A giant of steel, by a giant of art - 20 years of Paolozzi's Vulcan

Vulcan was the centrepiece – quite literally – when the then Dean Gallery, an adjunct of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, opened in 1999. Almost crammed into his space, the scale of this titanic creation is driven home by the very constraints of his surroundings. How this near-genius juxtaposition came about is explained by Keith Hartley, the gallery’s deputy director and chief curator.

“The City of Edinburgh Council let us have this building – an ex-orphanage – at a peppercorn rent. The ground floor, though, was rather cavernous: occupied only by a staircase at each end. Timothy Clifford, director at the time, wanted to create a gallery that would fill the space,” he said. Then there was the prospect of how to use the gallery.

Clifford had recently visited south-east Asia where he saw caves filled with huge buddhas. He told Paolozzi about this. Hartley continues: “Paolozzi was given carte blanche but had to fill the space of course. What Paolozzi came up with was Vulcan.”

Standing almost seven-and-a-half metres high, Vulcan is made from panels of constructed steel. He is shiny. Pearlescent. And each foot is the size of a mobility buggy.

Hartley says that Vulcan (or his Greek counterpart, Hephaestus) is actually a self-portrait: the god of metalworking is often regarded as the archetypal sculptor. Given that Paolozzi had, in 1994, gifted a substantial number of his works – including the contents of his studios – to the gallery, it seems apposite that the colossus striding the ground floor should be the giant himself, Paolozzi.

Although the new gallery seemed like the perfect home for his legacy, the man himself was adamant that the space should not be a shrine to him nor his work. His wishes have of course been respected, though his work is much in evidence: witness the ceiling panels above Vulcan and the mesmerising recreation of Paolozzi’s studio.

This latter, an amalgam of Paolozzi’s London and Munich studios, was recreated by Paolozzi curator Fiona Pearson and his assistant Nick Gorse. Everything is there: toys, maquettes, his bed, newspapers, dirty mugs, his radio (Radio 3 was his almost-permanent accompaniment). Nigh-on impossible to spot any bare floorspace, Hartley hits the spot with: “It’s like a teenager’s bedroom.” Quite so. Paolozzi wanted to clear a working space, so donated his ‘stuff’ to Scotland. As an illustration of the mind of the man, of the artistic process, it has to be second-to-none.

The process of Vulcan’s creation began with maquettes - or models. Once scaled up and the sections constructed, Vulcan was brought into the gallery - now known as Modern Two - in pieces and assembled in situ. The task of constructing and welding the sections fell to John Crisfield and his Sculpture Factory - at the time based in Shoreditch.

He and Paolozzi also forged a friendship during the process. Crisfield describes how he’d be busy welding sections together, “Paolozzi would be sat in a corner, watching - always with a huge bag of biscuits.” After a day’s work, the floor would be covered in scrap and rubbish: “But he wouldn’t let us clear it up. He wanted to photograph it.” Crisfield said too that the sections, once loaded onto the lorry, looked just like a heap of junk – scrap.

Gallery staff remember the process of assemblage as all rather last minute: Paolozzi himself on the mezzanine overseeing the process, while parts were being soldered just moments before the building was due to open.

Born in Edinburgh to Italian parents in 1924, Eduardo Luigi Paolozzi’s father owned a tobacconist in Leith. It was perhaps here that Eduardo, who became an inveterate collector of the ‘stuff’ ultimately to be incorporated in his work, started his habit. Keith Hartley tells of a boy who loved to collect cigarette cards and empty cigarette packets from his father’s customers.

In 1940, when Italy declared war on Britain, Paolozzi was interned at Edinburgh’s Saughton Prison. During his three-month sojourn there, his father, grandfather and uncle, who had been fellow internees, boarded the SS Arandora Star. The ship was transporting other Italian and German civilians together with a small number of prisoners of war to Canada. On July 2, 1940, she was sunk by a German U-Boat. Paolozzi’s relatives were among the 865 who drowned. Paolozzi was 16.

In 1943, Paolozzi took evening classes at Edinburgh College of Art, thence to Central St Martin’s College of Art and Design in London before moving onto the Slade School of Fine Art for the three years to 1947. Later that year he went to Paris for two years, encountering artists such as Alberto Giacometti, Jean Arp, Georges Braque and Fernand Leger. It was the influence of these and other surrealists that found expression in a series of sculptures Paolozzi produced in the 1950s featuring surfaces covered with machine parts and other found objects. It was these that gained Paolozzi recognition.

His passion for found objects, machine parts, components – stuff – remained with him throughout his life. Any time he was visiting Edinburgh, he would invariably stop by Wonderland, the model shop on Lothian Road, to stock up with bits and pieces. Iain Reid, proprietor, recalls Paolozzi. “My recollection was just of his face – intently looking at models or planes hanging from the ceiling – completely absorbed.

“We get architectural students coming in here – they buy materials to let them build models of structures in miniature.” Paolozzi would frequently buy components, Reid says. “He didn’t ever show me pictures, like other customers, of what he wanted to build. He’d build things out of his mind rather than out of a box.”

“We spoke, but not in any great detail,” Reid continues. “We get a lot of these guys who just come in, kind of wander around – looking for inspiration.” Paolozzi would buy random items, Reid says. “He’d just collect a big bunch of stuff and dump it on the counter.”

Keith Hartley bears out the story of Paolozzi’s avid collecting: “He was always carrying stuff around with him,” he says. “When Eduardo arrived in Edinburgh, he’d come with two or three of these huge, chequered laundry bags – just full of stuff,” he laughs. “But he was a serious person, always active. Mind always working – everything was art to him. He was interested in a whole range of things. He just couldn’t stop working.”

Acknowledged as the creator of British Pop Art, his work, I Was A Rich Man’s Plaything (1947), is considered to be the earliest example of the genre. This collage typifies Paolozzi’s approach – he believed fervently that his work should respond to temporary culture.

“When lecturing at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in 1952, he said that art – and the teaching of it – needed to be woken up. And that all the emergent new technology, including the atomic bomb, should be grist to the artistic mill,” explains Hartley.

“While he was in Paris, he met a lot of GIs who’d come to the city to study. Paolozzi was bowled over by their magazines.”

The influence of these is abundantly evident in his continued fascination with mass media and developments in the science and technology of the post-war era. From moon landings to nuclear weapons, robotics to plastics – the pickings were rich. Paolozzi kept scrapbooks and studied making collages while still in Paris, practices he continued on his return to London.

The 1952 ICA lecture was a sensation. Hartley says: “The fact that Paolozzi was taking advertising seriously was groundbreaking.” The audience was nonplussed. Advertising? As Art?? Keith Hartley describes listening to a recording of the lecture, he says that there is hardly any talking from Paolozzi – only grunting – as he put image after image up on the overhead projectors. “The audience knew that something was going on.”

Something was. Watershed, turning point, moment in history, call it what you will, Paolozzi brought art and science together through his preoccupation with humankind and machine. Always describing his work as surrealist art, his sculptures developed along cubist lines. Literally.

Paolozzi’s sculptures have a rectilinear, yet biomorphic quality. Dark and brooding, many portray man as merely an agglomeration of parts in an overall machine.

Towering to the ceiling of the first floor from the ground floor in Modern One, Vulcan’s impact is staggering. He inspires the awe and wonder emblematic of the emotions provoked by Paolozzi’s work in general.

Paolozzi was promoted to the office of her Majesty’s Sculptor in Ordinary for Scotland in 1986. He received an honorary doctorate from Heriot-Watt University in 1987. Two years later, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth as Knight Bachelor (Kt). In 2001, he suffered a serious stroke. In a sad irony, recalling Vulcan’s lameness, it robbed him of his mobility. Eduardo Paolozzi died in 2005.

A founding father of British pop art which spawned its American counterpart and influenced the work of giants like Warhol, Paolozzi was, in Keith Hartley’s view, a true universal man. It’s an epithet attached commonly to Paolozzi’s own hero: Leonardo Da Vinci.

Surely the finest of valedictories written for this man of the hour came from the pen of JG Ballard. He nailed Paolozzi’s impact perfectly by describing him as an artist whose work could be used as evidence to reconstruct the 20th century in the event of a holocaust.

Says it all.