Life Savers

‘In the collages which he has designed since 1947, Paolozzi makes use of the popular and widespread pictorial mass material of his time but not of his culture. The material consists mostly of cuttings and cut-outs from American magazines, advertising prospectuses and dime novels which he obtained from former GI’s in Paris … Paolozzi, by recourse to readymade pictures, introduces standardised, identifiable forms which not only represent themselves but a great deal more: prosperity and prestige. The pictures – and this is Paolozzi’s express intention – have sociological significance; they represent ideals and the popular dreams of the masses; for Paolozzi they possess a magic and suggestive character, and he regards them as “readymade metaphors” which “are far more effective than an attempt to draw or transpose life’s experience” (Paolozzi in exhibition catalogue, Nationalgalerie Berlin, 1975) … Paolozzi’s collages and scrapbooks of the 1950 period coincide with the beginnings of English Pop Art and the beginning of a new aestheticism: a denial of the traditional panel-painting, a rejection of artistic beauty, an alignment with the mass media, an integration of non-artistic spheres’ (U. Schneede, Pop Art in England: beginnings of a new Figuration 1947-63, Hamburg, 1976, pp. 98, 100).