Eduardo Paolozzi
Great Lives
BBC
4.2 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 23 August 2011
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week's Great Life, Sir Eduardo Paolozzi, hated being tagged as the father of pop art, yet his representations of images from popular culture came almost two decades before Warhol and Lichtenstein. Prolific and generous, his public sculptures populate many cities across the country, yet his name is not as well known as Moore, Hepworth or Gormley. The diversity of the forms that he worked in, and his reluctance to be packaged and promoted by agents, accounts at least partly for that.
Paolozzi's personal story is no less complicated. Born in Edinburgh to Italian parents that sent him back to Fascist summer camp in Italy every year, all the men in his family, including the young Eduardo were interned when Mussolini declares war in 1940. Eduardo spent three months prison, but his father and grandfather met a far worse fate.
Joining Matthew in the studio are two close friends of Paolozzi's. Nominating him is the restaurateur Antonio Carluccio, who remembers dining and cooking with Paolozzi, and marvelling at how his 'fatty sausage' fingers could produce artwork of such intricacy. Cultural historian, Professor Sir Christopher Frayling who taught with Paolozzi for many years also has many anecdotes to tell, and he and Matthew agree to differ on their appraisal of one of Paolozzi's most well known works; the mosaics at Tottenham Court Road tube station.
Produced by: Sarah Langan.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Choosing what to watch night after night the flicking through the endless |
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| 0:19.0 | Lovely. Off the telly with me Joanna Paige. |
| 0:21.0 | And me, Natalie Cassidy, so your evenings can be a little less searching |
| 0:25.7 | and a lot more watching. Listen on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:29.2 | Thank you for downloading this great Lives podcast from BBC Radio 4. |
| 0:34.3 | For more information and details of other podcasts, |
| 0:36.9 | just visit BBC.k. |
| 0:39.1 | UK slash Radio 4. |
| 0:42.4 | My guest today on Great Lives is the restaurateur Antonio Calutio, and the life he's chosen is the sculptor Sir Eduardo Palazzi. |
| 0:52.0 | Here's a clip from an addition of the TV program Food and Drink |
| 0:55.8 | from 1993 where they are both experimenting in a bit of a job swap. In |
| 1:01.7 | celebration we are swapping jobs. |
| 1:04.1 | I'm going to sculpt while Edwanda cooks his favorite Italian dish. |
| 1:08.1 | Well, I'm cooking a dish that my mother used to do, |
| 1:10.8 | and they still do it in my father's village because they still hunt there and |
| 1:14.4 | they would catch a rabbit and they would cook it exactly this way. |
| 1:18.0 | Wonderful. |
| 1:19.0 | May you suggest you something? |
... |
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