Sir
Eduardo Paolozzi
Sculptor and printmaker who created some of the finest examples of
British pop art
Frank Whitford
Friday April 22, 2005
Printed with kind permission of the Guardian Newspapers Ltd, copyright
2005
Of the few British artists who came to international prominence soon
after the second world war, Eduardo Luigi 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 silkscreened 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 pariour 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 soon 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 was an admirer of 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 Paolozzi was not embittered by the tragedy he
had nothing but contempt for most British politicians of every
persuasion for the rest of his life.
His internment over, Paolozzi helped his mother make and sell ice cream
while he attended the Edinburgh College of Art learning calligraphy and
lettering. Then in 1943 he was conscripted, and spent more than a year
with the Pioneer Corps, aimlessly bivouacked on a soccer pitch in
Slough. Feigning madness to secure his release, he immediately enrolled
at the Slade School, at that time evacuated to Oxford.
Paolozzi's natural gifts as a draftsman 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 in the
Pitt-Rivers Museum. Once the Slade returned to London, he also
discovered the work of 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. 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, failing to attract the interest of dealers
and critics, returned to London, somewhat crestfallen, in 1949.
Paolozzi saw and learned a great deal in Paris, above all about Dada
and surrealism. His sculptures made at the 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 in Paris that Paolozzi also 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 they 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 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 also founded a short-lived
company, Hammer Prints, which made and sold textiles, wallpaper and
tiles decorated with images produced by the silkscreen process.
During the early 1950s Paolozzi worked on several architectural
projects, making a fountain for the Festival of Britain on the South
Bank and another for the Hamburg Garden Show of 1953. 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, at that time 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 other 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,
archetypically English looks made a striking contrast with his own
dark, thickset, Mediterranean appearance. Mounting success soon enabled
him to lease a studio in Chelsea where he would live alone during the
week (and which he retained until the end of his life). He quickly came
to lead two largely separate lives: one in London, the other as a
weekend visitor to the country where his wife soon began to feel
isolated, especially after all three of their daughters had gone away
to 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, were a revelation. The
collages suggested a radically new aesthetic that, 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 the
geometric elements of which they were composed. 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 other 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 Ludwig 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, abstract sculptures in welded
aluminium and chromium plated steel betrayed a decline in invention and
originality. His prints also became repetitive, using the same images
and ideas to the point of exhaustion. Some believed that slightly later
works, designed to satirise minimalism and other then fashionable kinds
of contemporary art, reflected a serious 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 live
and work in 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 Fachhochschole 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 first 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 at
the Academy 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. Paolozzi 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 Newton for the main 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 Paolozzi's
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 startling originality of the sculpture and
prints of the 1950s and 1960s. Yet it is on them, no doubt, that his
considerable artistic 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 complex abstract ideas. Always
impressively well informed about the latest trends in music, the
theatre and cinema, in his studio he listened constantly to BBC 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,yet 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, for lunch to the Royal College of Art, or for dinner to one
of the several restaurants where, thanks to gifts of his sculpture or
prints, he never saw a bill. But he was prodigiously productive
nevertheless, working for several hours very early in the morning and
again late at night when he knew he would not be interrupted.
Remarkably generous to his friends, to whom he would casually hand out
artists' proofs of prints like sweets, Paolozzi was nevertheless
subject to dark moods during which he could be woundingly insensitive.
During his career he was represented by very few dealers and stayed
with none of them for long.
Paolozzi 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 for which he
had long prepared his list of records.
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 which partly ensured his knighthood.
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, which he was unable to finish. He also donated
countless prints and sculptures to museums in Britain and abroad. There
is no doubt that he relished every visible sign of his eminence,
especially from Scotland. His emotional attachment to Edinburgh became
increasingly evident during the last years of his life.
In 1994 he offered a large quantity of his works to the national
galleries of Scotland The Dean Gallery in Edinburgh, which opened in
1999, contains his works in many media: his large and bewilderingly
varied library; a reconstruction of his fascinatingly 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.
He is survived by his three daughters, Louise, Anna and Emma.
Eduardo Luigi Paolozzi, sculptor and print maker, born March 7 1924;
died April 22 2005
Related articles
22.04.2005: News: Sculptor and pop art founder Eduardo Paolozzi
dies
07.04.2005: News: Resale royalties for painters and sculptors
04.06.2004: Review: Paolozzi at 80, Dean Gallery, Edinburgh
23.10.2000: News: Fears for sculptor on life support
Useful links
More
about Eduardo Paolozzi: Wikipedia entry
See works by Paolozzi in the Tate collection
See works by Paolozzi in the government art collection
See the statue of Newton: British Library entry
See the Tottenham Court Road underground mosaics
See the cover of Paul McCartney's album Red Rose
Speedway
Flowers East gallery
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