j w575 paolozzi book 11 03/10/2011 17:27 page 16 › 2015 › ...occupation, and created a series of...

J W575 Paolozzi book_11 03/10/2011 17:27 6

17

Eduardo Paolozzi once noted that he chose tobecome a sculptor because of a desire to create‘things’.1 Things, rather than art: the distinctionremained important for the rest of his life. For theeighteen-year old Paolozzi, ‘art’ meant theacademic training at the Slade, where he studied:modelling from the antique, stone carving, copyingfrom the old masters, life drawing, a generalservitude to the traditions of western art. ‘Things’meant, largely speaking, everything else: thesubstance of real life, objects that spoke of thecontemporary predicament — worldly things.

Following his studies at the Slade, and for the firsttwo decades after the War, Paolozzi explored thecontemporary predicament in a unique manner.His work evolved from the mysterious world ofnature and animals, as with the small bronze ParisBird (fig.12), to a series of monumental figurativeworks collaged from found objects, notably Jason(fig.4). By the early 1960s he had turned to a moreabstract, architectural style in welded aluminium,for example The World Divides into Facts. Dazzlingand physically imposing though works from thismoment can be, they lack in many cases the fragile,exploratory quality of the early period, which

remains the ‘classic’ moment of Paolozzi’s oeuvre,and attests to his position by the mid 1950s notonly as a leading international sculptor, but alsoone of the most pungent interpreters of theconditions of post-War life. No artist respondedmore intuitively and with less self-consciousness tothe quiddity of daily life, to the demands of placeand time; from the rubble-strewn streets of post-War London, through to the growing materialismand economic revitalisation of the 1950s.

In England at this time the dominant model forsculpture remained the classicism of Henry Moore,‘so final and so convincing’, that it was necessaryfor a young sculptor to turn to European artists,and in particular to Picasso, to produce anything atall original.2 Even in his earliest sculptures, thenow lost plaster version of Bull,3 later cast inbronze (cat.1), a remarkably confident andexpressive early work, and the several versions incast concrete of Horse’s Head (cat.2), made outsidethe Academy in the basement of the Slade Studenthostel at 28 Cartwright Gardens (‘in order not tobe disturbed or criticised’),4 Paolozzi demonstratedthis feeling that something better was being doneelsewhere, and by other means: ‘the outer edge of

Used Future: The Early Sculptures of Eduardo PaolozziJohn-Paul Stonard

J W575 Paolozzi book_11 03/10/2011 17:27 Page 17

18

my soul was being tugged at by an invisible otherworld’, as he later put it.5 Horse’s Head strikinglyanticipates the motif developed from the early1950s by Paolozzi’s fellow Slade student WilliamTurnbull. Turnbull had produced a sculpture of ahorse’s head of almost exactly the samedimensions during the same year; which lackedhowever the simplified, cartoon-like nature ofPaolozzi’s version.6 Picasso’s roughly carved,expressive natural forms, using animal and plantmotifs, had a clear influence on the handful of‘Picassoid’ sculptures he made at this time andshowed at the Mayor Gallery in 1947 (the otherswere Seagull and Fish, and Blue Fisherman). He later

recalled: ‘As the sculpture school had becomeintolerable I had spent the previous six monthsworking in the basement making sculptures out ofconcrete and plaster, and black-and-white inkdrawings heavily influenced by Picasso who wasrichly represented – [in] books from the shelves ofPeter Watson who gave me his benedictions. PeterWatson at that time had bought a bronzechandelier designed by Giacometti and neededhelp to erect it. Consequently these Picassoidstudent works were reproduced, thanks to Peter, inthe magazine Horizon with a wonderful text byRobert Melville, and were exhibited at the MayorGallery’.7

fig.6 Fishermen (Newhaven) 1946, ink on paper, 18 x 26 in / 46 x 66 cm Private Collection


19

The Mayor Gallery exhibition, Paolozzi’s first one-man show sold out; a coup for the twenty-threeyear old artist, still a student. It was a sign of hisobstinately independent nature that he used theproceeds to quit the London art world for Paris,departing, according to legend, with a tin trunk ofhis possessions, and living on next to no money —when Nigel Henderson visited, Paolozzi providedhim with a list of basic items to bring, cookingingredients and art materials. Life in Paris was amatter more of experience than productivity. Histime was largely spent seeing art – from the ‘tinyhippopotami’ that he saw in a case in the Louvreon the first day he arrived,8 to the art collection ofMary Reynolds. It was a time of measuring himselfagainst the remnants of the pre-War avant-garde –he arrived in time to visit the last large Surrealistgroup exhibition, ‘Exposition Internationale duSurréalisme,’ which opened at the Galerie Maeghtin July. The catalogue featured Marcel Duchamp’sPrière de Toucher on the cover, and artists fromtwenty-five countries were represented, but it wasclear that the pre-War spirit of Surrealism had notbeen recaptured – certain renegade figures, suchas Tristan Tzara, were now criticising themovement on political grounds, and the socialbasis of the original group had dispersed.

When it came to making work, however, the clearpoint of reference for the group of sevensculptures by Paolozzi that survive from 1948–9was the pre-War work of Giacometti. Two Forms onRod (cat.5) is often compared with Giacometti’sMan and Woman (1929), and echoes the harshorganic forms and psychological tension of theSwiss artist’s work of the 1930s.9 Similarly, Bird(1949, Tate), may at first glance suggest a directcomparison with Giacometti’s Woman with herthroat cut (1932), and Table Sculpture (Growth)(cat.6), with La table, made by Giacometti in 1933.It was the directness and pungency of Giacometti’ssculptures that appealed to Paolozzi, in particular

to his sense of a mysterious, sometimes threateningworld of natural forms. He was also impressed byGiacometti’s self-belief: ‘he was a real artistbecause he was obsessed about his ideas andworked all night, and everything else in life for himwas just a grey shadow’.10 But there is also an

fig.7 Horse’s Head 1946, ink & collage on paper 19 x 9 in / 49 x 23 cm Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh


20

important difference; rather than an endless andpoetic transformation of objects, a flippingbetween readings and strong association withliterature, Paolozzi was engaged with the mutepower of objects and shapes that defytransformation — not representing a body ofthought, or illustrating poetic texts, but appearingas natural objects, strange and irreconcilable.

Notwithstanding the power of these earlySurrealist-influenced sculptures – and the four

versions of Forms on a Bow (fig.8; cat.4), remain thefirst major statement of a sculptural idea inPaolozzi’s oeuvre – it was less in sculpture than intwo other areas, collage and bas-reliefs, thatPaolozzi made his most important innovations ofthe Paris period. The combination of these twoformats, collage as sculptural relief and sculpturalrelief as collage, proved to be the crucible out ofwhich emerged much of Paolozzi’s later work. Hisfocus on collage during the Paris period evolvednaturally out of his earliest, childhood obsessions,

fig.8 Forms on a Bow No.1 1949, bronze, 211⁄2 x 251⁄2 in / 65 x 67cm Tate


21

copying pictures from newspapers and magazines.Alongside more conventional papier collés, usingcoloured paper and lettering to create semi-abstract compositions, Paolozzi continuedproducing photomontage-like works, in particularthe extraordinary ‘Museum-book’ collages (presentauthor’s term) that he had begun making while atthe Slade, for example Butterfly and Group of Gauls(fig.9 & 10). These culminated in the small collage-book Psychological Atlas, made around 1949, andwhich appears as a survey of the scenery andpsychology of post-War Europe. For this book,now a tattered relic kept as an archival item at theVictoria & Albert Museum, Paolozzi took thecatalogue from an exhibition of art held inGermany while the country was still underoccupation, and created a series of double-pagespreads with material that provides a strange,oblique snapshot of the moment.

Paolozzi's early experiments with bas-relief, inparticular the creation of plaster tiles incised withdecorative or abstract motifs, with strong emphasison surface rather than sculptural mass, was equallyimportant for the development of his sculptureover the next decade or so. Fish (plaster, 1948)measures about one foot square and suggestsmarine motifs and insects, crustaceans fossilised inplaster. Nature is clearly the key to Paolozzi’s workin relief, and the sense of a hidden mysterypreserved in nature, as if these were fossils thathad survived the destructive influence of humanculture. A number of these reliefs were made aftera visit to St. Jean de Luz, and evoked maritime andlunar landscapes, and may be compared with thestrangeness – the displaced quality – of thecollages in the Psychological Atlas. A relationshipbetween collage and relief work was evolving inPaolozzi’s work that allowed a concentration onforms as images, rather than as sculptural mass,and on images as something tangible, rather thanas flat and ‘notional’.

fig.9 Group of Gauls 1947, collage 93⁄4 x 71⁄4 in / 24.5 x 18.5 cm Paolozzi Foundation / Jonathan Clark Fine Art

fig.10 Butterfly 1946, collage 73⁄4 x 51⁄2 in / 19.8 x 14 cm Paolozzi Foundation / Jonathan Clark Fine Art


22

Those bas-reliefs Paolozzi made in Paris wereexhibited in a solo exhibition at the Mayor Galleryduring May 1949.11 Poor sales from this exhibition— only one was sold, to Roland Penrose — obligedPaolozzi to return to England in October 1949. Justbefore he left Paris two unidentified sculpturesand two bas-reliefs were included in the third ‘LesMains éblouies’ exhibition at the Galerie Maeght,Paris — but Paolozzi brought the majority of hissculpture back with him to London, and there castit in bronze for his first exhibition at the HanoverGallery in 1950, alongside works by Kenneth Kingand William Turnbull.12

•

Where was sculpture at mid-century? Artistsworking in Britain were certainly amongst thepioneers of modern sculpture, notably Epstein andMoore, who had made it their task to redefinesculpture as an independent art, rather than asarchitectural adornment, or as a matter ofcommemoration. Such innovations were on a parwith avant-garde developments in Paris, and werean important precedent for the internationalsuccess of British sculptors later in the century.The crucial step was to generate an iconography ofsculpture that was as independent and non-naturalistic as that used by modernist painters, inparticular abandoning academic study of thehuman body. If in his work of the late 1940sPaolozzi shows a full awareness of this newindependence of modernist sculpture, on hisreturn to England he confronted what was tobecome the central question of sculpture in thewake of modernism: how to reintroduce thehuman figure into this newly independent art.

For Paolozzi it became a matter of skin, of anorganic surface implying a living interior. Worn,

fig.11 Target 1947, ink & collage on paper 20 x 73⁄4 in / 51 x19.5 cm Pallant House Gallery, Chichester


23

complex surfaces came to take on a particularmeaning, and were derived at least in part from thematerial aesthetic of Paolozzi’s collage books,compiled with material often deliberatelydistressed to contrast with the glamour andtechnology of the printed images from which theywere made. If life was rough and broken, so tooshould be any given image of a man. Thesesuffering surfaces came to define Paolozzi’s

sculpture, and constituted the ‘Brutalist’ aestheticof his work during the 1950s.

Attempts to create a meaningful sculptural 'skin'appear earliest in the versions of Mr Cruikshank, of1950, the model for which Paolozzi took fromillustrations in American magazines. ‘MrCruikshank’ was the name given by Americanscientists to the wooden dummy of a human

fig.12 Paris Bird 1948, bronze 131⁄2 x 14 in / 34 x 35 cm Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh


shoulder-length bust used in X-radiographytesting. Paolozzi cut-out articles on the experimentsand included them on a double-page spread in thecollage book ‘Crane and Hoist Engineering’ (titledafter the book Paolozzi cannibalised as thetemplate for his collage book). ‘A stand-in for aliving man, Mr. Cruikshank has helped solveproblems relating to X-ray treatment of deep braintumours. His wooden noggin, sectioned to holdfilm, has the same X-ray absorption properties asthe human head. He poses before a two-million-volt, X-ray generator in the Massachusetts Instituteof Technology. His name, picked at random, has nospecial significance’, runs the caption for one. InPaolozzi’s hands the figure becomes a portrait bustof contemporary man, a representative of theanonymous mass. The surviving plaster model ofMr Cruikshank is divided up for casting, leavingseams showing on the bronze cast that suggest afabricated human head, or a robot. For furtherversions of Mr Cruikshank, Paolozzi adopted adifferent method of fabrication, soldering togetherthin strips of tin cut from cans, producingsomething more tender and fragile, with the pathosof a reliquary bust (cat.7).13

Paolozzi was not alone in his interest in the motifof the human head, which presented an immediatesolution to the introduction of the human body,whilst retaining a focus on abstract form. It wasimportant enough to be the subject of anexhibition at the ICA in 1953, 'Wonder and Horrorof the Human Head’, which was also the occasionfor a lecture on ‘The Human Head in Modern Art’by the critic Lawrence Alloway. It appears moreobliquely in the mysterious, inscrutable workContemplative Object (1951; fig.13) comprising arock-like form with strange carvings and markings,reminding us perhaps of the Mayan Zoomorphsfrom Quirigua, great unquarried sandstoneboulders carved with animal motifs. A similar

25


26

work, Study for a larger version in concrete (1951) wasone of three sculptures by Paolozzi shown at theBritish Pavilion at the 1952 Venice Biennale(alongside Bird, and Forms on a Bow, both 1950).14

It was undoubtedly the first work by Paolozzi toappear on an international stage: Study for a largerversion in concrete was included in Michel Tapié’s1952 publication Un art autre, and a cast waspurchased by the Museum of Modern Art, NewYork, in 1952.15 Paolozzi’s affinity with the type of‘Art Informel’ being promoted by Tapié, and ayoung generation of European artists and critics,can be seen by the comparison of his works bythose with Dubuffet, whose scarred and scratchedfigures seem rescued directly from the crumblingwalls and pavements of an older, now outmodedEuropean habitat. Of the Study for a larger versionin concrete, Paolozzi later wrote that ‘The artistintends that the sculpture should representsymbolically; the world of sea life’.16

However much the ‘human’, societal element waspressing, he had remained, nevertheless in therealm of nature: he had yet to step outside thismagic circle and produce sculptures that were ableto reflect on nature as threatening and threatened,something other to human life, but also dependenton it. The crucial moment, as is so often the case,came with the revelation of the possibilitiespresented by new techniques and materials. In late1953 Paolozzi took a room at 1 East Heath Road,Hampstead, the home of Dorothy Morland, thenthe director of the ICA. Together with her son,Francis, also a sculptor, Paolozzi began castingworks at a home-made foundry using the lost waxmethod. Paolozzi later described his method: ‘Wellyou make an oven, you make a wax, and then youput… investment round it as it’s called, and thenyou burn the wax out, and then you just melt themetal and pour it in. And then after that there’sstill a lot of work getting rid of the investment andcutting the runners off. It’s frightfully hard graft,

and yet there are people who do it every day in thefoundries’.17 The high cost of metal founding,which had proved prohibitively expensive for thefirst Hanover Gallery exhibition, as well as theneed to take control of the process andexperiment, made the home-spun approach moreattractive. In any case, since his days of producingworks in his student lodgings, rather than in theSlade studios, Paolozzi always seemed happierworking from home. Still, only five works are datedto the next two years: the small unique bronze Fish(the plaster original of which had been exhibited inthe exhibition ‘Young Sculptors’ at the ICA in1952, and cast in bronze the next year at therequest of the owner) and Head from 1953; andfrom the next year another work titled Head, thistime a version lying on its side showing its hollowconstruction, and the small, strange homunculiHead and Arm.18

Divorced from its body, the human head suggests apsychology of form — a thoughtful massconstructed from the objects that it perceives. Inworks such as the 1954 screen print AutomobileHead, the motif functions as a way of showing theinteraction of the body and society – it shows how‘objects from the environment became the collage-skins of the beings in that environment’, in thewords of Diane Kirkpatrick.19 Alongside AutomobileHead, a number of works on paper made in 1953show Paolozzi exploring the theme of the flattenedand de-featured human head in a manner veryclose to Dubuffet. The overriding sense is ofpathos, of the human body, and psyche, subjectedto suffering. As such, Paolozzi takes his place in atradition of modern sculptors who, as LeoSteinberg put it, show the body not as the hero butas the victim of life.20

Paolozzi is in this sense close to Henry Moore, whomade figures of pathos throughout his life.Paolozzi's recumbent Head of 1954 could be by the


27

older artist, if it was not hollow, a stark exposure ofsculpture as mere object to which Moore couldnever resort. Moore’s figures may be pierced, butnever actually empty. This hollowness is a meansboth to emphasise a kind of symbolic affect of theworks — dehumanisation — but also to emphasisethe surface, and the sense in which the meaning ofan object derives from what has been done to it,

fig.13 Contemplative Object c.1951, plaster with bronze coating, h.91⁄2 x 181⁄2 in / 24 x 47cm Pallant House Gallery, Chichester

recorded in the marks left by that action on thesurface.

The comparison of Paolozzi and Moore is worth abrief aside. According to Lawrence Alloway,Paolozzi ‘avoided, like the plague, not only thevirtuosity of Reg Butler, but the competence ofHenry Moore’.21 On the evidence of their works of


28

the 1950s, there are however a number of points ofclose comparison. A Brutalist tendency – of scarredsurfaces and distressed organic forms – infusesMoore’s work, for example in the small Head of1955, a knotted, primitive apparition directlycomparable with Paolozzi’s version of the samesubject from 1952. Moore’s Wall Relief maquettesfrom the same year show a remarkably similarprocedure to that developed by Paolozzi thefollowing year, of creating a relief by imprintingobjects on a flat surface. If the ‘Brutalist moment’in Moore’s work showed his awareness of theimportance of the sculptural surface as a conveyorof meaning, it was an awareness he was unable todevelop — he simply could not abandon theplenitude, sensuousness and essential optimism onwhich so much of his work was based. Above all, itwas his inability to abandon the imagined notionof a ‘full’ sculptural form, even in those works suchas the Helmet Head series that have empty interiors,that distinguishes his work from Paolozzi’srelentless hollowness. A hollow head for Moorewas just a helmet – for Paolozzi it was a burnt out,yet still-living form.

By 1955, however, Paolozzi had reached an impassein his quest to re-introduce the human figure. Nosculpture, cast or otherwise fabricated, is securelydated to this year. The meagre output was in partbecause his attention was direct elsewhere, toteaching textiles at Central St Martins, and to thefounding of a textile and design company, HammerPrints Ltd, alongside Judith and Nigel Hendersonduring the summer of 1954. Paolozzi was also facedwith the problem of finding a material by which hecould make large sculptures with ‘collage-skins’. Inthe summer of 1954 he wrote to several foundries,describing the orthodox lost-wax method he hadbeen using, noting that while it was excellent forsmall scale work, it presented problems foranything ‘life size and over’, and requested

information on a material ‘with similar propertiesto plaster which can be used directly with moltenmetal without baking’.22 He probably discoveredthe solution on his own — modelling directly inwax. A number of small wax figurines show thatPaolozzi had been experimenting with the mediumat the time, making works recalling small figurinesthat Dubuffet had begun making the previousyear.23 It was however the combination of the useof wax and the type of relief panels that Paolozzihad been making since the late 1940s whichproduced the necessary synthesis. At some pointduring 1953/4 Paolozzi had made a large reliefpanel, which still exists, using wax, wood, andfound objects. The decisive step came with therealisation that the relief could be made in plaster,found objects used to create negative impressionsover which molten wax could be poured to createsheets with positive impressions. Paolozzi laterrecalled that the wax-sheet sculptures had beenmade at the small cottage at Thorpe Le Soken,Essex, bought from Nigel Henderson in 1953, towhere he had moved with his wife Freda the nextyear. ‘I began with clay rolled out on a table. Intothe clay I pressed pieces of metal, toys, etc. I alsosometimes scored the clay. From there I proceededin one of two ways. Either I would pour waxdirectly on to the clay to get a sheet or I wouldpour plaster onto the clay. With the plaster I thenhad a positive and a negative form on which topour wax. The wax sheets were pressed aroundforms, cut up and added to forms or turned intoshapes on their own. The waxes were cast intobronze at Fiorini and Carney in London’.24

It was on this basis that Paolozzi returned,extremely energetically, to making sculpture. 25

During the summer of 1956 ten small sculptureswere exhibited at the Hanover Gallery, some ofwhich had been cast at Susse Frères in Paris.26

These works, all but one of which were made, or at


30

least cast, in 1956, show Paolozzi’s firstexperimentations with wax as a modelling medium,and notably include the first version of ChineseDog. Coeval with the Hanover Gallery exhibition,the historic exhibition This is Tomorrow ran at theWhitechapel Gallery. Eleven groups of artistscontributed individual displays reflecting oncontemporary art and life. ‘Group Six’ comprisedPaolozzi, the artist Nigel Henderson, and thearchitects Alison and Peter Smithson, who built ashelter-like pavilion, subsequently populated byPaolozzi and Henderson with objects and images,‘symbols for all human needs’, according to theexhibition catalogue. The display was titled ‘Patioand Pavilion’. It is noticeable that Paolozzi chosenot to include his most recent sculptures, butrather Contemplative Object and also anunidentified small mannequin-type figure,comparable with a number of small figuresculptures from 1956, such as Little Warrior. Thereason may have been pragmatic — most of hissculptures were on display at the Hanover Galleryexhibition which ran concurrently. Photographsshow an array of tiles and objects arranged on thefloor as if from an archaeological dig. Some at leastmust have been ceramic tiles made by Paolozzi atthe Central School, but again are unidentified.

Although it remained largely uninhabited, ‘Patioand Pavilion’ may be seen as a stage on which themuch larger figures Paolozzi began making at thetime could have appeared. It was comparable inthis respect with a number of other displayinteriors of the time, spaces in which the newfigurative sculpture could be inscribed. For his‘Gallery for a Collector of Brutalist and TachisteArt’ at the Ideal Home Exhibition of 1958, RichardHamilton included, amongst other design objectsand works of art, Paolozzi’s 1956 Chinese Dog as theonly sculpture. It was however at the Hanover

Gallery that Paolozzi's dramatis personae took to thestage most memorably, in a striking survey of thefirst mature period of Paolozzi's sculpture – anexhibition unrivalled since. Thirty-seven workswere displayed, including a host of smaller figures,from the King Kong-like Monkey eating a Nut (1957)to the pathos-laden two versions of Icarus (fig.15),made the same year, whose stumpy wooden arms,broken at the elbows, strongly recall Dubuffet’s useof twigs and wire to create his figurines; to animposing cohort of the larger figural works, such asJapanese War God, of 1958 (fig.3). A photographincluded in the catalogue shows Paolozzi sizing upto the wax model for this large standing figure, andwe get the sense of his satisfaction of havingovercome the technical difficulties of casting sucha large figure, a rival for his own physical energyand presence. Of the smaller works shown at theHanover Gallery, Shattered Head (cat.12) presentsone of the most complete statements of Paolozzi’sdialogue of surface and void. Patches of metaldefine the head like bandages, the vacant interiorvisible through the interstices. Shattered Head isone of the haunting hollow men of twentieth-century art, a witness of life reduced to brutesurvival. We may compare it with a sculpture madeby the Spanish artist Julio González two decadespreviously, Torso (1936), using a similar, ifantecedent method of fragmented planarconstruction: the two works appear as if they havebeen recovered from the same archaeological dig,originally part of a single antique standing figure.

As a pathos-laden monument the human headmotif is developed in a series of works beginningwith Krokodeel (fig.1), a hollow bronze head justover one metre high, and then with twomonumental works from 1958; A.G.5 (cat.14), andVery Large Head. These works are both cast andwelded — Paolozzi cast sections from wax

fig.14 St Sebastian No.III 1958–9, bronze, h.87 in / 221cmRijksmuseum Kröller-Muller, Otterlo


33

vision of the future as already past, a ‘used future’,to use a term that became dominant in post-WarAmerican cinema.

Paolozzi considered his sculpture Jason, made in1956 and now in the collection of the Museum ofModern Art, New York (fig.4), as one his best worksof the period. The title and forms of the sculpturewere inspired, he later wrote, by Martha Graham’sbriefing for the character of Jason in the balletMedea, by Samuel Barber, subtitled ‘Cave of theHeart’, who ‘should exist on two time levels, theancient and the modern world’.29 By contrast withother monumental standing figures, Jason is afragile, delicate work, life-size and with a slightsense of contraposto, that in such a fragmentedfigure can only be read as pathos. In a set ofteaching notes produced for students at StMartin’s School of Art the next year, Paolozzi usedBarber’s configuration of Jason as at once a ‘God-like superhuman figure’ of Greek tragedy, whowould then step out of his legendary role andbecome ‘modern man’.30

The same may be said for the four major figures ofSt Sebastian (fig.2 &14) that, in a strange way, echothe four earlier Forms on a Bow, made ten yearspreviously.31 With reference to the second in theseries, purchased by the Guggenheim Museum,New York, in 1958, Paolozzi stated that he wasinterested not in the iconography St Sebastian’smartyrdom by bow and arrow, but rather in his‘second’, less well-known martyrdom, being‘clubbed to death by his company after notshooting to kill’, according to Paolozzi, who addedthat it was not based on religious belief, but ratheron his interest in the ‘irony of man and hero – thehollow god’.32

The monstrous cranium, encrusted torso andtubular legs of St Sebastian II are indeed all

originals, and then had these welded together toform a hollow, almost cage-like structure. Thesurface is dirty and pitted, here encrusted withobjects, studio and mechanical detritus, there withtypographers letters, sometimes with just an earthyunidentified substance. Present-day objects arelifted into a timeless sphere where the future isfigured as a ruin, and antiquity as a presentimentof this ruin. Time is collapsed within the coursefabric of a human — barely human — figure.

Having established this new, monumentalfigurative style of sculpture, based on collage andassemblage with a strong emotive resonance,Paolozzi began to develop individual motifs,notably the head and the standing figure. Nowhereis this dialogue of antiquity and modernity morepowerfully embodied than in the series of standingfigures that Paolozzi began to make from 1956,which dominated the display at the HanoverGallery. Michel Leiris's description of Giacometti'ssculptures, published in English in 1949, holdstrue for those by Paolozzi, envisioning them aspoints at which 'thousands of years of antiquityconverge with an abrupt interruption of time: thesudden uncovering of a figure in which the wholeof a long past is for ever summed up’.27 YetPaolozzi’s figures also arise from a different visionof the future, and the past — not of timelesshumanity, but deeply implicated with thetechnology of his day, and as such occupy adifferent physical and imaginary space: the thickly-encrusted surface of Robot (1956), comprising smallobjects lost in a lava-like surface, hollow, brittle,seems as if salvaged after centuries at the bottomof the sea — the ‘vernacular spolia of reality’, asthey have been pungently described.27 Paolozzi’s‘brutalist’ vision was not of gleaming perfectionand technological optimism but of decay andobsolescence. It is a vision of the present based ona vision of the future, but with little idealism: a

fig.15 Icarus II 1957, bronze, h.60 in /100 cmScottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh


34

hollow, ‘caves of the heart’ constructed from thedetritus of a timeless world. Pathos is perhaps over-emphasised by the words formed by typographersletters attached to the back of the figure, ‘Pleaseleave me alone’, which suggest also the personalnature of these sculptures for Paolozzi; their statusas alter-egos. In a further work in the series, StSebastian III (fig.14) the distinction between thehead and the torso has disappeared entirely, andthe impression is given more of a tower block onstilts, in ruin.

I suggested at the beginning of this essay, inrelation to the 1963 The World Divides into Facts,that Paolozzi’s concerns shifted from the humanbody to the architectural at the beginning of the1960s.33 In fact the transition was more gradual,and it was clear that architectural elements, both interms of principles of construction, and formalmotifs, were already part of his large figurativeworks during the 1950s. If St Sebastian III seemshalf-man, half-tower block, then the impression ofan architectural edifice is even less ambiguous in afurther series of works made around 1958/9, inparticular His Majesty the Wheel (fig.16) andMechanik Zero(cat.15), both dating to that time.Mechanik Zero in particular shows the organicforms of the human figure tipping into anengineered form, imposing a rich set of rhythms onthis metaphor, and suggesting a renewed use ofsurrealist metaphoric form. By 1960 the shift wascomplete, the transition even recorded in the titleof a work from 1960 –1, Legs as Lintels. The idea ofthe human body as an architectural construct –essentially a post and lintel structure of legs andtorso, uncomplicated by arms or distinctionbetween torso and head – is carried on in certainof these works. In others, such as Triple Fuse, allsense of human reference disappears. With itdisappears also an important animating element ofPaolozzi’s early work, which he was not torecapture. Triple Fuse, exhibited at Betty Parsons’

Gallery in New York in 1962, and currentlyuntraced, suggests a precarious, pre-fabricatedtower, an anonymous corporate architecture withthreatening potential. Such a reading is borne outby a work made the following year, TyrannicalTower, a stacked-box structure incorporatingheavily worked relief surfaces. Architectureevolves as a metaphor for power structures, andthus retains a connection with the human body interms of ‘personality’ – but all other formalreferences are gone.

What might we make of all this? After 1964Paolozzi became a different type of artist: moreworldly, perhaps, with more extensive resources athis disposal. None of the later works, particularlythe large public sculptures, achieve the sameintensity of form of the 1950s, the imbrication ofworldly clutter and an intelligent vocabulary ofsculptural form. For the first decade after the warPaolozzi dealt with nature and natural imagerythat could be referred back to Klee, Picasso andErnst in equal measure; but after his return fromParis, with the introduction of the ‘image of man’(as it was then so often termed) the focus shiftedfrom the mystery of nature to nature’s ruin: to thespectacle of a ‘used future’ that had already begun.The power of Paolozzi’s vision came from hisobsession with the fate of the things of his world,rather than arising from a concept of ‘art’, and hiswork may be best described as a vast archive ofworldly things. From today’s perspective the earlysculptures constitute both the foundation and thestandards by which the rest of this archive isordered; and one of the most intriguing andadvanced bodies of sculpture produced anywherein the post-War world.

fig.16 His Majesty The Wheel 1958, bronze, h.60 in /152 cmScottish National Gallery of Modern Art


36

Notes

With thanks to Evelyn Hankins, Carmen del Valle Hermo,Jennifer Schauer, Aimee Soubier and Eugenie Tsai.

1) [REF]

2) F. Whitford, ‘Eduardo Paolozzi’, in: exh. cat., Eduardo Paolozzi,London (Tate Gallery) 1971, pp. 6 – 29, here pp.7-8. See below fora challenge to this conservative view of Moore.

3) The lost plaster original is dated 1946 according to a typedmemorandum of agreement that Paolozzi drew up with a lawyer,dated 16th April 1960, in which Paolozzi gave the bronze versionof Bull to his wife, Freda.

4) E. Paolozzi, ‘Memoir’, 1994, reprinted in Robbins, pp.53-60,here p.55.

5) Ibid., p.59

6) Two versions of the sculpture in coloured concrete, one white,one red, were exhibited at the 1947 Mayor Gallery exhibitionDrawings by Eduardo Paolozzi (only later, in 1974, was the workcast in bronze).

7) Ibid., p.59

8) Eduardo Paolozzi, ‘Statement’, in: State of Clay, exh.cat.,Sunderland (Arts Center), 1978, n.p.

9) See, for example, D. Kirkpatrick: Eduardo Paolozzi, London1970, and W. Konnertz: Eduardo Paolozzi, Cologne 1984. Likemany of Paolozzi’s works from this period, the original of TwoForms on a Rod has been lost: in this case it consisted of a singlecolumn with a projection which was then cast twice, at later date,probably in the early 1950s, and joined together to form the metalversion.

10) EP, interview with Richard Cork, broadcast on BBC Radio 3,March 1986. Cited in R. Spencer, ed.: Eduardo Paolozzi: Writingsand Interviews, Oxford 2000, p.65. For a contemporary appraisal ofGiacometti that Paolozzi knew, see: Michel Leiris, ‘ContemporarySculptors VII – Thoughts around Giacometti’, trans. DouglasCooper, Horizon, 19 (June 1949), p.411-17.

11) Eduardo Paolozzi – Drawings and Bas-Reliefs.

12) These were cast at Morris Singer Foundry, Wilkinson’sFoundry on Tottenham Court Road, and Fiornini and Carney,Peterborough Mews, Fulham.

13) Other works made around the same moment show differentattempts to bring collage and bas-relief together to evoke thehuman figure, notably in Paolozzi’s maquette for the UnknownPolitical Prisoner International Sculpture Competition (1952), showing

a series of slabs with strange organic markings. It is perhaps lesssuccessful in evoking an absent human form than a work fromthe previous year, The Cage, a strange organic cage-like structuremade from wire and plaster. The notion of a linear wire sculpturealso informed one of Paolozzi’s first public sculptures, hisfountain for the 1951 Festival of Britain exhibition; a work thatlooked forward to the many public commissions that he was tocomplete later in his career.

14) It had been first shown at the exhibition Young Sculptors atthe ICA in 1952.

15) See: A.H. Barr, ed., ‘Painting and Sculpture Collections, July1, 1951 – May 31, 1953’, Bulletin, vol. xx, nos.3-4, Summer 1953.

16) Paolozzi described how the sculpture was made: ‘The mouldswere made directly in clay: modelled in the negative : (afterpouring and setting) the moulds were destroyed on removal fromthe work; the cast at the M.M.A [he is referring to the Museum ofModern Art, New York] was made by gelatine moulding’. MuseumCollection Files. Department of Painting and Sculpture: Paolozzi.The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Cited hereafter as:MOMA – Paolozzi.

17) Eduardo Paolozzi, Oral History, interviewed by FrankWhitford, 1993-5, British Library.

18) The dating of these works is imprecise, and contested; andthe task of identifying any chronology or sequence is madeharder by the closeness in subject matter of the works, and oftenidentical titles. The dating of the Pallant House Standing Figureto 1953 is questioned in footnote 22 below.

19) D. Kirkpatrick, Eduardo Paolozzi, New York, 1969, p.29.

20) Leo Steinberg, ‘Gonzalez’, reprinted in Other Criteria, 1972,pp. 241-250, here p.243.

21) L. Alloway, ‘Eduardo Paolozzi’, Architectural Design (April1956), p.133.

22) EP to ‘The Sales Manager, Morgan Crucible Ltd.’ (also sent toa London-based foundry); 26th July 1954; reprinted in Spencer,op.cit. (note 10), pp.74–5. It is on this basis that the date of theStanding Figure in the collection at Pallant House, of 1953, maybe questioned. The technique of constructing a large figureusing moulded and embossed sheets of wax was only developeda few years later, in 1956. No other works of this size or natureexist from this time, and it is highly unlikely that such apioneering work would have gone unremarked at the time, orindeed subsequently.

23) The further comparison between these works and the waxfigurines of Edgar Degas is, striking — Degas’ small sculptureswere only cast in bronze after his death. They show various


37

female figures, dancers and bathers, as well as horses, comprisedof rough lumps of clay, often using objects embedded in thesculptures’ surface. The wax figurines had resurfaced after thewar, and in 1955 were exhibited at Knoedler’s gallery in NewYork.

24) EP to Angelica Rudenstine, 5th August 1983. Cited inSpencer, op.cit. (note x), p.80. This ‘collage’ method isdemonstrated by a set of photographs of Paolozzi at work takenaround 1958. R. Fiorini & J. Carney were located in Fulham,moving from Michael Rd to Peterborough Mews in 1961; Fiorinicast Shattered Head, and Chinese Dog 2, amongst other works.

25) And also returned to teaching sculpture on a part-time basisat St Martin’s School of art (from 1955 to 1958)

26) These were: Bull (1946), and Shattered Head, Black Devil, Frogeating a lizard, One-armed torso, Man and motor-car (two versions),Small Figure (two versions) and Figure (all from 1956). These wereall still on a relatively small scale, the largest being Black Devil(untraced) at 19 inches high.

27) Michel Leiris, ‘Contemporary Sculptors VII – Thoughtsaround Giacometti’, trans. Douglas Cooper, Horizon, 19 (June1949), p.411-17, here p.415.

28) D. Herrmann, ‘Bronze to Aluminium and back again:Eduardo Paolozzi’s use of Materials in Sculpture c.1957–71’,Sculpture Journal 14 (December 2005), pp.71–85, here p.74.

29) MOMA – Paolozzi.

30) E.P. ‘Four Design Problems for Students of St Martin’sSchool of Art’, 1957. Reprinted in Spencer, op.cit. (note 10), pp.79-8, here 78.

31) There are two versions of St Sebastian no.1, one in thecollection of the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; the other in theScottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh.

32) ‘notes on Paolozzi’s conversation with Las’, 23rd March 1959,inter-office memorandum. Guggenheim Museum Archive:Eduardo Paolozzi.

33) Robin Spencer notes the same transformation in Paolozzi’swritings, which became ‘more structured and architectural’ inthe 1960s, by contrast with the previous decade, during which itevolved more organically. p.29


j w575 paolozzi book 11 03/10/2011 17:27 page 16 › 2015 › ...occupation, and created a series of...

Documents