Sir Eduardo Paolozzi, the Scottish sculptor, collagist, printmaker and film-maker, was one of the most influential artists in postwar Britain. Widely esteemed as one of the fathers of British Pop Art, he left an imposing legacy of monumental civic sculptures and made substantial donations of his works and his collections of popular ephemera to leading museums.

Eduardo Luigi Paolozzi was born to Italian parents in Leith, Edinburgh, in 1924. He spent his holidays as a child in the 1930s in summer camps in Italy. After being interned for three months in 1940 under the Emergency Powers Act, he served in the Royal Pioneer Corps, and then continued his studies in London at St Martin’s School of Art and at the Slade School of Art, having briefly attended evening classes at Edinburgh College of Art in 1943 with the intention of becoming a commercial artist. His frequently disrupted training was completed by a brief spell in 1947 at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, but in the end he was left to his own devices.

Paris, where Paolozzi made his home from 1947 to 1949, proved an ideal breeding ground for his art. Many of the great artists of the inter-war years were still working there, and he was able to meet sculptors such as Brancusi and Giacometti, painters such as Braque and Léger, and figures associated with Dada and Surrealism, such as Jean Arp and the poet Tristan Tzara. Thus began his lifelong involvement with Surrealist conjunctions of imagery and with the collage methods on which much of his subsequent work was to be based, although he was too young to be seen as part of the movement itself. He was, in fact, born in the very year in which André Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto was published.

On his return to London in 1949, Paolozzi quickly made his name with lumpen cast-bronze sculptures of the human figure that owed something to the example of French sculptors of the period such as Germaine Richier but perhaps even more to the work of the French painter Jean Dubuffet, whose devotion to child art and to the art of the insane encouraged Paolozzi to give free rein to his imagination and to his taste for a raw and brutal lack of finish. In their scarred and wounded surfaces and sometimes tragic overtones, these works shared the existentialist angst of much of the art produced in the decade after the Second World War.

Unlike the painter Francis Bacon, however, with whom he had formed a friendship on his return to London, Paolozzi tempered the solemnity of his art with humour and with a voracious appetite for the ephemera of popular culture that were to make him one of the father figures of Pop Art in Britain.

Paolozzi’s later claim to have been the first Pop artist, which contradicted his more usual image of himself as a late Surrealist, was based on a group of scrapbook collages that he had made from advertisements and other mass-media sources in Paris and London in the late 1940s and early 1950s. These were not exhibited at the time as works of art, but were shown in a rapid-fire slide lecture called Bunk, which he delivered to a select coterie at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 1952, as a demonstration of the bombardment of images characteristic of contemporary consumer culture.

Joining forces with other artists such as Richard Hamilton and William Turnbull, and with critics and historians such as Lawrence Alloway and Reyner Banham, who together styled themselves the Independent Group, Paolozzi was party to a systematic examination of the popular culture to which he had long been drawn.

By this time he was already amassing the huge collection of toys and ephemera, the Krazy Kat Archive, a selection of which later became part of the holdings of the Victoria and Albert Museum and one of his most conspicuous testaments to later generations.

By the late 1950s he began to embed machine parts into figure sculptures such as St Sebastian or The Philosopher, and to allude in them to conventions from outside the realm of fine art such as those found in science fiction and monster movies. Totemic in form, sombre in colour and still rather tortured in appearance, however, these works remained far in spirit from the Pop Art that was soon to follow, in spite of the fact that they presaged both the types of reference and the methods of appropriation that were to become a matter of course in the work of younger artists.

The appearance of Paolozzi’s work changed dramatically in 1962, almost certainly in response to the emergence of Pop Art as a coherent movement. He shed his sculpture of its handmade look and began instead to produce highly mechanistic, robotic figures and machinelike structures in aluminium and other metals whose surface he repainted in bright primary colours in the middle of the decade.

He also gained acclaim as a printmaker, particularly in his use of silkscreen printing, a medium only recently adopted from commercial art by fine artists: in limited edition portfolios such as As is When (1965), based loosely on the life and writings of the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, and in other collage-based series such as Moonstrips Empire News (1967) and Zero Energy Experiment Pile (Z.E.E.P.) (1969-70), teeming with disparate images, he made his most brilliant contributions to the iconography of Pop. He also made some experimental films that relied on methods of collage and photomontage, beginning with The History of Nothing (1960-62).

Paolozzi’s large and bulky frame and phlegmatic speech belied the enormous energy with which he applied himself to his work. Few artists of the postwar period can have rivalled his prolific output in an extraordinary variety of media, including porcelain designs for Rosenthal and a number of public commissions, mainly in Britain and Germany, by which he stamped his identity on the environment at large.

In London alone these included the installation in 1981 of a cast-iron head for Euston Square, a set of cooling tower panels in cast iron for the Pimlico Rampayne Street complex (1979-82), a bronze self-portrait as Hephaestus for 34-36 High Holborn (1987), the redecoration from 1980 to 1986 of the Tottenham Court Road Underground station as a Modernist neo-Byzantine fantasy of shimmering mosaics, and an imposing bronze of Sir Isaac Newton, after William Blake, for the courtyard of the new British Library (1995-97).

Other such commissions included a set of four cast-aluminium doors for the Hunterian Art Gallery at the University of Glasgow (1976-80) and a number of sculptures and reliefs in Germany, where his considerable reputation was enhanced by professorships at the Fachhochschule in Cologne (1977-81) and at the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Munich (1981-90).

The knighthood bestowed on Paolozzi in 1988 was the most conspicuous sign of the official approval lavished on him from the time that he won the British Critics Prize at the age of 29 in 1953.

After his retrospective at the Tate Gallery in 1971, major exhibitions of his work were held at almost every other important institution in London, including the Victoria and Albert Museum, the National Portrait Gallery and the Serpentine Gallery. In 1985 he even curated an exhibition at the Museum of Mankind, Lost Magic Kingdoms, in which he brought together an astonishing assortment of ethnographic artefacts and some of his own works into a kind of giant assemblage guided by his own eyes and hands.

Paolozzi was tutor in ceramics at the Royal College of Art from 1968 to 1990, but his gruff manner and combative personality ultimately worked to the detriment of his teaching career: he should by rights have been a professor of sculpture at a leading British art school.

Until he began showing again at commercial galleries in London, first with Jason & Rhodes in 1996 and later with Flowers, he was for many years without proper representation in Britain.

One of the rare later sightings of his new sculpture was in an exhibition held in 1996 at the Hayward Gallery in London, Spellbound: Art and Film, to which he contributed a compulsively manic installation of plaster objects as his response to the inspiration of the cinema. As in the best of his art, Paolozzi here confirmed an extraordinary feeling for objects, through which he suggested his awe about the world in all its variousness.

In spring 2001 Paolozzi suffered an almost fatal stroke, and it was widely reported that his family had been given the option of switching off the life support or risk him surviving only in a persistent vegetative state. One magazine even published a premature obituary, but his relatives chose to keep him alive, rightly guessing that he would have a ferocious will to survive even in such dire circumstances.

Though he was largely confined to bed in his last years and deprived of speech, he demonstrated without a doubt that his strong personality, and his stubborn refusal to give up, remained intact far beyond what could be expected of most human beings.

Conscious of his desire to leave to his native country a legacy of his vision, and also to create something of a monument to himself, Paolozzi made an extremely substantial donation to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in 1995 on the understanding that it be housed in a separate building opposite the site of the permanent collection on Belford Road, Edinburgh.

The Dean Gallery, housing a re- creation of his studio and changing displays from the Paolozzi gift, opened in March 1999. Containing about five thousand works and found objects collected by him, as well as his working library, it is an extraordinary resource for historians, artists and the public alike and will do much to encourage continued research into Paolozzi’s work and to keep alive his reputation for generations to come.

Together with the large volume of his Writings and Interviews edited by Robin Spencer and published in 2000 by Oxford University Press, it is already making evident just how long it is going to take for his admirers to catch up with the fertile workings of his imagination.







Sir Eduardo Paolozzi, CBE, artist, was born on March 7, 1924. He died on April 22, 2005, aged 81.