Head Looking Up

Paolozzi first exhibited a brass sculpture with a similar title, Man Looking Upwards, in Edinburgh in October 1953. In a typewritten list made by Paolozzi at the time of the Hanover Gallery exhibition of 1958 Head Looking Up is dated 1956, and a photograph (by Nigel Henderson) of a wax version of it, reproduced in Lawrence Alloway's Architectural Design article of April 1956, is dated 1955. In his article Alloway calls Paolozzi's recent sculpture 'multi-evocative' [because it] 'integrates the modern flood of visual symbols, a primary fact of urban culture'; and compares Head Looking Up to illustrations in science fiction: 'The head is a head, a planet, an asteroid, a stone, a blob under a microscope; it is big and small, one and many'. Alloway claimed that Paolozzi 'avoids like the plague, not only the virtuosity of Reg Butler, but the competence of Henry Moore'. Paolozzi's may have adopted the motif and title Head Looking Up from Reg Butler's series of 'Watcher' drawings, intended for his The Unknown Political Prisoner sculpture of 1952, which he subsequently developed in sculpture - two were shown with the title Head Looking Up in Butler's Hanover Gallery exhibition of 1957. In the 1950s Paolozzi is recorded as being critical of Butler whom he clearly regarded as a rival, but whose sculpture was very highly thought of by Herbert Read.

We are very grateful to Robin Spencer for preparing this catalogue entry.