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CULTURE


A much worse fate was in store for his father,


‘Paolozzi and his family were interred during World War Two; three were killed in a torpedo attack near Donegal’


maternal grandfather and uncle. They were sent from Edinburgh for internment in Canada, sailing aboard the SS Arandora Star. But on the 2nd July 1940, 100 miles west of Donegal, the vessel was torpedoed by a German U-boat with the loss of over 800 lives, including all three members of Paolozzi’s family. The fi nal resting places of Paolozzi’s family remain unknown; 470 of the victims were Italian nationals and although many bodies were subsequently washed ashore on the coasts of Ireland and several Hebridean islands, only thirteen Ital- ians were ever positively identifi ed. Once freed from Saughton and reunited with


Above: Paolozzi mosaic at Tottenham Court Road tube station, London. Right: Paolozzi sculpture in the grounds of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.


his mother and sister, Paolozzi was obliged to help run the shop. He also trained as a motor mechanic, the visual legacy of which can be seen in much of his sculpture and graphic work. He began evening classes at Edinburgh College of Art, enrolling for a full-time course in 1943 only for his studies to be curtailed by military call-up. Sent for training in Slough, he was able to attend occasional classes at St Martin’s. Paolozzi was drawing all this time but it was only when he encountered a book called Foundations of Modern Art that he understood how he could communicate his vision and truly become an artist. He became increasingly absorbed in the language of modern aesthetics, a way of thinking, seeing and expressing that was heavily infl uenced by both primitive art and avant garde intellectualism.


68 WWW.SCOTTISHFIELD.CO.UK


Paolozzi escaped the army in 1944 by feigning


lunacy to bring about a discharge on psycho- logical grounds and, freed from the constraints of military life, continued his studies. While at the Ruskin School of Art in Oxford he worked as a fi re watcher at the Ashmolean Museum, sleeping in the museum surrounded by the art of great masters and the ethnographic collec- tions. Both were to have a formative infl uence on his work. After a period in Paris, where he met Alberto Giacometti among other infl u- ential artists, Paolozzi returned to London to teach textile design at the Central School of Art and Design. It was during this time that he began to establish himself as one of the the most innovative of the new wave of British artists. Anticipating Warhol by several years, he was producing collage-based screenprints based on contemporary ephemera, pop culture and news. Rich in language of advertising and photography, these were unprecedented pieces that offered a pointed rebuke of the high art sensibilities of the cultural establishment. Paolozzi is sometimes referred to as the


‘Godfather of Pop Art’ but his work was deeper and richer than that movement allowed. While Pop Art was essentially superfi cial, Paolozzi was anything but. He extended his collage approach to complex, cerebral sculp- ture, making assemblages and wax casts of found objects, contrasting the mechanical and organic, the modern and ancient. He defi ned his approach saying ‘a sculptor in the urban


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