Eduardo Paolozzi is now rightly regarded as one of the most influential British artists of the 20th century.
Born in Leith, Edinburgh in 1924, he grew up in the ice cream parlour owned by his Italian immigrant parents, immersed from the beginning in popular culture. In June 1940, on the outbreak of war, he was interned for three months as an ‘enemy alien’ and it was during this time that his world changed when his father, grandfather and uncle were killed when the ship carrying them to detention in Canada was sunk by a German U-Boat.
On his release in 1941, Paolozzi took over the family ice cream shop but had also begun by 1943 to attend evening classes at Edinburgh College of Art, demonstrating considerable talent. He was able to enter the Slade School full-time in 1944 where he became well acquainted with Constantin Brancusi, Alberto Giacometti and Jean Arp; all towering figures in the canon of European avant-garde sculpture, and also befriended other young Scottish artists then in the city, including William Gear, William Turnbull and Alan Davie.
As it had been removed by the war from London to Oxford, Paolozzi spent most of his time in that city’s Pitt Rivers Museum, fascinated by its world-renowned collections of African art and fetish sculpture. Equally impressed by the work of Picasso and making a connection between the two, he began to understand what his art might be able to achieve and, leaving the Slade at the end of the war, arrived in Paris in 1947. Freddy Mayor, founder of the Mayor Gallery, London, gave Paolozzi his first one-man show at that time, while he was still a student at the Slade. The exhibition included sculptures of birds, fish and animals in plaster, concrete and bone.
He then set up a studio in Chelsea and filled it with the sort of popular ephemera and found objects that would continue to inspire his work for the rest of his life. Paolozzi was a founder of the Independent Group and in their show at the Independent Gallery in 1952 broke new ground with a silent projection of found images. The piece was a revelation, proposing a radically new aesthetic that, within a few years would form the basis of British Pop art. At the same time he began to develop a fetishistic style of sculpture, influenced by Dubuffet and also reminiscent of Giacometti and Germaine Richter.
In 1960 he had a retrospective in the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale and at this point his work began to change, with the original, organic, totemic figures metamorphosing into the slick mechanical men of the 1960s. From 1965, Paolozzi began to create distinctive collage-based Pop Art screenprints, under the collective title of Bunk.
In the 1970s Paolozzi began to make the quasi-cubist sculptures which were to figure among his signature works. Paolozzi was particularly keen that plaster should achieve a higher status than had previously been the case and his works in the medium were often not cast in any other material. They were cast from a variety of sources, some being taken from the ‘ready-mades’ in his studio, while others were made to the artist’s original, sometimes already-existing designs.
In 1994, Paolozzi gave a large number of works to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, along with the contents of his studio, including a large number of works in plaster. Displayed as it would have looked in situ, the studio is clearly intended to instruct the viewer about Paolozzi’s working practice, juxtaposing his work with the inspiration which lay behind it. Paolozzi, a teacher at heart, taught extensively from his early years, initially at the Central School in London during the 1950s, then in Hamburg from 1960-62 (where pupils included that ill-fated member of the Beatles, Stuart Sutcliffe). A brief sojourn in California in 1968 preceded his being appointed Professor of Ceramics at Cologne in the late 1970s. He enjoyed a long-running association with Germany and in particular with Munich, where he also had a studio and it was here that he developed the concept of the Tottenham Court Road Station mosaics.
The mosaics were commissioned in 1979 by London Transport and are designed to link the interconnecting spaces of the station, featuring strongly on the Northern and Central line platforms. Completed in 1986, the glass mosaics cover some 950 square metres. Having suffered over the years, they were painstakingly restored in 2015 and, while 95% were retained in place, the remainder were removed and given to Edinburgh College of Art where Paolozzi was a visiting professor and where he had himself studied in the 1940s.
In 1987, the novelist J. G. Ballard reflected that ‘if the entire twentieth century were to vanish in some huge calamity, it would be possible to reconstitute a large part of it from Paolozzi’s sculpture and screen prints.’
Eduardo Paolozzi was made a CBE in 1968, an RA in 1979 and knighted in 1989. He died in 2005.