Paolozzi: The Inventor Of Pop Art?
Eduardo Paolozzi was one of the key British post-war artists. Yet 12 years on from his death, he’s an oddly undersung figure. That may be because the artist, as this fascinating show reveals, never fully aligned himself to any club or movement – not even the ones he instigated himself. Paolozzi effectively invented pop art, collaging brash consumer imagery from US magazines encountered while living in Paris in the late Forties. His so-called Bunk lecture, at London’s ICA in 1952 and recreated here, at which these rough-and-ready but ground-breaking amalgams of pin-ups, fast cars and fast food were launched on narrow-minded, austerity era-London, is generally regarded as the opening salvo of the global pop art movement.
