Sir Eduardo Paolozzi (Independent) with links to the art
Hyfler/Rosner
23 April 2005
Art:
http://www.ambitmagazine.co.uk/Art3.htm
http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?workid=11146
http://www.austindesmond.com/Frameset.htm?HTM/prints/BritishPrintmakingIndex1/PAOLOZZI-Arpa_JPG.html~mainFrame
http://fildalinguagem.no.sapo.pt/witt.html
http://www.galleryonline.com/items/item.ehtml?i=150
http://www.gillianjason.com/pages/single/817.html
Born into an Italian Scottish working-class community
focused on Edinburgh, Eduardo Paolozzi was an unlikely
candidate for the role of one of Britain's leading sculptors
of the post-war period.
From the age of nine he was sent to Fascist youth camps in
Italy every summer, like other boys from this background,
the visits ceasing only on the outbreak of the Second World
War. His parents ran a confectionery shop, where he spent
long hours helping out after school during term-time.
During these years he developed the habit of making
scrapbooks dense with contemporary images cut from magazines
and comic books. Long before he began training as an artist
or had encountered the surprising disjunctions of
Surrealism, he was a natural and inventive collagist and
voracious accumulator of found materials.
His response to the spectacle of contemporary life conveyed
through the mass media was passionate and unselfconscious:
at a time when fine-art practice was dominated by class
divisions that regarded such unpretentious and ephemeral
visual material as unworthy of attention, Paolozzi welcomed
with alacrity the visual possibilities he saw around him.
It was this open-mindedness to visual stimulation, as a
result of which he moved effortlessly from ancient mythology
and classical Greek sculpture to the kitsch seductions of
contemporary advertising, that enabled him to react with
such spontaneous energy and wit to the changed visual
landscape of the post-war years and to forge one of the most
original and solidly anchored forms of Pop Art, long before
the movement took hold in the early 1960s.
The tragic experiences undergone by Paolozzi and his family
when Italy entered the war in June 1940 may help account for
the combative and suspicious strains of his personality
which later kept him at some remove from the art world even
as he was showered with official honours, including his
election to the Royal Academy in 1979 and a knighthood in
1989. He lost not only his father, but also his maternal
grandfather and an uncle when the ship taking them to
internment in Canada was torpedoed, and he himself was
imprisoned for three months.
Understandably, some residue of bitterness seems to have
affected his relations with other people well into his
successful professional life, with a particular distrust
reserved for art dealers and for critics who dared to voice
any reservations about his work, no matter how much they
might admire it. He formed intense friendships with other
artists, only in many cases to fall out with them so
severely that they never again had any contact; such was the
case, for example, with the two American painters with whom
he collaborated on separate occasions in the early and
mid-1960s, R.B. Kitaj and Jim Dine.
From the late 1940s through to the 1970s Paolozzi held solo
exhibitions at some of the outstanding galleries of the
time, including the Mayor Gallery, the Hanover Gallery,
Waddington Galleries and the Robert Fraser Gallery in
London, and the Betty Parsons Gallery and Pace Gallery in
New York, but by a combination of circumstance and his
awkward character he ended up in his later years floating
uncertainly from gallery to gallery without having the solid
commercial support that an artist of his stature would
normally have commanded.
Yet there are stories, too, of his generosity of spirit
towards individuals and institutions he trusted and
respected. He was as likely to make a spontaneous gesture of
friendship or thanks as to strike someone off his list for a
perceived slight.
In the end, it was he who suffered more than anyone from
these apparently unpredictable ways of behaving. Though he
left a very visible mark on the urban landscape with the
sculptural commissions he executed in his later years, he
must have felt that British museums were a little reluctant
to give him the acclaim that was his due.
After the Tate Gallery retrospective of 1971, which
confirmed his position as one of the towering sculptors of
his generation, his work was shown sporadically in the UK,
including a print retrospective at the Victoria and Albert
Museum in 1976, a retrospective at the Royal Scottish
Academy in Edinburgh in 1984, and an exhibition of his
portraits at the National Portrait Gallery in 1988. It was
only in 1995, however, with the announcement of the Paolozzi
Gift to the National Galleries of Scotland, opened to the
public in the refurbished Dean Gallery in Edinburgh in
spring 1999, that he finally received recognition on the
scale he deserved. In 2004 the Dean Gallery was responsible
for a full-scale retrospective, "Paolozzi at 80".
Whatever anger or resentments may have simmered in
Paolozzi's life, they were absent from his art, which was
blissfully full of humour, visual energy, intellectual
curiosity and an exuberant spirit for which it would be
difficult to find a parallel.
His original intention was to study commercial art. His
intermittent studies at a variety of art schools could not
have done much to prepare him for the audaciousness of his
mature work. During the years that he lived in Paris, from
1947 to 1949, he underwent his real artistic education,
meeting not only the great sculptors of the period,
Constantin Brancusi and Alberto Giacometti, but also artists
associated with Dada and Surrealism. In Paris Paolozzi made
the first of the scrapbook-like collages that were to form
the basis of his celebrated slide lecture called "Bunk" at
the ICA, London, in 1952, and which he gathered together
nearly 20 years later in facsimile form as a box of
screenprints that stands as one of the most complex
statements of Pop iconography.
The "Bunk" lecture was witnessed by just a small group of
fellow travellers, the newly formed Independent Group, which
numbered among its members the artists Richard Hamilton,
William Turnbull, Victor Pasmore and Nigel Henderson and the
critics Lawrence Alloway (credited with the first published
use of the term "Pop" in 1958), Toni del Renzio and Reyner
Banham. Together they explored the new field of semiology,
the study of signs, dissecting the implicit meanings within
advertising, science fiction, comic books, photography,
fashion, car design and other areas of visual invention
previously ignored by fine artists and art historians alike.
In the "Bunk" lecture, Paolozzi had flashed his scrapbook
images on the screen with such speed that they would barely
register on the brain; so, too, in his classic Pop
screenprints of the 1960s, such as As is When (1965,
dedicated to the life and work of the Austrian philosopher
Ludwig Wittgenstein) and Moonstrips Empire News (1967), or
much later in the Tottenham Court Road Underground station
mosaics of 1980-86 that remain his most visible art work in
the capital, he manifested this assault on the senses in
intricate collages filled to bursting point with familiar
images and jazzy patterns.
An extraordinary innovator in his use of materials, in the
early 1950s Paolozzi was perhaps the first major artist to
take up screenprinting - previously regarded as a medium
appropriate only for posters and other commercial uses - as
a process for making limited-edition prints.
During the same period, he also applied the collage
aesthetic and the exploitation of mechanical procedures to
the bronze sculptures that established his international
reputation. For his representations of monstrous shattered
heads, grotesque animals, warriors, and mythic figures such
as Cyclops or St Sebastian, he pressed machine parts and
other found objects into the wax maquettes so that they left
clear imprints when cast into bronze.
By 1962, when Pop Art had become an unstoppable force,
Paolozzi had moved from the still brutalist look of works
such as Tyrannical Tower, made under the influence of Jean
Dubuffet's art brut just a year earlier, to a much sleeker
machine aesthetic of sculptures resembling robots and
engines. A few years later he had many of these new works
resurfaced, either chrome-plating them to give them the
glamorous allure of cars straight off the assembly-line or
painting them in bright primary hues to make them look as
appetising as colourfully packaged foods in a supermarket.
Although Paolozzi was not averse to expressing his political
views through his art, for example by making reference to
the Vietnam War in his 1971 Tate retrospective, he remained
more interested in questions of the spirit and in conveying
how the mind works and how it processes visual information.
(His ideas are recorded in the very substantial Eduardo
Paolozzi: writings and interviews (2000), edited by Robin
Spencer.) During the 1970s he moved much closer to
abstraction in wooden reliefs and in screenprints and
woodcuts still slotted together on the principles of his
earlier collages from found images, made in homage to
composers including Charles Ives and Anton Bruckner and to
the architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh.
The bronze doors he made for the Hunterian Art Gallery in
Glasgow in 1976 were a culmination of these developments and
led to numerous other public commissions which became his
mainstay during the 1980s and 1990s.
Among the most notable of his outdoor sculptures are
Piscator of 1981, an enormous cast-iron sculpture in front
of Euston Station; Hephaestus, a bronze of 1987 obviously
modelled on the artist's own pugilist's features, at 34-36
High Holborn in London; and Newton of 1997, after William
Blake's watercolour of Sir Isaac Newton, an even more
prepossessing figure greeting visitors to the new British
Library on Euston Road.
At the 2000 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition his sculpture
London to Paris, measuring over 20 feet in length and taking
the form of a flatbed locomotive, was given pride of place
in the courtyard. This major late work is currently on
display at the Cass Sculpture Foundation's sculpture park at
Goodwood, West Sussex.
Paolozzi taught at a variety of institutions throughout his
life. After teaching textile design at the Central School of
Art and Design, London, from 1949 to 1955, he was lecturer
in sculpture at St Martin's School of Art (1955 to 1958) and
Visiting Professor at the Hochschule for Bildenden Künste in
Hamburg (1960-62), where his pupils included Stuart
Sutcliffe, one of the original line-up of the Beatles. He
was tutor in ceramics at the Royal College of Art from 1968
to 1989, Professor of Ceramics at the Fachhochschule,
Cologne, from 1976 to 1981, and Professor of Sculpture at
the Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Munich, from 1981 to
1990.
Marco Livingstone
Eduardo Luigi Paolozzi, sculptor, collagist and printmaker:
born Edinburgh 7 March 1924; Instructor, Central School of
Arts and Crafts 1950-55; Lecturer, St Martin's School of Art
1955-56; Tutor in Ceramics, Royal College of Art 1968-89,
Visiting Professor 1989, Honorary Professor 2000; CBE 1968;
ARA 1972, RA 1979; Professor of Ceramics, Fachhochschule,
Cologne 1977-81; Professor of Sculpture, Akademie der
Bildenden Künste, Munich 1981-91; HM Sculptor in Ordinary
for Scotland 1986-2005; Kt 1989; married 1951 Freda Elliott
(three daughters; marriage dissolved); died London 22 April
2005.