Eduardo Paolozzi Scottish, 1924-2005

Eduardo Paolozzi was born to Italian emigre parents in the industrial port city of Leith, outside of Edinburgh. There, he witnessed the increasing effects of machinery and mass culture on daily life, influencing his subsequent career as an artist. Polozzi began training as an artist at the University of Edinburgh, leaving to join the army in WWII and then interned with other Italian men in the UK. He eventually returned to art training at London's Saint Martin's School of Art and finished in 1947 at the Slade School of Fine Art at University College London.

After leaving school, Paolozzi became a multidisciplinary artist, creating collages, prints, sculptures, tapestries, textiles, and paintings. However, despite considering himself primarily a sculptor, Paolozzi rose to fame from the screenprints he produced in the late 1940s using the decoupage style honed in his youth. Rooted in the Hollywood magazines he collected as a child, these collages comprised imagery of American glamour and consumerism, which the artist found to be a respite from the melancholy of Britain's post-war years. After giving a lecture at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London in 1952 in which he detailed the imagery in these brightly colored and labyrinthine screenprints, the art world bestowed them a new moniker: "pop art." These screenprints became the pioneering works of the Pop Art movement, a group that grew to include art world giants Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein.

Paolozzi had long eschewed whatever the art establishment endorsed. So, when his screenprints began to lose popularity in the 1960s, he embraced this decline and refocused his work on sculpture and more esoteric mediums. Paolozzi went on to produce acclaimed sculptural collections inspired by the cubist style of Braque and Léger. He befriended Jean Arp, Max Ernst, and Lucien Freud, whom he considered artistic iconoclasts. In 1989, Queen Elizabeth knighted Paolozzi and appointed him Her Majesty's Sculptor in Ordinary for Scotland. Today, the artist's mosaics line the walls and floors of London's Underground, while his sculptures stand before Euston Station, Isaac Newton's memorial, and the British Library. Paolozzi's works currently occupy the collections of New York's MOMA, the Tate in London, and Berlin's National Gallery, while the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh houses a permanent installation of his Chelsea artist studio.