Sir Eduardo Paolozzi, R.A.

Acquired directly from the Artist prior to the mid 1970s by Colin St John Wilson

West Berlin, Nationalgalerie, Eduardo Paolozzi, 5th February - 6th April 1975, cat. no.19 (another cast);
London, Tate Gallery, Eduardo Paolozzi, 22nd September - 31st October 1971, cat. no.33 (another cast).

Reyner Banham, 'The New Brutalism', Architectural Review, vol.118, no. 708, December 1955 (another cast);
Diane Kirkpatrick, Eduardo Paolozzi, Studio Vista, London, 1970, illustrated pl.14, p.24 (another cast);
Winifred Konnertz, Eduardo Paolozzi, DuMont Buchverlag, Cologne, 1984, p.85 (another cast).

Structurally sound, with tiny casting pinholes appearing most visible to the forehead area. There is very minor surface dirt and small, tiny flecks of surface matter to isolated areas of the work, with a small possible graze to the patina on the lower edge at the back and elsewhere to the underside of the work, with a further small area of oxidisation underside at the back, not visible when the work is standing. There is slight ware elsewhere to the patina, most visible to the back of the head. This excepting the work appears to be in very good condition. Please telephone the department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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As a student at the Slade in the late 1940s, Paolozzi was already developing the art brut aesthetic that was to define his work of the 50s, a dystopian yet simultaneously humanistic vision of a damaged and degraded world, assembled from the detritus of modern life collected from scrapyards and wastelands.

Defying the School’s tradition of modelling in clay over a wooden armature, and so forced to work out of hours in his student digs, Paolozzi  began experimenting with working in plaster, as well as casting found objects directly in cement, looking for a more direct and less refined way of working which would be somewhere nearer the ‘truth’ of his experience of industrial, commodified society.  When Paolozzi left art school and went to Paris in the summer of 1947, with £75 in his pocket from a sell-out exhibition at the Mayor Gallery, he found himself in a much more receptive environment to the one he found at the Slade.  The eminence grise of the raw and the ‘primitive’, Jean Dubuffet, could be found in the cafes of the Left Bank, as could Alberto Giacometti, who at the time was perfectly relaxed about striking up a conversation with a young artist, often inviting them back to his studio to meet his wife and to talk long into the night. Paolozzi certainly made an impression in Paris, exhibiting with Denise René  and featuring  in Michel Tapie’s seminal book Un Art Autre (in which the phrase ‘art informel’ was coined).

On his return to London in 1949, Paolozzi continued making works influenced by Giacometti, including Table Sculpture Growth (SNGMA) and Forms on a Bow (Tate) that appear to be assemblages of found objects and tools from a lost civilisation. However, in the early 1950s he embarked on a series of heads (sculptures, drawings and collages – the present lot included) that reference both Giacometti’s primitive stone heads of the 1920s and the contemporary paintings of Dubuffet and Fautrier. As Roland Penrose’s 1953 exhibition at the ICA, The Wonder & Horror of the Human Head, sought to demonstrate, the central nerve centre of our own internal mechanism becomes a focus for the angst of the wider world, a world ripped apart by the War and now under the shadow of the atomic bomb.

However, Head, small enough that it could have been moulded within the artist’s hand, seem less ‘of the moment’ in its psychological impact. He serves as a symobolic ‘everyman’, one both ancient and modern. Sad but stoical, put-upon but optimistic, this tiny sculpture is full of emotional power, enough for Sandy Wilson, a great friend of Paolozzi’s and the original owner of the piece, to comment that it was ‘like a hand-grenade, about to go off’.

The following work has been requested by Pallant House Gallery, Chichester for their forthing Eduardo Paolozzi exhibition, from 6th July to 13th October 2013.