Book dossier

Eduardo Paolozzi

by Eduardo Paolozzi

"Eduardo Paolozzi played a major role in the development of pop art. His ironic representations of robots and machine intelligence, and his many variations on Duchamp's ready mades, have also influenced young artists in Britain. The garden shed, bicycle wheel, and other odds and ends in the This is Tomorrow exhibition of 1956 was the first time such humble everyday things had been seen in a British art gallery. After knowing Giacometti, Arp, and Leger in Paris in the 1940s, Paolozzi became a founder member of the Independent Group at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. Rather than many of his generation who followed the reductive modernism of Clement Greenberg, he identified instead with the life and ideas of Ludwig Wittgenstein to develop a new language for art. For half a century Paolozzi has unswervingly adopted an inclusive agenda by embracing both high and low art, science and technology, music and the cinema, philosophy and literature.^ His private and public art ranges from the collage for a postage stamp to the monumental bronze sculpture of Newton for the British Library as well as the mosaic decorations for Tottenham Court Road underground station, London." "For Paolozzi, a surrealist before surrealism was readmitted to the modernist canon, much of the avant garde and its culturally conservative determinant art history are among bourgeois society's last taboos. His accusation is that society and art have failed to confront major problems such as waste and pollution which threaten the future of the planet. Paolozzi's critical writings are also invested with a deep humanism, and have a positive message for society including advice to the young artist at the start of the new millennium. Also published here for the first time are sequences from his poetry and novels which show the influence of surrealism and Raymond Roussel.^ As Hans Arp's and Kurt Schwitters's writings are to the first half of the twentieth century, so Paolozzi's are to the second. They have a distinct and unmistakable voice and show Paolozzi working in the tradition of the painter-poets as one of the last century's great modernist artists."--BOOK JACKET.