In 1995 the Gallery of Modern Art received two extraordinary collections of work by Eduardo Paolozzi. The first was the promised gift by the artist himself of the contents of his studios – some 3,000 sculptures, works on paper and studio effects as well as his library and a substantial archive; the second was the bequest of Gabrielle Keiller, Paolozzi’s most important patron in the 1960s and 1970s who had amassed an extensive collection of his work. When added to the Gallery’s existing holdings, these two gifts created the largest collection of Paolozzi’s work in the world and an unrivalled resource for the study of his achievement as a sculptor, printmaker and writer. Paolozzi was an archivist of the everyday, a hoarder who transformed the detritus of contemporary consumer society into artistic gold. These collections are a veritable treasure trove that reveals the richness of his source material as well as the sheer breadth of imagination and invention that lies behind his production.
Of Italian descent, Paolozzi was born in Leith, near Edinburgh. He trained briefly at the Edinburgh College of Art and then at the Slade School of Fine Art in London before leaving for Paris where he stayed from 1947 to 1949. These few years in post-war Paris were crucial to his development, providing exposure to a giddying array of artistic trends and talent. He made contact with several leading figures from the surrealist movement; he met Braque, Brancusi and Calder and became interested especially in the work of Alberto Giacometti and Jean Dubuffet. In Paris, Paolozzi began to produce collages, piecing together images from American magazines, novels and scientific books. From his earliest days, helping in the family confectionary shop in Leith, he had been fascinated by the vitality and colour of advertising. He loved to cut and paste snippets from magazines and newspapers into scrapbooks. Collage was a natural extension of this boyhood practice and would remain central to his artistic methods. The act of juggling with unrelated images and reassembling them into new identities was his way of expressing both the excitement and disorientation of modern life.
In the second half of the 1950s, Paolozzi developed techniques that allowed him to extend the idea of collage into the realm of sculpture. He would press an array of different objects into clay and then fill the imprinted surface with wax. He could then assemble sculptures from these wax sheets and cast them in bronze. The resulting heads and figures were encrusted with the impressions of bits of toys, radio parts, nuts and bolts and all sorts of junk collected from dustbins and scrapyards. Many of the figures were given the names of biblical or mythological figures, such as the work illustrated here, one of several entitled St Sebastian. The martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, usually shown as a heroic male nude pierced by arrows, is a familiar subject in Renaissance art. But here, Paolozzi’s disfigured being offers a very different vision. With its oversized head, its fractured torso and rickety tubes for legs, this frail-looking object could be a shattered human or a burnt-out robot. This is art from the post-Holocaust nuclear age of the 1950s, evoking a survivor from some unimaginable horror or a premonition of some future catastrophe. Across his long career, Paolozzi would go on to make many, more optimistic and life-affirming pieces. This, however, is one of his most powerful transformations of the everyday into the extraordinary.
This text was originally published in 100 Masterpieces: National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, 2015.