There is a collage Eduardo made in the 1960s that
shows an American image of a starlet ogling a muscle-bound beefcake,
surrounded by candy bars, and a television set that shows the single
image of a butterfly on the screen. This is quintessential Paolozzi.
With just two ideas, he says it all about the transience of capitalism
and material culture; more relevant now even than it was 40 years
ago. This is called 'Image Fades but Memory Lingers On'. If images
do fade, then Eduardo's fade very much slower than those of other
artists, because fading images to keep alive certain causes and
ideas was central to his art.
Eduardo's imagination could be triggered by a grainy photo in a
newspaper or a neglected object in a display case in the corner
of a little-visited museum. Either would set him off on his journey:
a journey that began, and has also ended, here in Edinburgh.
Nearly half a century ago, he described art as 'The Translation
of Experience'. By this, he did not mean that art had to be autobiographical:
what he did mean, I think, was that art could not could not help
but be, or indeed should be, a reflection of the wider social and
political forces driving us all, including himself, the son of a
mother and father who emigrated to Scotland from southern Italy
early in the last century. It was his fellow Italian-Scot, Richard
Demarco, who recently wrote eloquently in his tribute:
To Eduardo, his early beginnings in Edinburgh - long before the
term 'Scots-Italian' - became a badge of ethnic identity. Eduardo's
own translation of these experiences is the sculpture 'The Manuscript
of Monte Cassino' at the top of Leith Walk, Edinburgh. With its
firmly planted foot and the open hand of hospitality, it is a symbol
of the historic integration of one community being accepted by another.
But its fragmentary state also hints at its identity as an oblique
memorial to the tragic sinking of the Arandora Star, which fractured
the community in Edinburgh in 1940 and resulted in many losses,
including Rudolfo Paolozzi, the husband of Carmela and father to
Eduardo and Yolanda.
Today, most of us probably think of Eduardo as a great European,
as at home in London as he was in Munich, Paris, or Edinburgh. Now
that Scotland takes her place with confidence on the world's stage,
we do not think it at all unusual if an artist who was born in the
Highlands has an exhibition in China, or a Glasgow painter wins
the Turner prize. But during Eduardo's career, and even after Richard
Demarco brought artists like Joseph Beuys to Edinburgh, cultural
identity was defined by a much narrower kind of nationalism. But,
now that we are more accustomed to the internationalism in art Eduardo
always represented, we should not forget the direct and indirect
contribution he has always made to the cultural life of Scotland.
It is not noticed, for instance, how often he exhibited new work
in Scotland, either before or immediately after showing it in the
major international exhibitions. Within a year of his debut representing
Great Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1952, and while 'Parallel
of Life and Art' (1953) the breakthrough exhibition about art and
science was running at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA),
he sent seven of his recent bronzes to the Society of Scottish Artists
exhibition in Edinburgh, care of his old teacher Norman Forrest.
There were further exhibitions of recent work, including one at
the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (1966), which reprised
sculpture and prints, centred on the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein,
first shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1964. And
in 1984, he made use of the long run-up to the big exhibition of
his work at the Royal Scottish Academy, to develop an entirely new
phase of his sculpture, which served him for public and private
work for the for the next 15 years.
To these milestones in his professional career should be added the
ceiling in relief for Cleish Castle, commissioned by the architect
Michael Spens in 1972, which is now fortuitously installed here
in the Dean; and the doors for the new Hunterian Art Gallery of
Glasgow University a year or two later - all of which happened in
Scotland several years before the reliefs were shown publicly, either
in London or in international exhibitions abroad. There were also
the tapestries, woven to his designs at regular intervals by Archie
Brennan and his successors, at the Dovecote Studio, from the 1960s
until quite recently.
And there can be few institutions in Scotland, whether public or
private, from the universities to the schools of art, who have not
been the beneficiaries of Eduardo's gifts, either of his work, his
advice, enthusiasms or ideas. And for much of this time, his influence
was at work behind the scenes, in the formation of Gabrielle Keiller's
collection of surrealist and contemporary art, the results of which
we now see all around us. To achieve only one-tenth of this would
be remarkable enough for any single individual. But Eduardo was
a man of prodigious energy, who believed that anything in art and
life was possible, given the will to achieve it. Nevertheless, less
than half of this would have been possible had Eduardo followed
the conventional route by always issuing his art through the conventional
channels of the art world. Had he followed the conventional commercial
route, there would have been: no doors for Glasgow University; no
bronze figures for the Royal Scottish Museum; and certainly no gift
of the kind he was finally able to make to the Dean Gallery. Only
perhaps Sir Angus Grossart, representing the Royal Bank of Scotland,
could have been persuaded to pay the full commercial rate for the
great sculpture he then commissioned for the Gyle. Of the periods
of short duration when Eduardo did have a dealer, his time was taken
up, like Whistler before him, with endless disputes about royalties,
percentages and the like. To an artist friend, asking advice, he
wrote in 1983:
I am undoubtedly the wrong person to advise about London galleries.
As you know, I made the decision a number of years ago to work outside
the gallery system. I find one loses contact with work, clients,
prices, if a gallery handles sales. I also resent giving 50% to
a dealer. Being camera-shy, and rather stranger-shy, I also tend
to avoid exhibition openings as well.
This expressed reticence is wholly characteristic and a true, and
accurate reflection of his personality. It is one of the factors
that made Eduardo first and foremost an 'artist's artist'. It also
reflects his gregarious nature and the need to mix art and life,
which the calculated distancing of the commercial world would have
denied him. Eduardo's generosity was also prompted by the interest
he took in the ritual of the gift as practised by so-called under-developed
societies; in contrast with the economic profligacy and technological
complexity of our own. Why, if so much could be achieved with so
little, based on 'free' exchange, were Western capitalist societies
so uncreative and hell-bent on self-destruction. These questions
exercised him greatly. They lay behind the exhibition 'Lost Magic
Kingdoms', which he created with Professor Malcolm McLeod in 1985;
and provided a rationale for his own omnivorous collecting habits,
which were central to his creative process. Above all, Eduardo's
generosity and celebration of his 'gift', with the creative freedom
it allowed him, was targeted at a greedy art world predicated overwhelmingly
on the reductive and destructive assumption that the intrinsic value
of art is directly related to its market value; an equation that
all great artists, from Marcel Duchamp onwards, have done everything
in their power to subvert and overturn.
Eduardo was a formidable art worker who lived his life through his
art and his art through his life. He would have liked, I am sure,
to have seen his art have a greater effect on society than it did.
But he accepted philosophically that the art world was effectively
controlled by big business and he was ultimately content to have
his art improve society rather than transform it. His 1971 exhibition
at the Tate Gallery was the most articulate and trenchant protest
against the Vietnam War ever made by any artist, American or European;
but for reasons not hard to imagine it has been totally expunged
from the record of art history.
There are as many sides to Eduardo's art as there were aspects of
his complex personality. For this reason, his legacy is likely to
be accordingly rich and various. This art is susceptible to multiple
interpretations and, because he operated across such a broad spectrum
of media and expressions, it will have different things to say from
one generation to the next. It is more likely to be rediscovered
afresh, not by 'art experts' or curators, but by those who
come upon it for the first time, bringing only their own experience
of the world rather than any specialist knowledge of art. For art
does not speak for itself. Posterity has found very little to say.
This will never be Eduardo's problem.
I should like to end on a personal note. I believe anyone wanting
to understand more about Eduardo's art has first to come to an understanding
of the circumstances in which he grew up, here in Edinburgh. Not
only did the journey of his life begin here, which he translated
into a lifetime of art, but he recognised this with the Gift of
his work made towards the end of his life. That is why, while we
all mourn his passing, there is a real sense from what he left behind
that his new journey has only just begun.
Robin Spencer
Reference
1. Paolozzi E, Spencer R (ed).
Eduardo Paolozzi: Writings and
Interviews. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
