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Foreword

To categorise the work of Sir Eduardo Paolozzi, and to place him tidily within the ranks of the British art hierarchy is a difficult task. How can one pull together the threads of such a disparate career?  Part of the complexity stems from the fact that during his lifetime Paolozzi worked in a greater variety of materials than probably any other living artist – he was active in producing all forms of sculpture, printmaking, drawing, textiles, ceramics, jewellery and even the first architectural redesign of a London tube station.

Whilst much of his renown is a result of his career as a sculptor, Paolozzi, like many of his contemporaries including Hamilton, Hockney and Kitaj, consistently viewed printmaking not just as a secondary pursuit, but rather as a vital artistic process.

Paolozzi’s interest in the two-dimensional was most certainly driven by his love of the collage. Since childhood he collected disparate cuttings and pages from various magazines and comics, pasting them into scrapbooks alongside advertising slogans, and sections from aeronautical manuals. The plethora of visual material he collected was vast. With the variety of assembled images from newspapers and magazines, he attempted to capture the schizophrenic quality of life, where the individual is confronted everyday with a barrage of imagery from mass-media communication.

Paolozzi’s innovative use of the collage technique translated well onto screenprint, which readily retained the collage-like effect within a larger-scale graphic work. It was screenprinting which Paolozzi used to produce many of his most memorable Pop Art prints of the 1960s.

In his boxed set of prints, Moonstrips Empire News of 1967, Paolozzi’s primary concern appears to be the collage of both written and visual imagery. Fragments of ready-made text, including works by James Joyce & William Burroughs are screenprinted and placed in the box alongside totally unrelated Pop images. This theme of the free association of imagery is continued in the sequel box of prints entitled General Dynamic Fun published in 1970. Here, literary references are abandoned in place of collaged pictorial subjects drawn from film, magazines and commercial packaging.

The source of much of Paolozzi’s collage material was America, and it was in 1970, after a visit to California in 1968, that he produced the brashest, most colourful and most extreme set of colour screenprints, the Zero Energy Experimental Pile or Z.E.E.P. images were garnered from Scientific American, Fortune, Playboy, Aviation Technical Magazine, National Geographic, brochure handouts, and plastic kit covers. Many of the themes in the Z.E.E.P. prints were reworked by Paolozzi in two other later screenprints, B.A.S.H. (1971) and Philadelphia Print (1971).

The definitive statement of Paolozzi’s printed collage work was to come with the publication of the BUNK series of prints in 1972. These screenprints are direct facsimiles of original collages constructed from material Paolozzi collected between 1947-52. The 1972 series, produced in an edition of 100, are boxed sets of lithographs and screenprints, torn by hand and pasted onto backing sheets in replication of the original collages.

BUNK was to be a landmark publication , after which there was a dramatic shift in the inconographical emphasis in Paolozzi’s screenprints. After 1973, gone is the dependence on collage and the use of mass culture imagery. Instead, he was to strive towards a graphic notation of sound. In the Perpetuum Mobile screenprint of 1975, the imagery is now almost pure linear abstraction. The pattern of lines was to suggest the flow of music, as well as resembling diagrams of sound waves.

It is of no real surprise that it was the composer Charles Ives (1874-1954) who most influenced Paolozzi during this period. Ives was renowned for his mingling of numerous musical sources within his work, and this ‘collaging’ of material obviously attracted Paolozzi. Between 1974 and 1976 Paolozzi executed a major series of nine screenprints, Calcium Light Night,  all of which take their titles from Ives songs. Again, both stylistically and visually, they are aural diagrams, designed to indicate the physical form of sound.

Paolozzi was to experiment with many other printmaking techniques later in his career including numerous woodcuts and engravings but he was to return to screenprinting one final time with the production of the Turing Suite in 2000. This suite of eight images, inspired by the work of the brilliant mathematician and wartime code-breaker Alan Turing is a triumph of printmaking. Abstraction is not now linear, but crowded with sections of brightly-coloured wannabe micro-chip computer panels and ever-repeating blocks of transistors and other-world gadgetry.

Imagery on this scale could best be expressed through the use of screenprinting and Paolozzi was clearly a master of the technique. It was always the screenprint which allowed Paolozzi to express the fertility of his imagination, and it was a medium ideally suited for such a creative force.

-Tim Byers, Sims Reed