J W575 Paolozzi Book 11 03/10/2011 17:27 Page 16 J W575 Paolozzi Book 11 03/10/2011 17:27 Page 17

J W575 Paolozzi book_11 03/10/2011 17:27 Page 16 J W575 Paolozzi book_11 03/10/2011 17:27 Page 17 Used Future: The Early Sculptures of Eduardo Paolozzi John-Paul Stonard Eduardo Paolozzi once noted that he chose to remains the ‘classic’ moment of Paolozzi’s oeuvre, become a sculptor because of a desire to create and attests to his position by the mid 1950s not ‘things’.1 Things, rather than art: the distinction only as a leading international sculptor, but also remained important for the rest of his life. For the one of the most pungent interpreters of the eighteen-year old Paolozzi, ‘art’ meant the conditions of post-War life. No artist responded academic training at the Slade, where he studied: more intuitively and with less self-consciousness to modelling from the antique, stone carving, copying the quiddity of daily life, to the demands of place from the old masters, life drawing, a general and time; from the rubble-strewn streets of post- servitude to the traditions of western art. ‘Things’ War London, through to the growing materialism meant, largely speaking, everything else: the and economic revitalisation of the 1950s. substance of real life, objects that spoke of the contemporary predicament — worldly things. In England at this time the dominant model for sculpture remained the classicism of Henry Moore, Following his studies at the Slade, and for the first ‘so final and so convincing’, that it was necessary two decades after the War, Paolozzi explored the for a young sculptor to turn to European artists, contemporary predicament in a unique manner. and in particular to Picasso, to produce anything at His work evolved from the mysterious world of all original.2 Even in his earliest sculptures, the nature and animals, as with the small bronze Paris now lost plaster version of Bull,3 later cast in Bird (fig.12), to a series of monumental figurative bronze (cat.1), a remarkably confident and works collaged from found objects, notably Jason expressive early work, and the several versions in (fig.4). By the early 1960s he had turned to a more cast concrete of Horse’s Head (cat.2), made outside abstract, architectural style in welded aluminium, the Academy in the basement of the Slade Student for example The World Divides into Facts. Dazzling hostel at 28 Cartwright Gardens (‘in order not to and physically imposing though works from this be disturbed or criticised’),4 Paolozzi demonstrated moment can be, they lack in many cases the fragile, this feeling that something better was being done exploratory quality of the early period, which elsewhere, and by other means: ‘the outer edge of 17 J W575 Paolozzi book_11 03/10/2011 17:27 Page 18 fig.6 Fishermen (Newhaven) 1946, ink on paper, 18 x 26 in / 46 x 66 cm Private Collection my soul was being tugged at by an invisible other recalled: ‘As the sculpture school had become world’, as he later put it.5 Horse’s Head strikingly intolerable I had spent the previous six months anticipates the motif developed from the early working in the basement making sculptures out of 1950s by Paolozzi’s fellow Slade student William concrete and plaster, and black-and-white ink Turnbull. Turnbull had produced a sculpture of a drawings heavily influenced by Picasso who was horse’s head of almost exactly the same richly represented – [in] books from the shelves of dimensions during the same year; which lacked Peter Watson who gave me his benedictions. Peter however the simplified, cartoon-like nature of Watson at that time had bought a bronze Paolozzi’s version.6 Picasso’s roughly carved, chandelier designed by Giacometti and needed expressive natural forms, using animal and plant help to erect it. Consequently these Picassoid motifs, had a clear influence on the handful of student works were reproduced, thanks to Peter, in ‘Picassoid’ sculptures he made at this time and the magazine Horizon with a wonderful text by showed at the Mayor Gallery in 1947 (the others Robert Melville, and were exhibited at the Mayor were Seagull and Fish, and Blue Fisherman). He later Gallery’.7 18 J W575 Paolozzi book_11 03/10/2011 17:28 Page 19 The Mayor Gallery exhibition, Paolozzi’s first one- man show sold out; a coup for the twenty-three year old artist, still a student. It was a sign of his obstinately independent nature that he used the proceeds to quit the London art world for Paris, departing, according to legend, with a tin trunk of his possessions, and living on next to no money — when Nigel Henderson visited, Paolozzi provided him with a list of basic items to bring, cooking ingredients and art materials. Life in Paris was a matter more of experience than productivity. His time was largely spent seeing art – from the ‘tiny hippopotami’ that he saw in a case in the Louvre on the first day he arrived,8 to the art collection of Mary Reynolds. It was a time of measuring himself against the remnants of the pre-War avant-garde – he arrived in time to visit the last large Surrealist group exhibition, ‘Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme,’ which opened at the Galerie Maeght in July. The catalogue featured Marcel Duchamp’s Prière de Toucher on the cover, and artists from twenty-five countries were represented, but it was clear that the pre-War spirit of Surrealism had not been recaptured – certain renegade figures, such as Tristan Tzara, were now criticising the movement on political grounds, and the social basis of the original group had dispersed. When it came to making work, however, the clear point of reference for the group of seven sculptures by Paolozzi that survive from 1948–9 was the pre-War work of Giacometti. Two Forms on Rod (cat.5) is often compared with Giacometti’s 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 Man and Woman (1929), and echoes the harsh organic forms and psychological tension of the Swiss artist’s work of the 1930s.9 Similarly, Bird (1949, Tate), may at first glance suggest a direct to his sense of a mysterious, sometimes threatening comparison with Giacometti’s Woman with her world of natural forms. He was also impressed by throat cut (1932), and Table Sculpture (Growth) Giacometti’s self-belief: ‘he was a real artist (cat.6), with La table, made by Giacometti in 1933. because he was obsessed about his ideas and It was the directness and pungency of Giacometti’s worked all night, and everything else in life for him sculptures that appealed to Paolozzi, in particular was just a grey shadow’.10 But there is also an 19 J W575 Paolozzi book_11 03/10/2011 17:28 Page 20 1 1 fig.8 Forms on a Bow No.1 1949, bronze, 21 ⁄2 x 25 ⁄2 in / 65 x 67cm Tate important difference; rather than an endless and versions of Forms on a Bow (fig.8; cat.4), remain the poetic transformation of objects, a flipping first major statement of a sculptural idea in between readings and strong association with Paolozzi’s oeuvre – it was less in sculpture than in literature, Paolozzi was engaged with the mute two other areas, collage and bas-reliefs, that power of objects and shapes that defy Paolozzi made his most important innovations of transformation — not representing a body of the Paris period. The combination of these two thought, or illustrating poetic texts, but appearing formats, collage as sculptural relief and sculptural as natural objects, strange and irreconcilable. relief as collage, proved to be the crucible out of which emerged much of Paolozzi’s later work. His Notwithstanding the power of these early focus on collage during the Paris period evolved Surrealist-influenced sculptures – and the four naturally out of his earliest, childhood obsessions, 20 J W575 Paolozzi book_11 03/10/2011 17:28 Page 21 copying pictures from newspapers and magazines. Alongside more conventional papier collés, using coloured paper and lettering to create semi- abstract compositions, Paolozzi continued producing photomontage-like works, in particular the extraordinary ‘Museum-book’ collages (present author’s term) that he had begun making while at the Slade, for example Butterfly and Group of Gauls (fig.9 & 10). These culminated in the small collage- book Psychological Atlas, made around 1949, and which appears as a survey of the scenery and psychology of post-War Europe. For this book, now a tattered relic kept as an archival item at the Victoria & Albert Museum, Paolozzi took the catalogue from an exhibition of art held in Germany while the country was still under occupation, and created a series of double-page spreads with material that provides a strange, oblique snapshot of the moment. 3 1 fig.9 Group of Gauls 1947, collage 9 ⁄4 x7⁄4 in / 24.5 x 18.5 cm Paolozzi's early experiments with bas-relief, in Paolozzi Foundation / Jonathan Clark Fine Art particular the creation of plaster tiles incised with decorative or abstract motifs, with strong emphasis on surface rather than sculptural mass, was equally important for the development of his sculpture over the next decade or so. Fish (plaster, 1948) measures about one foot square and suggests marine motifs and insects, crustaceans fossilised in plaster. Nature is clearly the key to Paolozzi’s work in relief, and the sense of a hidden mystery preserved in nature, as if these were fossils that had survived the destructive influence of human culture. A number of these reliefs were made after a visit to St.

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