The Brutalism of Life and Art

In February 1950, shortly after returning from two years in Paris, Eduardo Paolozzi displayed six sculptures and sixteen bas-reliefs at London’s Hanover Gallery, all of which, as the critic Herbert Read would soon put it, displayed “a scorn of bourgeois finish.”1 Placed in oversized wooden frames like archaeological finds, the bas-reliefs were made out of sandy, textured plaster arranged in odd patterns-rashes of bumps, clusters of squares, and sinuous lines. Though many had titles such as Squid and Land and Sea, and thus claimed a relationship with the natural world, none bore easily identifiable subjects within themselves. Appearing less worked by hand than weathered by nature, their textures were akin to encrusted skeletons or long-dried tire tracks.2 They were not so much abstract as they were artifacts, cast-off things and relics that spoke of a distant world. Poised on inelegant pedestals, Paolozzi’s freestanding sculptures possessed similar qualities, finding their forms in plaster of Paris, patinated bronze, and encrusted metal rods. All had a basic quality about them, their scorn of finish stressing their physical properties, and in many cases there seemed to be a correspondence between the medium used and the form an object took, as if each were a study in the properties of its material. Where the bronze sculptures featured tabletop-like surfaces that gave way to alternately organicand totemic-looking protuber

Art · Art, Politics, and Modernism · Materials Science