Sir Eduardo Paolozzi

By the late 1940s Eduardo Paolozzi had already embraced a wide range of mass-produced objects and printed ephemera, advertisements, scientific diagrams, science fiction illustrations, comic books and other products of modern industrial society out of an insatiable appetite for 20th-century imagery and as the raw material for his own Surrealist derived collages and cast bronze sculptures.

His Bunk! collages of this period, initially shown in slide form in a lecture given to fellow members of the Independent Group in the summer of 1952, were finally brought to a wider audience on their publication as facsimile prints in 1972. Their status as harbingers of Pop Art is undeniable given that they provide a compendium of later Pop themes and motifs – including pin-ups, American junk food, automobiles, contemporary interiors and space-age imagery – but they were originally intended only as scrapbook images for private consumption.

Paolozzi’s sculptures of the 1950s likewise contain elements that would later metamorphose into Pop, not only in the references to robots and monster movie imagery in works such as Robot 1956 or St Sebastian 1957, but also in their identity as three-dimensional collages cast in bronze from wax maquettes into which found objects had been pressed. Paolozzi’s true emergence as a Pop artist, however, occurred only in 1962, when he began to produce imposing abstracted figures cast in various metals and endowed with a strongly mechanistic presence. In works such as Diana as an Engine 1963 the human figure is expressed in terms of the machine and enriched by reference to classical mythology. Its brightly decorative colour was added three years later, as was the case with most of these totemic sculptures, emphasizing its Pop appearance.

It was during this period, too, that Paolozzi began to produce the collage-based screenprints which are among his most important contributions to the history of Pop. Notable among these are the portfolio As is When 1965, loosely based on the life and work of the Austrian-born British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, and the densely illustrated Moonstrips Empire News 1967, beautifully cased in a tinted Perspex box. These literally dizzying amalgamations of patterns and images powerfully convey the bombardment of the senses by the modern mass media. In later sculptures he continued to elaborate his long-standing methods of creating composite heads and figures cast from a random sample of found objects, making evident the strong continuity of his approach before, during and after Pop. In 1999 the Paolozzi gift to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art was put on permanent display at the Dean Gallery in Edinburgh.

Courtesy of Marco Livingstone