Sir Eduardo Paolozzi (Guardian)
Hyfler/Rosner
Relentlessly creative sculptor and printmaker whose legacy
ranges from pop art to monumental public works
Frank Whitford
Saturday April 23, 2005
Guardian
Of the few British artists who came to international
prominence soon after the second world war, Sir Eduardo
Paolozzi, who has died aged 81, was one of the most
inventive, prolific and various. Chiefly a sculptor (and one
of the first to react against the all-pervading influence of
Henry Moore), he was also a highly original printmaker, some
of whose collage-based silkscreen images are among the
finest examples of pop art - the style he was instrumental
in shaping.
Paolozzi's career was the more remarkable for its
unpromising beginnings. His parents, immigrants to Scotland
from the remote Italian province of Frosinone, ran a small
ice-cream parlour in Leith, where Paolozzi was born.
Although seemingly destined to inherit the business, he
liked drawing so much that he thought of becoming a
commercial artist. His ambitions became more elevated,
however, partly as a result of his determination to make his
name in a country which he never regarded as entirely his
own.
Paolozzi's father admired Mussolini, and sent Eduardo to a
fascist youth camp in Italy every summer, where he acquired
a liking for badges, uniforms and aeroplanes. When Italy
declared war in 1940, his father was interned as an enemy
alien. So was Paolozzi; he spent three months in Saughton
jail, Edinburgh, while his father and grandfather were
transported to Canada on the Arandora Star. The ship was
sunk and they drowned. Although not embittered by the
tragedy, Paolozzi had nothing but contempt for most British
politicians for the rest of his life.
His internment over, he helped his mother make and sell ice
cream, while he also attended Edinburgh College of Art,
learning calligraphy and lettering. Conscripted in 1943, he
spent more than a year with the Pioneer Corps, aimlessly
bivouacked on a soccer pitch in Slough. Feigning madness to
secure his release, he enrolled at the Slade School of Art,
then evacuated to Oxford.
Paolozzi's natural gifts as a draughtsman quickly became
evident. So did his enthusiasm for the unconventional.
Although he copied old master paintings in the Ashmolean, he
preferred to draw the tribal art at the Pitt-Rivers museum.
Once the Slade returned to London, he also discovered
Picasso, of whom his teachers deeply disapproved.
Picasso's influence is plain in the primitivistic
sculptures, energetic drawings and elegant, cubist-derived
collages which Paolozzi produced as a student. Their quality
was immediately recognised, and, in 1947, he was given a
one-man exhibition at the Mayor gallery, in London.
Everything on show was sold. Soon after, the celebrated
magazine Horizon published an article about his work.
By then - and before completing his studies - Paolozzi had
moved to Paris, armed with letters of introduction to
Brancusi, Braque, Giacometti and several other famous
artists. He intended to remain permanently in France, but,
after failing to attract the interest of dealers and
critics, he returned to London, somewhat crestfallen, in
1949.
None the less, he saw and learned a great deal in Paris,
above all about Dada and surrealism. His sculptures at this
time combine organic and mechanistic forms so as to suggest
strange artefacts or mysteriously exotic growths. They share
something with Giacometti's surrealist objects, but are less
threatening and strikingly assured.
It was also while in Paris that Paolozzi produced
rudimentary collages from advertisements in American glossy
magazines, the lurid covers of cheap novelettes, and
illustrations from scientific books. They were inspired by
Dada photomontage, but were made chiefly for his own
amusement and only shown to friends some years later. Today,
they are regarded as important early examples of pop art.
Back in London, Paolozzi briefly shared a studio with Lucian
Freud, and then with William Turnbull, whom he had met at
the Slade. He also came into contact with Francis Bacon, and
was stimulated by the painter's determination to take risks
and by his use of photographs as source material. Paolozzi's
closest friendship, however, was with Nigel Henderson, the
brilliant experimental photographer. They taught together at
the Central School of Art and founded a shortlived company,
Hammer Prints, which made and sold textiles, wallpaper and
tiles decorated with silkscreen images.
During the early 1950s, Paolozzi worked on several
architectural projects, making a fountain for the Festival
of Britain and another for the 1953 Hamburg Garden Show. In
the same year, he was a finalist in the much publicised
international competition to design a monument to the
unknown political prisoner.
At the Central School, Paolozzi used silkscreening not only
as a means of decoration but also to make limited edition
prints. Many of the stencils were reproduced from drawings
(some by young children), cut up and rearranged to make
seemingly spontaneous compositions reminiscent of American
abstract expressionist paintings, then virtually unknown in
Europe.
Collage remained central to Paolozzi's methods, both as
printmaker and sculptor, for the rest of his career.
Everything he created began as an accumulation of unrelated
images culled from a wide variety of sources which, when
rearranged, achieved a new and surprising unity.
In his prints, crude outlines of heads and standing figures
were filled with fragmentary diagrams of automotive parts,
and other machines, to suggest primitivistic robots. His
sculpture was similar. The surfaces of his roughly cast,
rudimentarily formed bronze heads and figures were thickly
encrusted with the impressions of nuts, bolts, bits of toys
and junk collected from dustbins and scrapyards. By turns
horrifying, pathetic and comically ramshackle, these figures
seemed to allude to the results of nuclear destruction, or
to reflect the existential angst then current throughout
Europe. They touched a contemporary nerve, and they made his
reputation.
Many of these sculptures were begun in the isolated cottage
on the Essex coast to which Paolozzi moved soon after
marrying in 1951. His wife, Freda Elliot, was a textile
designer whose handsome English looks made a striking
contrast with his thick-set Mediterranean appearance.
Mounting success enabled him to lease a studio in Chelsea,
where he lived alone during the week. He quickly came to
lead two largely separate lives: one in London, the other as
a weekend visitor to the country, where Freda soon began to
feel isolated, especially after their three daughters had
left for boarding school.
During the 1950s, Paolozzi became involved in the
Independent group, a loose association of young members of
the Institute of Contemporary Arts. They met to discuss
ideas and enthusiasms then ignored by the art pundits, above
all, science, technology and popular culture, especially
American movies and science fiction. In 1952, at the group's
first meeting, Paolozzi projected a large number of his
collages on to a screen. For most of his audience, the
juxtaposition of the weighty and trivial, the artistic and
technological, was a revelation. The collages suggested a
radically new aesthetic, which, before the end of the
decade, was to form the basis of pop art.
Paolozzi's determination to make his art mirror a wide range
of disparate ideas and information also resulted in
contributions to several unconventional and imaginative
exhibitions. The most important were Parallel Of Life And
Art (1953) and This Is Tomorrow (1956), both of which used
photographs and installations to illustrate unexpected
connections and affinities between art, science, technology,
ethnography and archaeology.
During the same period, Paolozzi also established a
reputation abroad. His work was shown at the Venice Biennale
of 1952, in New Images Of Man at the Museum of Modern Art,
New York, in 1959, and at Documents, in Kassel the same
year. In 1960, there was a retrospective at the British
pavilion at the Venice Biennale.
By then, his sculpture had begun to change. A visiting
professor at the school of art in Hamburg between 1960 and
1962 (where he taught Stuart Sutcliffe, one of the original
Beatles), Paolozzi regularly visited the dry docks,
collecting discarded components from the wrecking yards.
He used these, together with standard engineering parts
ordered from catalogues, to create sculptures which
simultaneously suggested curious machines and totems from
some lost, but technologically advanced, culture. The
earliest were cast in bronze, but later examples were made
by welding. Some were painted in bright colours so as to
emphasise their geometric elements.
Many were constructed at an engineering works near Ipswich,
with which Paolozzi remained associated for several years.
The craftsmen there showed him the advantages of working
with assistants, and, from then on, he regularly employed
model-makers and technicians at every stage of his
sculptural production.
Paolozzi also treated printmaking with a new seriousness,
and, in 1965, created one of the masterpieces of pop art, As
Is When, a portfolio of 12 screenprints improbably inspired
by the life and work of the philosopher Wittgenstein. Based
on elaborate collages, the prints employ fragments of texts,
abstract patterns, pictures of aeroplanes and other
machines, together with Disney characters. Other print
portfolios followed, most notably Moonstrips Empire News
(1967).
The 1960s were one of the most creative periods in
Paolozzi's career. Towards the end of that decade, however,
his abstract sculptures in welded aluminium and
chromium-plated steel betrayed a decline in invention and
originality, and his prints became repetitive. Some thought
that slightly later works, designed to satirise minimalism
and other fashionable kinds of contemporary art, reflected a
creative crisis. They dominated Paolozzi's only full
retrospective in Britain, at the Tate gallery in 1971, which
was a critical flop.
This was the lowest point in Paolozzi's artistic
development. But he began to work with renewed energy in
1974, after being invited to West Berlin. There, he spent
almost two years creating several portfolios of ravishly
beautiful abstract prints (especially Calcium Night Light)
and a number of impressive reliefs assembled from small,
standardised wooden elements. Some were later cast in
bronze.
Paolozzi loved Germany. He was exhilarated by the dynamism
of its cities and the high regard in which artists were
held. He also relished the attention given him by German
critics and collectors. Between 1977 and 1981, he was a
professor at the Cologne Fachhochschule and, then, more
happily, at the Munich Academy, where he taught until
regulations forced him to retire in 1994.
However, he retained his London studio, continued to teach
part-time at the Royal College of Art (which had appointed
him in 1968), and regularly flew back and forth between
Heathrow and Munich, always accompanied by copious suitcases
stuffed with plaster maquettes, sketchbooks and the makings
of collages. In Munich, he would sleep on a camp bed in his
cluttered studio, and eat, usually surrounded by admiring
students, at a local pizzeria.
Commissions for public sculptures multiplied, first in
Germany and then in Britain. He made doors for the Hunterian
museum in Glasgow, an abstract monument for Euston Square in
London, and mosaic decorations for Tottenham Court Road
underground station. He also created a large sculpture for
the headquarters of the Royal Bank of Scotland in Edinburgh,
and a bronze figure of Isaac Newton for the entrance of the
British Library.
The last two works revealed a growing interest in
classicism, which had begun in Munich, where Paolozzi
frequently visited the Glyptothek, the outstanding
collection of Greek and Roman statuary. But even his
neoclassical heads and figures continued to employ collage
and assemblage. Constructed from unconnected fragments, or
cut into sections before being rearranged, many of them
appear mechanistic, as though informed by a classicising
aesthetic modified to reflect a modern distrust of absolute
values.
Powerful though it is (and, in its eclectic, postmodernist
use of allusion, very much of its time), the work of
Paolozzi's last period lacks the freshness and originality
of the sculpture and prints of the 1950s and 1960s. Yet it
is on this later work, no doubt, that his considerable
reputation will continue to rest.
As a man, Paolozzi was a mixture of childlike enthusiasm,
unquenchable curiosity and powerful intelligence. He could
grasp the essence of a book or the argument of a scholarly
article from a few hastily read paragraphs. He was at ease
with abstract ideas. He was impressively well informed about
the latest trends in music, the theatre and cinema, and, in
his studio, listened constantly to Radio 3, which, as he put
it, had been his only education. He tried to keep in shape
with the aid of judo (he was a black belt), gymnastics,
swimming and a variety of diets, though he never seemed able
to concentrate on anything for long.
Those who knew him rarely saw Paolozzi at work. His day
seemed to consist of diversions. He would flip idly through
magazines or folders filled with clippings, go for a drink
at the Chelsea Arts Club close to his studio, lunch at the
Royal College of Art, or dine in one of the several
restaurants where, thanks to gifts of his sculpture or
prints, he never saw a bill. But he was prodigiously
productive, working for several hours very early in the
morning and late at night, when he knew he would not be
interrupted.
Remarkably generous to his friends, to whom he would hand
out artists' proofs of prints, plaster maquettes and
expensive books like sweets, Paolozzi was nevertheless
subject to black moods, during which he could be woundingly
insensitive. He was represented by very few dealers, and
stayed with none of them for long.
He was made a CBE in 1968, an RA in 1979 and a knight in
1989; he was awarded numerous honorary doctorates, one by
Cambridge University, where he was also an honorary fellow
of Jesus College; he was even a member of the Athenaeum.
Such recognition delighted him; he was especially pleased to
appear on Desert Island Discs.
Discreet about his private life, Paolozzi was attractive to
women. Apart from his wife, three were important to him: the
collector Gabrielle Keiller, the Berlin art dealer Helga
Retscher, and Marlee Robinson, who acted as his personal
assistant for more than a decade and arranged for him to
fill the vacant, Ruritanian post of Queen's sculptor in
ordinary for Scotland. She also organised Paolozzi's defence
after his wife, to his surprise and shock, brought divorce
proceedings in 1988.
Towards the end of his life, Paolozzi became increasingly
concerned about his posthumous reputation. Eager to shape
it, he began to write an autobiography and donated countless
prints and sculptures to museums in Britain and abroad. He
relished every visible sign of his eminence, especially from
Scotland, and his emotional attachment to Edinburgh became
increasingly evident.
In 1994, he offered a large quantity of works to the
national galleries of Scotland. The Dean gallery, in
Edinburgh, contains his works in many media, his large and
varied library, a reconstruction of his chaotic London
studio, and examples of the surrealist art from the
collections of Roland Penrose and Gabrielle Keiller, which
crucially inspired Paolozzi at every point of his career.
Paolozzi spent his final years in a nursing home, paralysed
from the waist down and unable to talk, an especially tragic
fate for a man to whom lively conversation meant so much.
His daughters, Louise, Anna and Emma survive him.
· Eduardo Luigi Paolozzi, sculptor and printmaker, born
March 7 1924; died April 22 2005