The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
At home with the daddy of Pop Art
‘Dad’s hands were enormous,” says Emma Paolozzi. “So enormous, in fact, that when people met him, they’d go, ‘Bloody hell!’ And yet he could do all this tiny work with them.”
Her father was the British sculptor and printmaker Eduardo Paolozzi, who died in 2005. Next week, the Whitechapel Gallery in east London will unveil the first major retrospective of his career for 40 years. Featuring more than 250 artworks, the show will offer an opportunity to reassess an artist who remains curiously underappreciated – despite the prominence of his public art in London and elsewhere.
Paolozzi was responsible, for instance, for the monumental bronze figure of Sir Isaac Newton on the forecourt of the British Library. He also designed the vibrant mosaics in Tottenham Court Road underground station. “I’m surprised and disappointed that the Tate didn’t do something big on him, especially after he died,” says Emma, a 56-year-old jeweller, who looks strikingly like her father. She isn’t the only person to believe that Paolozzi – who belonged to the generation of artists that followed Henry Moore – was a colossus of 20th-century British art. Along with friends, such as Richard Hamilton, who also achieved prominence in the Forties and Fifties, he was an early pioneer of Pop Art, arguably even its progenitor. In 1947, while living temporarily in Paris off the proceeds of his successful first London solo exhibition, he made a series of eye-popping collages inspired by imagery in American magazines and books given to him by US ex-servicemen. “After the war, America was suddenly very glamorous,” explains Emma. “What this country didn’t have, America had in spades: cars, movies, Formica – everything. It was a land of plenty, and, even though there was still rationing [in Britain], the future looked brighter.” In 1955, Paolozzi’s wife, Freda Elliot, and their first daughter, Louise, moved to an isolated cottage near the village of Thorpele-Soken in the marshlands of Essex, where Emma, born five years later, would grow up. Paolozzi continued to divide his time between Essex and London, where he taught sculpture part-time at St Martin’s School of Art.
“We didn’t see much of Dad when we were kids, because he would go up to London to teach Mondays to Fridays, then come home at weekends,” Emma recalls. “But I don’t think that’s unusual – a lot of kids don’t see their dads. We had a garage opposite the house with a big studio, and I remember there used to be sculptures littered around, with bicycles and ladders and things.”
She smiles. “If you gave him space, he would fill it. With Dad, everything was in progress. He even travelled with a suitcase full of magazines, toys, bits and bobs, sketchbooks. It was a portable studio.” In 1956, Paolozzi embarked on a series of spellbinding sculptures that would secure his reputation. They were made by delicately manipulating wax sheets that replicated the shapes of commonplace objects – toys, nuts and bolts, junk scavenged from scrapyards – which he had impressed into beds of clay.
Cast in bronze, the finished works, including The Philosopher (1957) and Large Frog (New Version) (1958), which will both be at the Whitechapel, were remarkable for their busy surfaces – a reaction against Moore’s sleek output. Today, they are understood as an existential expression of mankind’s plight in a nuclear age – but Emma sees something different: “A lot of the things he did in the Fifties, like the Frog, are so magical, charming, and authentic,” she says. “They are a wonderful example of
Emma Paolozzi’s father, Eduardo, was a creative colossus – so why hasn’t he been given a major show for 40 years?