National Galleries of Scotland’s Paolozzi at 100 eschews the retrospective for a study of under-represented works highlighting the artist’s collaborations, generosity and delight in popular culture
In 1971 the head designer of luxury French fashion label Lanvin wrote to Eduardo Paolozzi, thanking the Scottish Italian artist for a recent collaboration. The letter has a scrawling script that is informal and friendly, displaying a natural conviviality between artist and designer. Lanvin had adapted Paolozzi’s 1967 ‘Moonstrips Empire News’ screenprints into textile designs featuring clashing patterns of bold geometric shapes in saturated hues of orange, pink, blue, and green.
Samples of these lush fabrics feature in the free Paolozzi at 100 exhibition at the National Galleries Scotland: Modern Two in Edinburgh, but it is the letter and its accompanying envelope from their archives that the show’s curator, Kerry Watson, is keen to show me. Unassuming and simply addressed in typewritten print to ‘Monsieur PAOLOZZI’, this tiny envelope evocatively captures the singularity of the artist as a totem of Scottish art in the 20th century.
Paolozzi was born in 1924 to Italian parents who ran an ice cream shop in Leith, the historic port in the north of Edinburgh. ‘Where he came from shaped the artist he became,’ Watson explains. ‘He had a down to earth approach.’ He was obsessed with popular culture, compulsively filling scrapbooks from an early age.
The exhibition begins in the 1940s with him studying in London and Paris, when he met artists such as Jean Dubuffet, inventor of the term art brut. Two key early works, ‘St Sebastian I’ (1957) and ‘His Majesty the Wheel’ (1958-9), show the influence of the raw and expressive qualities of art brut. Made by directly imprinting scraps of metal into wax slabs that are then cast in bronze, they are abrasive in their materiality and defiance of traditional sculptural techniques.
During the 1950s Paolozzi became a founding member of the Independent Group with others including architects Alison and Peter Smithson. Along with the artist Nigel Henderson, Paolozzi and the Smithsons worked together repeatedly, and were hailed by Reyner Banham as central to the New Brutalism movement. A 1953 photograph in the exhibition shows each outdoors with a different chair. Three have sleek steel frames by Charles and Ray Eames; Paolozzi’s scrappy wooden bar stool is striking in comparison.
It is photos like these on show in the exhibition that give us a sense of who Paolozzi was. He is already well known in Scotland. ‘There are a lot of Paolozzi fans,’ says Watson. The vast archive of his work at the National Galleries of Scotland is one of the most accessed for research, while a reconstruction of his studio is already on permanent display. But Watson wanted to show people something new. ‘It’s not meant to be a retrospective,’ she says; the intention is to highlight under-represented parts of his archive.
One of these lesser-known aspects drawn out in the exhibition is Paolozzi’s design collaborations from the 1960s to 1970s. The project with Lanvin is included here, alongside a sumptuous series of fine bone china plates for manufacturer Wedgwood between 1968 and 1969. The plates resemble psychedelic microchips, with striped sections of giddying gridded squares and circles that make your eyes bulge.
These two commercial collaborations are just a small selection from a lifetime of friendships and collaborations with designers and architects that produced some of Paolozzi’s best-known public realm works. His imposing bronze sculpture ‘Newton’ outside the British Library in London was commissioned by long-term friends Colin St John Wilson and MJ Long. Another lifelong collaborator was Terence Conran, who commissioned his enigmatic ‘Head of Invention’ when he founded the Design Museum in 1989.
Paolozzi’s most widely-seen public commission is his 1986 mosaic mural at Tottenham Court Road Tube station in London. It is a well-known landmark on the Undergound and has been cited as a favourite work of art and a repeated source of inspiration by the designer Adam Nathaniel Furman. Less well-known is a mural in Cosmic House, commissioned by Maggie Jencks for her West London home from Paolozzi. Maggie’s daughter Lily Jencks remembers Paolozzi being ‘incredibly generous’ in giving art, especially to the first Maggie’s Centre for cancer care, which opened in Edinburgh in 1996.
Clearly, Paolozzi had a collaborative instinct and a gift for forging lasting friendships. The exhibition photos convey a sense of his idiosyncrasies and his charm, which – with his generosity – give us an insight into the fondness with which he is held in Edinburgh. In 1994 he gave a sizeable donation to the National Galleries of Scotland with strict obligations to have a permanent representation of his work on site, leading to him become ‘part of the fabric,’ explains Watson. This forthright act shows a conscious concern for legacy, and taken with his breadth of public realm works shows Paolozzi to be a subversive and savvy artist who has guaranteed free public access to his art for generations to come.
Chloe Spiby Loh is a creative producer and curator working at the intersection of architecture and the arts