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. Jean de Luz, and evoked maritime and lunar landscapes, and may be compared with the strangeness – the displaced quality – of the collages in the Psychological Atlas. A relationship between collage and relief work was evolving in Paolozzi’s work that allowed a concentration on forms as images, rather than as sculptural mass, and on images as something tangible, rather than as flat and ‘notional’.
3 1 fig.10 Butterfly 1946, collage 7 ⁄4 x 5 ⁄2 in / 19.8 x 14 cm Paolozzi Foundation / Jonathan Clark Fine Art
21 J W575 Paolozzi book_11 03/10/2011 17:28 Page 22
Those bas-reliefs Paolozzi made in Paris were exhibited in a solo exhibition at the Mayor Gallery during May 1949.11 Poor sales from this exhibition — only one was sold, to Roland Penrose — obliged Paolozzi to return to England in October 1949. Just before he left Paris two unidentified sculptures and two bas-reliefs were included in the third ‘Les Mains éblouies’ exhibition at the Galerie Maeght, Paris — but Paolozzi brought the majority of his sculpture back with him to London, and there cast it in bronze for his first exhibition at the Hanover Gallery in 1950, alongside works by Kenneth King and William Turnbull.12
•
Where was sculpture at mid-century? Artists working in Britain were certainly amongst the pioneers of modern sculpture, notably Epstein and Moore, who had made it their task to redefine sculpture as an independent art, rather than as architectural adornment, or as a matter of commemoration. Such innovations were on a par with avant-garde developments in Paris, and were an important precedent for the international success of British sculptors later in the century. The crucial step was to generate an iconography of sculpture that was as independent and non- naturalistic as that used by modernist painters, in particular abandoning academic study of the human body. If in his work of the late 1940s Paolozzi shows a full awareness of this new independence of modernist sculpture, on his return to England he confronted what was to become the central question of sculpture in the wake of modernism: how to reintroduce the human figure into this newly independent art.
For Paolozzi it became a matter of skin, of an organic surface implying a living interior. Worn,
3 fig.11 Target 1947, ink & collage on paper 20 x 7 ⁄4 in / 51 x19.5 cm Pallant House Gallery, Chichester
22 J W575 Paolozzi book_11 03/10/2011 17:28 Page 23
complex surfaces came to take on a particular sculpture, and constituted the ‘Brutalist’ aesthetic meaning, and were derived at least in part from the of his work during the 1950s. material aesthetic of Paolozzi’s collage books, compiled with material often deliberately Attempts to create a meaningful sculptural 'skin' distressed to contrast with the glamour and appear earliest in the versions of Mr Cruikshank, of technology of the printed images from which they 1950, the model for which Paolozzi took from were made. If life was rough and broken, so too illustrations in American magazines. ‘Mr should be any given image of a man. These Cruikshank’ was the name given by American suffering surfaces came to define Paolozzi’s scientists to the wooden dummy of a human
1 fig.12 Paris Bird 1948, bronze 13 ⁄2 x 14 in / 34 x 35 cm Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh
23 J W575 Paolozzi book_11 03/10/2011 17:28 Page 24 J W575 Paolozzi book_11 03/10/2011 17:28 Page 25
shoulder-length bust used in X-radiography testing. Paolozzi cut-out articles on the experiments and included them on a double-page spread in the collage book ‘Crane and Hoist Engineering’ (titled after the book Paolozzi cannibalised as the template for his collage book). ‘A stand-in for a living man, Mr. Cruikshank has helped solve problems relating to X-ray treatment of deep brain tumours. His wooden noggin, sectioned to hold film, has the same X-ray absorption properties as the human head. He poses before a two-million- volt, X-ray generator in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His name, picked at random, has no special significance’, runs the caption for one. In Paolozzi’s hands the figure becomes a portrait bust of contemporary man, a representative of the anonymous mass. The surviving plaster model of Mr Cruikshank is divided up for casting, leaving seams showing on the bronze cast that suggest a fabricated human head, or a robot. For further versions of Mr Cruikshank, Paolozzi adopted a different method of fabrication, soldering together thin strips of tin cut from cans, producing something more tender and fragile, with the pathos of a reliquary bust (cat.7).13
Paolozzi was not alone in his interest in the motif of the human head, which presented an immediate solution to the introduction of the human body, whilst retaining a focus on abstract form. It was important enough to be the subject of an exhibition at the ICA in 1953, 'Wonder and Horror of the Human Head’, which was also the occasion for a lecture on ‘The Human Head in Modern Art’ by the critic Lawrence Alloway. It appears more obliquely in the mysterious, inscrutable work Contemplative Object (1951; fig.13) comprising a rock-like form with strange carvings and markings, reminding us perhaps of the Mayan Zoomorphs from Quirigua, great unquarried sandstone boulders carved with animal motifs. A similar
25 J W575 Paolozzi book_11 03/10/2011 17:28 Page 26
work, Study for a larger version in concrete (1951) was and yet there are people who do it every day in the one of three sculptures by Paolozzi shown at the foundries’.17 The high cost of metal founding, British Pavilion at the 1952 Venice Biennale which had proved prohibitively expensive for the (alongside Bird, and Forms on a Bow, both 1950).14 first Hanover Gallery exhibition, as well as the It was undoubtedly the first work by Paolozzi to need to take control of the process and appear on an international stage: Study for a larger experiment, made the home-spun approach more version in concrete was included in Michel Tapié’s attractive. In any case, since his days of producing 1952 publication Un art autre, and a cast was works in his student lodgings, rather than in the purchased by the Museum of Modern Art, New Slade studios, Paolozzi always seemed happier York, in 1952.15 Paolozzi’s affinity with the type of working from home. Still, only five works are dated ‘Art Informel’ being promoted by Tapié, and a to the next two years: the small unique bronze Fish young generation of European artists and critics, (the plaster original of which had been exhibited in can be seen by the comparison of his works by the exhibition ‘Young Sculptors’ at the ICA in those with Dubuffet, whose scarred and scratched 1952, and cast in bronze the next year at the figures seem rescued directly from the crumbling request of the owner) and Head from 1953; and walls and pavements of an older, now outmoded from the next year another work titled Head, this European habitat. Of the Study for a larger version time a version lying on its side showing its hollow in concrete, Paolozzi later wrote that ‘The artist construction, and the small, strange homunculi intends that the sculpture should represent Head and Arm.18 symbolically; the world of sea life’.16 Divorced from its body, the human head suggests a However much the ‘human’, societal element was psychology of form — a thoughtful mass pressing, he had remained, nevertheless in the constructed from the objects that it perceives. In realm of nature: he had yet to step outside this works such as the 1954 screen print Automobile magic circle and produce sculptures that were able Head, the motif functions as a way of showing the to reflect on nature as threatening and threatened, interaction of the body and society – it shows how something other to human life, but also dependent ‘objects from the environment became the collage- on it. The crucial moment, as is so often the case, skins of the beings in that environment’, in the came with the revelation of the possibilities words of Diane Kirkpatrick.19 Alongside Automobile presented by new techniques and materials. In late Head, a number of works on paper made in 1953 1953 Paolozzi took a room at 1 East Heath Road, show Paolozzi exploring the theme of the flattened Hampstead, the home of Dorothy Morland, then and de-featured human head in a manner very the director of the ICA. Together with her son, close to Dubuffet. The overriding sense is of Francis, also a sculptor, Paolozzi began casting pathos, of the human body, and psyche, subjected works at a home-made foundry using the lost wax to suffering. As such, Paolozzi takes his place in a method. Paolozzi later described his method: ‘Well tradition of modern sculptors who, as Leo you make an oven, you make a wax, and then you Steinberg put it, show the body not as the hero but put… investment round it as it’s called, and then as the victim of life.20 you burn the wax out, and then you just melt the metal and pour it in. And then after that there’s Paolozzi is in this sense close to Henry Moore, who still a lot of work getting rid of the investment and made figures of pathos throughout his life. cutting the runners off. It’s frightfully hard graft, Paolozzi's recumbent Head of 1954 could be by the
26 J W575 Paolozzi book_11 03/10/2011 17:28 Page 27
1 1 fig.13 Contemplative Object c.1951, plaster with bronze coating, h.9 ⁄2 x18⁄2 in / 24 x 47cm Pallant House Gallery, Chichester
older artist, if it was not hollow, a stark exposure of recorded in the marks left by that action on the sculpture as mere object to which Moore could surface. never resort. Moore’s figures may be pierced, but never actually empty. This hollowness is a means The comparison of Paolozzi and Moore is worth a both to emphasise a kind of symbolic affect of the brief aside. According to Lawrence Alloway, works — dehumanisation — but also to emphasise Paolozzi ‘avoided, like the plague, not only the the surface, and the sense in which the meaning of virtuosity of Reg Butler, but the competence of an object derives from what has been done to it, Henry Moore’.21 On the evidence of their works of
27 J W575 Paolozzi book_11 03/10/2011 17:28 Page 28
the 1950s, there are however a number of points of information on a material ‘with similar properties close comparison. A Brutalist tendency – of scarred to plaster which can be used directly with molten surfaces and distressed organic forms – infuses metal without baking’.22 He probably discovered Moore’s work, for example in the small Head of the solution on his own — modelling directly in 1955, a knotted, primitive apparition directly wax. A number of small wax figurines show that comparable with Paolozzi’s version of the same Paolozzi had been experimenting with the medium subject from 1952. Moore’s Wall Relief maquettes at the time, making works recalling small figurines from the same year show a remarkably similar that Dubuffet had begun making the previous procedure to that developed by Paolozzi the year.23 It was however the combination of the use following year, of creating a relief by imprinting of wax and the type of relief panels that Paolozzi objects on a flat surface. If the ‘Brutalist moment’ had been making since the late 1940s which in Moore’s work showed his awareness of the produced the necessary synthesis. At some point importance of the sculptural surface as a conveyor during 1953/4 Paolozzi had made a large relief of meaning, it was an awareness he was unable to panel, which still exists, using wax, wood, and develop — he simply could not abandon the found objects. The decisive step came with the plenitude, sensuousness and essential optimism on realisation that the relief could be made in plaster, which so much of his work was based. Above all, it found objects used to create negative impressions was his inability to abandon the imagined notion over which molten wax could be poured to create of a ‘full’ sculptural form, even in those works such sheets with positive impressions. Paolozzi later as the Helmet Head series that have empty interiors, recalled that the wax-sheet sculptures had been that distinguishes his work from Paolozzi’s made at the small cottage at Thorpe Le Soken, relentless hollowness. A hollow head for Moore Essex, bought from Nigel Henderson in 1953, to was just a helmet – for Paolozzi it was a burnt out, where he had moved with his wife Freda the next yet still-living form. year. ‘I began with clay rolled out on a table. Into the clay I pressed pieces of metal, toys, etc. I also By 1955, however, Paolozzi had reached an impasse sometimes scored the clay. From there I proceeded in his quest to re-introduce the human figure. No in one of two ways. Either I would pour wax sculpture, cast or otherwise fabricated, is securely directly on to the clay to get a sheet or I would dated to this year. The meagre output was in part pour plaster onto the clay. With the plaster I then because his attention was direct elsewhere, to had a positive and a negative form on which to teaching textiles at Central St Martins, and to the pour wax. The wax sheets were pressed around founding of a textile and design company, Hammer forms, cut up and added to forms or turned into Prints Ltd, alongside Judith and Nigel Henderson shapes on their own. The waxes were cast into during the summer of 1954. Paolozzi was also faced bronze at Fiorini and Carney in London’.24 with the problem of finding a material by which he could make large sculptures with ‘collage-skins’. In It was on this basis that Paolozzi returned, the summer of 1954 he wrote to several foundries, extremely energetically, to making sculpture. 25 describing the orthodox lost-wax method he had During the summer of 1956 ten small sculptures been using, noting that while it was excellent for were exhibited at the Hanover Gallery, some of small scale work, it presented problems for which had been cast at Susse Frères in Paris.26 anything ‘life size and over’, and requested These works, all but one of which were made, or at
28 J W575 Paolozzi book_11 03/10/2011 17:28 Page 29 J W575 Paolozzi book_11 03/10/2011 17:28 Page 30
least cast, in 1956, show Paolozzi’s first Gallery that Paolozzi's dramatis personae took to the experimentations with wax as a modelling medium, stage most memorably, in a striking survey of the and notably include the first version of Chinese first mature period of Paolozzi's sculpture – an Dog. Coeval with the Hanover Gallery exhibition, exhibition unrivalled since. Thirty-seven works the historic exhibition This is Tomorrow ran at the were displayed, including a host of smaller figures, Whitechapel Gallery. Eleven groups of artists from the King Kong-like Monkey eating a Nut (1957) contributed individual displays reflecting on to the pathos-laden two versions of Icarus (fig.15), contemporary art and life. ‘Group Six’ comprised made the same year, whose stumpy wooden arms, Paolozzi, the artist Nigel Henderson, and the broken at the elbows, strongly recall Dubuffet’s use architects Alison and Peter Smithson, who built a of twigs and wire to create his figurines; to an shelter-like pavilion, subsequently populated by imposing cohort of the larger figural works, such as Paolozzi and Henderson with objects and images, Japanese War God, of 1958 (fig.3). A photograph ‘symbols for all human needs’, according to the included in the catalogue shows Paolozzi sizing up exhibition catalogue. The display was titled ‘Patio to the wax model for this large standing figure, and and Pavilion’. It is noticeable that Paolozzi chose we get the sense of his satisfaction of having not to include his most recent sculptures, but overcome the technical difficulties of casting such rather Contemplative Object and also an a large figure, a rival for his own physical energy unidentified small mannequin-type figure, and presence. Of the smaller works shown at the comparable with a number of small figure Hanover Gallery, Shattered Head (cat.12) presents sculptures from 1956, such as Little Warrior. The one of the most complete statements of Paolozzi’s reason may have been pragmatic — most of his dialogue of surface and void. Patches of metal sculptures were on display at the Hanover Gallery define the head like bandages, the vacant interior exhibition which ran concurrently. Photographs visible through the interstices. Shattered Head is show an array of tiles and objects arranged on the one of the haunting hollow men of twentieth- floor as if from an archaeological dig. Some at least century art, a witness of life reduced to brute must have been ceramic tiles made by Paolozzi at survival. We may compare it with a sculpture made the Central School, but again are unidentified. by the Spanish artist Julio González two decades previously, Torso (1936), using a similar, if Although it remained largely uninhabited, ‘Patio antecedent method of fragmented planar and Pavilion’ may be seen as a stage on which the construction: the two works appear as if they have much larger figures Paolozzi began making at the been recovered from the same archaeological dig, time could have appeared. It was comparable in originally part of a single antique standing figure. this respect with a number of other display interiors of the time, spaces in which the new As a pathos-laden monument the human head figurative sculpture could be inscribed. For his motif is developed in a series of works beginning ‘Gallery for a Collector of Brutalist and Tachiste with Krokodeel (fig.1), a hollow bronze head just Art’ at the Ideal Home Exhibition of 1958, Richard over one metre high, and then with two Hamilton included, amongst other design objects monumental works from 1958; A.G.5 (cat.14), and and works of art, Paolozzi’s 1956 Chinese Dog as the Very Large Head. These works are both cast and only sculpture. It was however at the Hanover welded — Paolozzi cast sections from wax
fig.14 St Sebastian No.III 1958–9, bronze, h.87 in / 221cm Rijksmuseum Kröller-Muller, Otterlo
30 J W575 Paolozzi book_11 03/10/2011 17:28 Page 31 J W575 Paolozzi book_11 03/10/2011 17:28 Page 32 J W575 Paolozzi book_11 03/10/2011 17:28 Page 33
originals, and then had these welded together to vision of the future as already past, a ‘used future’, form a hollow, almost cage-like structure. The to use a term that became dominant in post-War surface is dirty and pitted, here encrusted with American cinema. objects, studio and mechanical detritus, there with typographers letters, sometimes with just an earthy Paolozzi considered his sculpture Jason, made in unidentified substance. Present-day objects are 1956 and now in the collection of the Museum of lifted into a timeless sphere where the future is Modern Art, New York (fig.4), as one his best works figured as a ruin, and antiquity as a presentiment of the period. The title and forms of the sculpture of this ruin. Time is collapsed within the course were inspired, he later wrote, by Martha Graham’s fabric of a human — barely human — figure. briefing for the character of Jason in the ballet Medea, by Samuel Barber, subtitled ‘Cave of the Having established this new, monumental Heart’, who ‘should exist on two time levels, the figurative style of sculpture, based on collage and ancient and the modern world’.29 By contrast with assemblage with a strong emotive resonance, other monumental standing figures, Jason is a Paolozzi began to develop individual motifs, fragile, delicate work, life-size and with a slight notably the head and the standing figure. Nowhere sense of contraposto, that in such a fragmented is this dialogue of antiquity and modernity more figure can only be read as pathos. In a set of powerfully embodied than in the series of standing teaching notes produced for students at St figures that Paolozzi began to make from 1956, Martin’s School of Art the next year, Paolozzi used which dominated the display at the Hanover Barber’s configuration of Jason as at once a ‘God- Gallery. Michel Leiris's description of Giacometti's like superhuman figure’ of Greek tragedy, who sculptures, published in English in 1949, holds would then step out of his legendary role and true for those by Paolozzi, envisioning them as become ‘modern man’.30 points at which 'thousands of years of antiquity converge with an abrupt interruption of time: the The same may be said for the four major figures of sudden uncovering of a figure in which the whole St Sebastian (fig.2 &14) that, in a strange way, echo of a long past is for ever summed up’.27 Yet the four earlier Forms on a Bow, made ten years Paolozzi’s figures also arise from a different vision previously.31 With reference to the second in the of the future, and the past — not of timeless series, purchased by the Guggenheim Museum, humanity, but deeply implicated with the New York, in 1958, Paolozzi stated that he was technology of his day, and as such occupy a interested not in the iconography St Sebastian’s different physical and imaginary space: the thickly- martyrdom by bow and arrow, but rather in his encrusted surface of Robot (1956), comprising small ‘second’, less well-known martyrdom, being objects lost in a lava-like surface, hollow, brittle, ‘clubbed to death by his company after not seems as if salvaged after centuries at the bottom shooting to kill’, according to Paolozzi, who added of the sea — the ‘vernacular spolia of reality’, as that it was not based on religious belief, but rather they have been pungently described.27 Paolozzi’s on his interest in the ‘irony of man and hero – the ‘brutalist’ vision was not of gleaming perfection hollow god’.32 and technological optimism but of decay and obsolescence. It is a vision of the present based on The monstrous cranium, encrusted torso and a vision of the future, but with little idealism: a tubular legs of St Sebastian II are indeed all
fig.15 Icarus II 1957, bronze, h.60 in /100 cm Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh
33 J W575 Paolozzi book_11 03/10/2011 17:28 Page 34
hollow, ‘caves of the heart’ constructed from the Gallery in New York in 1962, and currently detritus of a timeless world. Pathos is perhaps over- untraced, suggests a precarious, pre-fabricated emphasised by the words formed by typographers tower, an anonymous corporate architecture with letters attached to the back of the figure, ‘Please threatening potential. Such a reading is borne out leave me alone’, which suggest also the personal by a work made the following year, Tyrannical nature of these sculptures for Paolozzi; their status Tower, a stacked-box structure incorporating as alter-egos. In a further work in the series, St heavily worked relief surfaces. Architecture Sebastian III (fig.14) the distinction between the evolves as a metaphor for power structures, and head and the torso has disappeared entirely, and thus retains a connection with the human body in the impression is given more of a tower block on terms of ‘personality’ – but all other formal stilts, in ruin. references are gone.
I suggested at the beginning of this essay, in What might we make of all this? After 1964 relation to the 1963 The World Divides into Facts, Paolozzi became a different type of artist: more that Paolozzi’s concerns shifted from the human worldly, perhaps, with more extensive resources at body to the architectural at the beginning of the his disposal. None of the later works, particularly 1960s.33 In fact the transition was more gradual, the large public sculptures, achieve the same and it was clear that architectural elements, both in intensity of form of the 1950s, the imbrication of terms of principles of construction, and formal worldly clutter and an intelligent vocabulary of motifs, were already part of his large figurative sculptural form. For the first decade after the war works during the 1950s. If St Sebastian III seems Paolozzi dealt with nature and natural imagery half-man, half-tower block, then the impression of that could be referred back to Klee, Picasso and an architectural edifice is even less ambiguous in a Ernst in equal measure; but after his return from further series of works made around 1958/9, in Paris, with the introduction of the ‘image of man’ particular His Majesty the Wheel (fig.16) and (as it was then so often termed) the focus shifted Mechanik Zero(cat.15), both dating to that time. from the mystery of nature to nature’s ruin: to the Mechanik Zero in particular shows the organic spectacle of a ‘used future’ that had already begun. forms of the human figure tipping into an The power of Paolozzi’s vision came from his engineered form, imposing a rich set of rhythms on obsession with the fate of the things of his world, this metaphor, and suggesting a renewed use of rather than arising from a concept of ‘art’, and his surrealist metaphoric form. By 1960 the shift was work may be best described as a vast archive of complete, the transition even recorded in the title worldly things. From today’s perspective the early of a work from 1960 –1, Legs as Lintels. The idea of sculptures constitute both the foundation and the the human body as an architectural construct – standards by which the rest of this archive is essentially a post and lintel structure of legs and ordered; and one of the most intriguing and torso, uncomplicated by arms or distinction advanced bodies of sculpture produced anywhere between torso and head – is carried on in certain in the post-War world. of these works. In others, such as Triple Fuse, all sense of human reference disappears. With it disappears also an important animating element of Paolozzi’s early work, which he was not to recapture. Triple Fuse, exhibited at Betty Parsons’
fig.16 His Majesty The Wheel 1958, bronze, h.60 in /152 cm Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art
34 J W575 Paolozzi book_11 03/10/2011 17:28 Page 35 J W575 Paolozzi book_11 03/10/2011 17:28 Page 36
Notes
With thanks to Evelyn Hankins, Carmen del Valle Hermo, a series of slabs with strange organic markings. It is perhaps less Jennifer Schauer, Aimee Soubier and Eugenie Tsai. successful in evoking an absent human form than a work from the previous year, The Cage, a strange organic cage-like structure 1) [REF] made from wire and plaster. The notion of a linear wire sculpture also informed one of Paolozzi’s first public sculptures, his 2) F. Whitford, ‘Eduardo Paolozzi’, in: exh. cat., Eduardo Paolozzi, fountain for the 1951 Festival of Britain exhibition; a work that London (Tate Gallery) 1971, pp. 6 – 29, here pp.7-8. See below for looked forward to the many public commissions that he was to a challenge to this conservative view of Moore. complete later in his career.
3) The lost plaster original is dated 1946 according to a typed 14) It had been first shown at the exhibition Young Sculptors at memorandum of agreement that Paolozzi drew up with a lawyer, the ICA in 1952. dated 16th April 1960, in which Paolozzi gave the bronze version of Bull to his wife, Freda. 15) See: A.H. Barr, ed., ‘Painting and Sculpture Collections, July 1, 1951 – May 31, 1953’, Bulletin, vol. xx, nos.3-4, Summer 1953. 4) E. Paolozzi, ‘Memoir’, 1994, reprinted in Robbins, pp.53-60, here p.55. 16) Paolozzi described how the sculpture was made: ‘The moulds were made directly in clay: modelled in the negative : (after 5) Ibid., p.59 pouring and setting) the moulds were destroyed on removal from the work; the cast at the M.M.A [he is referring to the Museum of 6) Two versions of the sculpture in coloured concrete, one white, Modern Art, New York] was made by gelatine moulding’. Museum one red, were exhibited at the 1947 Mayor Gallery exhibition Collection Files. Department of Painting and Sculpture: Paolozzi. Drawings by Eduardo Paolozzi (only later, in 1974, was the work The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Cited hereafter as: cast in bronze). MOMA – Paolozzi.
7) Ibid., p.59 17) Eduardo Paolozzi, Oral History, interviewed by Frank Whitford, 1993-5, British Library.
8) Eduardo Paolozzi, ‘Statement’, in: State of Clay, exh.cat., 18) The dating of these works is imprecise, and contested; and Sunderland (Arts Center), 1978, n.p. the task of identifying any chronology or sequence is made harder by the closeness in subject matter of the works, and often 9) See, for example, D. Kirkpatrick: Eduardo Paolozzi, London identical titles. The dating of the Pallant House Standing Figure 1970, and W. Konnertz: Eduardo Paolozzi, Cologne 1984. Like to 1953 is questioned in footnote 22 below. many of Paolozzi’s works from this period, the original of Two Forms on a Rod has been lost: in this case it consisted of a single 19) D. Kirkpatrick, Eduardo Paolozzi, New York, 1969, p.29. column with a projection which was then cast twice, at later date, probably in the early 1950s, and joined together to form the metal 20) Leo Steinberg, ‘Gonzalez’, reprinted in Other Criteria, 1972, version. pp. 241-250, here p.243.
10) EP, interview with Richard Cork, broadcast on BBC Radio 3, 21) L. Alloway, ‘Eduardo Paolozzi’, Architectural Design (April March 1986. Cited in R. Spencer, ed.: Eduardo Paolozzi: Writings 1956), p.133. and Interviews, Oxford 2000, p.65. For a contemporary appraisal of Giacometti that Paolozzi knew, see: Michel Leiris, ‘Contemporary 22) EP to ‘The Sales Manager, Morgan Crucible Ltd.’ (also sent to Sculptors VII – Thoughts around Giacometti’, trans. Douglas a London-based foundry); 26th July 1954; reprinted in Spencer, Cooper, Horizon, 19 (June 1949), p.411-17. op.cit. (note 10), pp.74–5. It is on this basis that the date of the Standing Figure in the collection at Pallant House, of 1953, may 11) Eduardo Paolozzi – Drawings and Bas-Reliefs. be questioned. The technique of constructing a large figure using moulded and embossed sheets of wax was only developed 12) These were cast at Morris Singer Foundry, Wilkinson’s a few years later, in 1956. No other works of this size or nature Foundry on Tottenham Court Road, and Fiornini and Carney, exist from this time, and it is highly unlikely that such a Peterborough Mews, Fulham. pioneering work would have gone unremarked at the time, or indeed subsequently. 13) Other works made around the same moment show different attempts to bring collage and bas-relief together to evoke the 23) The further comparison between these works and the wax human figure, notably in Paolozzi’s maquette for the Unknown figurines of Edgar Degas is, striking — Degas’ small sculptures Political Prisoner International Sculpture Competition (1952), showing were only cast in bronze after his death. They show various
36 J W575 Paolozzi book_11 03/10/2011 17:28 Page 37
female figures, dancers and bathers, as well as horses, comprised of rough lumps of clay, often using objects embedded in the sculptures’ surface. The wax figurines had resurfaced after the war, and in 1955 were exhibited at Knoedler’s gallery in New York.
24) EP to Angelica Rudenstine, 5th August 1983. Cited in Spencer, op.cit. (note x), p.80. This ‘collage’ method is demonstrated by a set of photographs of Paolozzi at work taken around 1958. R. Fiorini & J. Carney were located in Fulham, moving from Michael Rd to Peterborough Mews in 1961; Fiorini cast Shattered Head, and Chinese Dog 2, amongst other works.
25) And also returned to teaching sculpture on a part-time basis at St Martin’s School of art (from 1955 to 1958)
26) These were: Bull (1946), and Shattered Head, Black Devil, Frog eating a lizard, One-armed torso, Man and motor-car (two versions), Small Figure (two versions) and Figure (all from 1956). These were all still on a relatively small scale, the largest being Black Devil (untraced) at 19 inches high.
27) Michel Leiris, ‘Contemporary Sculptors VII – Thoughts around Giacometti’, trans. Douglas Cooper, Horizon, 19 (June 1949), 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’s School 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 the collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; the other in the Scottish 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’s writings, which became ‘more structured and architectural’ in the 1960s, by contrast with the previous decade, during which it evolved more organically. p.29
37