Overdue Re-evaluation

Rick Poynor began his succinct post about Eduardo on http://www.eyemagazine.com/opinion/article/incisive-vision thus:

Since Eduardo Paolozzi died in 2005 after several years of illness, a reassessment of his work has been gathering momentum. It’s a welcome development. For admirers of the Scottish artist, born to Italian parents, it sometimes seemed that, despite his knighthood in 1988 – or maybe, in some way, because of the establishment’s embrace – Paolozzi had become a critically neglected figure, his many achievements as sculptor, designer and printmaker overlooked. Conceptual art and its later offshoots monopolised critical attention, while easy to appreciate painters such as David Hockney and Lucian Freud received the publicity and accolades.

Overall, it's a good, thoughtful post with two of the prints as illustrations.  Rick's comments about the accessibility of the work of, e.g., Hockney and Freud, ring true, though those are two artists whose work reflect much skill and patient craftsmanship.  But think of all the other contemporary artists who attract the attention Eduardo currently does not, and compare the thinking and graphic expertise invested in his oeuvre with that deployed in, e.g., an Emin or Perry.

Patience is a great virtue, but after years of unfulfilled expectation, I do tire of waiting to see Eduardo's supreme virtuosity in printmaking fully recognised and celebrated beyond the realms of a little old blog like this. 

Happy New Year!

The Subject is S.I.N.

I have always much preferred Paolozzi’s graphic work to the sculpture.  It is true, however, that it is the latter that has received the most general acclaim.  And some of the oeuvre – the Tottenham Court Road mosaics, ‘Four Towers’ and ‘Hamlet in a Japanese Manner’ for example – straddles the media.

(Part of) Hamlet in a Japanese Manner      Courtesy GoMA 

Of the sculpture, some of the Sixties works appeal to me as they relate directly to – and have the same ‘look’ as - the great prints, such as, ‘Wittgenstein at Casino’. 

Later in his career, Paolozzi became very interested in Sir Isaac Newton and William Blake’s monotype of him.  In the various versions Paolozzi succeeded in expressing the reality of human thinking, whereby apparently contradictory notions can – indeed, HAVE – to be accommodated.  Blake, from a traditional religious viewpoint disapproved of the Newtonian quest to scientifically account for the world, (in the Wittgenstein sense), and rendered him as myopic, whereas Paolozzi’s Isaac, in the version at the British Library in London, has Michelangelo’s David’s all seeing eyes. 

But I remain convinced that Eduardo should have stuck to printmaking – just look, below, at what happened when he was in the role of the sculptor - a suit (!) and . . . !

Courtesy Frank Thurston