Sir Eduardo Paolozzi
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 2 December 1990
⏱️ 38 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The castaway in Desert Island Discs this week is one of the great European artists of today - Eduardo Paolozzi. One of his positions is Her Majesty's Sculptor In-ordinary for Scotland - a post rather like the Poet Laureate for Sculpture, but with no duties attached to it. But such eminence in the artistic world is in stark contrast to Sir Eduardo's humble beginnings as the son of Italian immigrants who had an ice-cream shop in Edinburgh. He'll be talking to Sue Lawley about his boyhood, when he was sent to Fascist youth camps in Italy for three months at a time, and the subsequent imprisonment and vilification which fell upon him and his family at the outbreak of war in 1940. He'll also be contemplating his years at the Slade and his flight to the artistic freedom of the Paris of Giacometti, Leger and Picasso.
[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]
Favourite track: L'Enfant Et Les Sortileges by Maurice Ravel Book: A tropical plant book in Italian with English gloss Luxury: Hurdy gurdy
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Kirstie Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive for |
| 0:05.5 | rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. |
| 0:08.6 | The program was originally broadcast in 1990 and the presenter was Sue Lawley. |
| 0:29.3 | My car's the way this week is a sculptor. Born the son of Italian immigrants, he was brought |
| 0:34.1 | up above his parents' ice cream shop in Edinburgh. Being enthusiastic fascists, they would send |
| 0:39.5 | their son home every year for a stunted youth camp, an experience which he enjoyed but |
| 0:44.2 | which earned him vilification and internment when war broke out in 1940. |
| 0:49.6 | Out of these inauspicious beginnings grew a love of art. He studied at the slayed where |
| 0:53.9 | he found the teaching doctrine air and fled to the freedom of Paris and the world of Picasso, |
| 0:58.8 | Iraq and Jacobiti. Now established as one of the great European artists of our day, he |
| 1:04.3 | was one of the founders of Pop Art, he's widely admired as an innovator in both technique |
| 1:09.4 | and subject matter. Unconventional but brilliant, he has designed works as diverse as cooling |
| 1:15.2 | tar panels in Pimlico, a school playground in Cologne and glass mosaic murals for Tottenham |
| 1:21.4 | Cordero tube station. At the moment he's working on a huge sculpture of Sir Isaac Newton. |
| 1:26.9 | He is Sir Eduardo Paolotti. Do you use the title Sir Eduardo? |
| 1:33.6 | Only if it's necessary, only if one's trying to be correct. After a certain age you're |
| 1:38.7 | asked to be as I am, trusty of the portrait gallery and it seems to be necessary sometimes |
| 1:45.5 | for decision-making. I think when you get a night you'd rather late in life, it doesn't |
| 1:50.3 | really mean an enormous amount. But it's useful. It's useful. |
| 1:54.8 | I mean how you begin, I mean where you begin when the authorities of an international |
| 1:59.9 | airport or of an English cathedral get in touch with you and ask you to create something |
| 2:04.3 | to enhance their space. How do you start? |
... |
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