April 22nd 2005 saw the death of the sculptor and artist Eduardo Paolozzi
Paolozzi’s Italian parents ran a small ice cream parlour in Leith, in June 1940, when Italy declared war Eduardo was interned (along with most other Italian men in Britain).During Eduardo’s three-month internment at Saughton prison his father, grandfather and uncle, who had also been detained, were among the 446 Italians who drowned when the ship carrying them to Canada, the Arandora Star, was sunk by a German U-boat.
There is little online about his internment and you wouldn’t have condemned him if he decided to leave Scotland after his release, the words of a Proclaimer’s song always springs to mind when I read about Eduardo Paolozzi, and other Scots=Italians:
Joseph D'Angelo dreams of the days
When Italian kids in the Grassmarket played
We burned out his shop when the boys went to war
But auld Joe's a big man and he forgave all
By the time Eduardo was released it was 1943 and he began attending Edinburgh College of Art before moving to London and feigned madness to secure his release from army duties in order that he could study sculpture at the Slade School of Fine Art from 1944 to 1947.
Paolozzi is widely considered to be one of the first Pop artists and created many collages including the famous ‘I was a rich man’s plaything’ in 1947, which was the first artwork to feature the word ‘Pop’ in it.
After a spell in Paris he returned to London and moved into a studio in Chelsea and by the 1950s was establishing himself as a surrealist artist through a series of screen-prints, pioneering the technique in which each print can have a separate colourway, predating Warhol’s famous prints of the same nature by four years.
In 1968 Paolozzi taught sculpture and ceramics at the University of California, Berkeley. He worked in Berlin from 1974, and was Professor at the Fachhochschule in Cologne from 1977 to 1981. He also later taught at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich.
Paolozzi might have spent many years away from his home town of Edinburgh but didn’t forget it, he donated a great deal of work to the Scottish National Gallery, who have since displayed a reconstruction of his studio and a large body of his work in the Dean Gallery.
If you have wandered around Edinburgh and visited St Mary’s Catholic Cathedral you will have come across Eduardo Paolozzi statues, “Manuscript of Monte Cassino” which comprises a giant foot and matching hand and ankle. The work was a gift to the city by entrepreneur Tom Farmer, the work is found outside St Mary’s RC Cathedral, I like how the area there has three pieces of art, on the left at Picardy Place you can enjoy a statue of Sherlock Holmes, and on the right you have two giant Giraffes outside the Omni Centre made of scrap metal.
Eduardo Paolozzi suffered a serious stroke in 2001 and he died in a hospital in London in April 2005.
The pics I have chosn are all held by The National Gallery of Scotland, if you like his work you will find loads of it on their website, over 12 hundred are tagged in his name. https://www.nationalgalleries.org/search?search=eduardo%20paolozzi
