The Brutalism of Life and Art

Abstract

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 pat- terns—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 nat- ural world, none bore easily identifiable subjects within themselves. Appearing less worked by hand than weathered by nature, their textures were akin to encrust- ed 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.