For four years, because of a cerebral attack, it had lived with the idle and moved in wheelchair. In spite of its state, it had gone Monday last to Hoxton (London), to visit a retrospective of its works. Eduardo Paolozzi died Friday morning in a London hospital. It was 81 years old. Its course will have been placed under the sign of Europe. Born Italian parents in Leith, suburb of Edinburgh, in 1924, it starts studies with the college of art of Edinburgh which it continues in Slade School of Art of London. In 1947, it unloads in Paris and discovers Dada, surrealism and rough art. But it is especially as cofounder of the pop art which it will make known in the United Kingdom. It is often forgotten, but pop British art is former to its American counterpart. In the Fifties, Eduardo Paolozzi belongs to a coterie, Independent Group, which gathers the artists Richard Hamilton and William Turnbull, but also of the architects and the critics of art. One among them, Lawrence Alloway, is in the beginning, in 1955, at the time of a seminar on the environment, of the term "pop art".

Art and life. Two years earlier, Independent Group, around Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi, sets up its first exposure of scale. "Parallel of Life and Art" clearly establishes a program aiming at bringing closer art and life. The following year, "Joinings and Objects" will insist on the technical innovations. But it will be necessary to always wait still a year so that Independent Group organizes, in Institute of Contemporary Arts of London, the exposure which will give to pop art an international audience. Its title, "Man, Machine and Motion", indicates its new orientation. The man and the machine are invited to convoler, not through the happy ideology of progress, but in a critical vision, around the central concept of movement. Movements of the citizens in the city, the objects of consumption, the new ideas, the advertising images, etc. As in the following exposure, "This is Tomorrow", assembled one year later and which will know, it also, a great repercussion, it acts to associate painting, sculpture and architecture.

Paolozzi, moreover, was impassioned by the ordinary collections of objects such as packages of cigarettes, models reduced, Hollywood images of stars. It had launched out in the manufacture of mechanical sculptures. Thus imagines it to set up ancient figures on superpositions of machine elements or to combine the human representation with last technologies. Among its "mechanical sculptures", one of the most noticed is the statue of Isaac Newton on the place which faces British Library. At the subway station of Tottenham Short Road, it covered the walls with a series of mosaics.

Social satire. But what narrowly attaches it to the pop-artists, they are its portraits of businessmen, political leaders and actor, carried out starting from the covers of Time . It proceeded by assemblies and photographic joinings of stereotypes from which it succeeded in working out the Pantheon of imaginary contemporary heroes. One knows the large serigraphic portraits of Warhol, one knows less than Paolozzi was the first to use this process in a systematic way. Instead of multiplying the icons of the fashionable celebrity, it puts them at the service of a reflexion on the relations of the man with time and the language. Have Is When (1965) referred thus directly to Ludwig Wittgenstein. The exercise transfers sometimes with the social satire, and the criticism of urban agitation.

Parallel to its artistic activity, Paolozzi will have devoted a broad part of its life to teaching. In 1968, it directed the ceramics department of the Royal College of Art and gave conferences on the textile design to the Exchange School of Art of London.