Eduardo Paolozzi (The Economist)
Hyfler/Rosner
The Economist
April 30, 2005
U.S. Edition
Eduardo Paolozzi, pioneer of pop art, died on April 22nd,
aged 81
WHEN Eduardo Paolozzi was a guest professor at the
University of California in 1968 he mostly turned down
invitations to visit the state's numerous and well-endowed
art galleries and museums. He spent his free time in
Disneyland, in computer centres, in aircraft and car
factories, in Hollywood studios. No one who knew him was
very surprised. Mr Paolozzi was fascinated by what he saw as
the real world. Fascinated, and appalled.
He had built up a reputation as a pioneer of pop art, in
which unconsidered trifles, perhaps some scraps from a
magazine, or a soup can, are turned into something more: a
work of art. Pop art had been invented, or at least
developed, in Britain in the 1950s and had then taken hold
in America, where Andy Warhol was its most famous
practitioner with his pictures of Campbell's Condensed Soup.
Mr Paolozzi's contribution to pop art had been acknowledged
in many international exhibitions, notably a one-man show in
New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1964.
Pop art can be in various forms, collages, screen prints,
sculptures, mosaics. Mr Paolozzi did them all. And all in
their way reflected his view that the rich world was
wasteful. He could not bear to throw away such things as a
nice bottle or box. Friends were bemused by the gifts he
enthusiastically presented them with, an old plastic
ashtray, a bicycle bell. In his work, he said, he tried to
rescue something from a thriftless society: think of it as a
health warning against thoughtless waste. Mr Paolozzi's
experience in California confirmed his view that the world
was bowing unthinkingly in the direction of the wasteful
Americans.
In the 1920s the parents of Eduardo Luigi Paolozzi had
emigrated from Italy to Leith, in Scotland, where they set
up an ice-cream parlour. They were what today are called
economic migrants. Work was scarce in Italy, but Eduardo's
father had no quarrel with Mussolini and each summer he sent
his son to a fascist youth camp. Eduardo's main memory of
that time was of the colourful Italian uniforms. In 1940,
when Italy entered the second world war on the side of
Germany, his father and grandfather were arrested. They died
when the ship taking them to internment in Canada was
torpedoed. His mother was at first moved inland, the
authorities fearing that she might spot the movements of
warships. But eventually she and her son were allowed to
carry on satisfying the Scots' craving for soft ice-cream.
Eduardo had a year in the army, digging trenches in the
unlikely event that with war nearing its end the Germans
would invade. It is unclear when he decided to be an artist,
but he seems to have been a natural. The drawings he showed
to the Edinburgh College of Art won him an immediate place.
He moved to the prestigious Slade School in London and in
1947, at the age of 23, he had a one-man show, at which
everything was sold. Horizon, the leading arts magazine of
the time, wrote about his work.
He did what young artists had been doing for a hundred years
and are still doing today: he went to Paris, the world
capital of art. In his pocket he had letters of introduction
to Braque, Giacometti and other idols. In Paris the
rudiments of what became pop art were there for the taking:
the Dadaists had rejected tradition, Picasso had
experimented with collage, the Surrealists pushed
imagination to its limits. Eduardo returned to Britain after
three years with his mind full of revolution.
The critics, bored with academic painting, loved his
collages. Eduardo moved on to challenge the "new
traditionalists", such as Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth,
whose sculpture, once derided, had become part of the art
establishment. Along with other young sculptors, such as
Anthony Caro and Reg Butler, he experimented with new
materials to reflect, as he put it, the "dynamism" of the
time.
He might start with a conventional-looking figure cast in
bronze, but when you got close you saw it was disfigured
with bits of junk reclaimed from rubbish dumps. His damaged
figures struck a chord and won him many prizes and honorary
degrees and more commissions than he could cope with. His
sculptures can be seen in many cities in Europe and North
America. London provided him with one of its best sites for
his statue of Isaac Newton: the forecourt of the new British
Library. His mosaics decorating the walls of Tottenham Court
Road underground station in central London beguile the
thousands of people using it each day.
Scotland is proud of him and most of its galleries have
examples of his work; and Mr Paolozzi, who thought of
himself as a European, admired Scotland for its ancient
links with France. His last major piece was a bronze and
timber train nostalgically titled "London to Paris". The
queen, ever ready with a handy honour, made him her
"sculptor in ordinary" for Scotland.
In 1989 he was knighted. Sir Eduardo had become part of the
establishment, as Henry Moore had before him. He was asked
what he thought of the new generation of artists. He said
that conceptual and installation art would fade from
fashion. It was short on intellect and did not involve
craftsmanship. What next, then? Paris, he said, probably
still had much to offer.