pink". The theme set in a kitschy dream-world, which seems to be particularly unnatural for the English, is a distancing and ironic revenge on the hypocritical and euphemistic (English) public culture. K. Ü.
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