11 September 2026
Simon Hucker
Eduardo Paolozzi’s work in the 1950s captured a world transformed by war, mass media, technology and celebrity. Across sculpture and collage, he drew on everything from scrap metal and industrial debris to magazines, comics and advertising, creating images that could be unsettling, seductive and strikingly prescient.
Two works, Shattered Head and Sweater Girl (Lana Turner), reveal very different sides of this extraordinary period in Paolozzi’s career.
Eduardo Paolozzi’s Shattered Head was made in the midst of a remarkable decade-long burst of creativity for the artist, during which he transformed himself from enfant terrible of British sculpture to major international star. His work was being collected by the world’s most important museums and he featured in some of the most ground-breaking shows of the 1950s, not least Peter Selz’s seminal New Images of Man at MoMA in New York in 1959.
Here Paolozzi’s distressed human figures, seemingly collaged out of the wreckage of war and welded together with the angst of the nuclear future, were shown alongside the likes of Giacometti, Richier, Dubuffet, Bacon, de Kooning, Pollock and Westermann, amongst others. Just to list these artists’ names is to encapsulate all the ideas swirling around in Paolozzi’s sculptures of the era and in Shattered Head in particular.
It is the ultimate image of existential crisis, Ginsberg’s contemporaneous Howl made flesh. Except the head is not a rendition of the flesh. Initially it appears to be a human head, covered perhaps in bandages, ravaged by atomic fallout or napalm, but these ‘bandages’ are in fact its sole substance, these molten metal strips are substitute for both skin and bone. This is a person made from debris, an android from a used future and a shattered past.
Shattered Head featured in Paolozzi’s 1958 solo exhibition at Erica Brausen’s Hanover Gallery, at the time very much the crucible for all that was avant-garde in British Art. The show itself was a tour de force, with almost every work eventually acquired by a major museum. Each sculpture was unique, assembled by Paolozzi from a combination of scrap metal, found objects or sheets of bronze cast from wax impressed with junk. As a result, works from this highly significant moment in his career are very hard to find.
Shattered Head was one of the few that Paolozzi made in an edition. It is small but extremely powerful, a shape-shifting image that reveals itself differently each time, sometimes more human, sometimes less: a man looking to the skies that threaten with unseen violence whilst being pulled back towards the bomb-crater that birthed him, a cipher for the world of the late 1950s but also perhaps today.
Judith Collins indicates that by 1957, the importance of Paolozzi’s work in bronze was being recognised and, presumably to meet demand, he was using a variety of different foundries across London and Paris. She elaborates:
“This scattered approach began to introduce confusion about original unique casts and numbered editions. A good example is the six numbered casts of ‘Shattered Head,’ made by Susse Frères, which follow three unnumbered casts made by Fiorini & Carney [as here], which were in turn cast from the original made in Hampstead and given to Dorothy Morland.”
Judith Collins, Eduardo Paolozzi, Lund Humphries, 2014, p.113.
At the same time that Paolozzi was transforming the language of post-war sculpture, he was experimenting with another source of material: the rapidly expanding visual culture of magazines, advertising, comics and celebrity. Some might say that Eduardo Paolozzi invented Pop Art, long before Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein’s earliest experiments in appropriating the language of advertising and cartoons as ‘High Art’.
It might have been Richard Hamilton who first described the idea of ‘Pop’, but this was Hamilton putting a name to the Independent Group’s activities at the ICA in the early 50s and, in particular, Paolozzi’s ‘Bunk’ lecture of 1952, where he used an epidiascope to flash up a series of collages he’d made in the preceding five years: images cut from magazines, comics, pulp fiction and packaging.
Together they created a dazzling visual commentary on contemporary life, full of surreal juxtapositions: the old world and new in absolute foment, as a brave new world and bright Technicolor future beckoned. In one of the ‘Bunk’ collages, I Was a Rich Man’s Plaything, a puff of smoke emerges from a gun, inside which is written ‘Pop’.
Sweater Girl (Lana Turner) is the perfect encapsulation of the ‘Bunk’ aesthetic. Paolozzi has torn a page from a celebrity magazine, preserving Turner’s lips and décolletage, as these are the ciphers of her status. Her eyes, which could be argued is where her individuality might reside, have been replaced by those of an unknown man, possibly another film star (the image is well-lit, the eyes dreaming), but equally they could be the eyes of the viewer, the person consuming Turner’s image.
The hair, in turn, belongs to another female star, rendered entirely anonymous, but importantly in colour, adding another level of play around the real and the fabricated.
The work, then, is all about the nature of celebrity, a full decade before Warhol’s Liz and Marilyn, before Jackie and Death & Disaster.
Paolozzi hints at the interior life, the human story, behind the image, through the rough collaging and a spattering of Abstract Expressionist paint, whereas Warhol leaves all that outside the image, its absence, though, inevitably becoming a presence.
This is perhaps what makes Warhol ‘pure’ Pop, whereas Paolozzi retains one foot in the Surreal, but their aims appear the same: to look at contemporary obsessions with celebrity and glamour and to see it as both mask and mirror.
