Sir Eduardo Paolozzi and Nigel Henderson

Rare table lamp, circa 1958-1960

Footnotes

Literature
Michelle Cotton, Lesley Jackson, Robin Spencer, Nigel Henderson & Eduardo Paolozzi: Hammer Prints Ltd., London, 2013, pp. 66-67 for illustrations of the prints

Toys
Nick Wright
Co-author of Cut and Shut: The History of Creative Salvage, London, 2012

Born in Lieth to Italian immigrants, Eduardo Paolozzi had few of the advantages of the young owners of the toys depicted on Hammer Prints. His father, a shop owner, admired Mussolini and sent Eduardo to summer camps in Italy. There he gained an appreciation of the planes, trains and fascist badges. At the outbreak of war, his father was declared an enemy alien and imprisoned. So was Eduardo. His father was then transported to Canada and drowned when the ship was torpedoed. Once freed, Eduardo helped his widowed mother make ice cream, one childhood treat that had always been abundant, whilst assembling scrapbooks containing images of the many more that were not.

His friendship with Nigel Henderson was formed at the Slade School of Art. Henderson was born of a wealthy English family and focused his camera on London's poor. A working-class Scot, Paolozzi came to prominence with collaged images from American magazines. Their friendship was so strong they lived in adjacent cottages on the Essex coast and set up a business together. Hammer Prints produced household objects and textiles printed in designs based on deliberately degraded images taken by Henderson. Whilst some of the designs were later taken up by manufacturers like Hull Traders, 'Toys', the print used on the lamp base and shade, was only produced by the artists.

Patrick Rylands, designer of Playplax, the toy Rachel Whiteread credits as her inspiration for her 2005 Tate installation, says the toys depicted would have been prohibitively expensive when new. Like the 'Toot Toot', Patrick thinks the 'Autobus' was made by Lehmans, a German manufacturer producing tin toys of a quality that rendered them "the real thing writ small". However, he says "In Paolozzi's hands, the toys are speaking a different language". That language is pop. In the centrality of ephemera and the use of collage and assemblage, British artists adopted the grammar of Kurt Schwitters but developed their own vocabulary. Where Schwitters used torn tram tickets, fragments of wire and bank notes rendered worthless by inflation to memorialise the dead of the First World War, Hamilton, Paolozzi and Henderson, collaged advertisements and glamour magazine images to critique the consumer culture of an ascendant America following the second. Not that their critique was entirely negative. In bombed out Britain where food was still rationed, images of fridges full of fresh dairy and T.V.s showing chromium-plated cars had an allure, materially and visually. Paolozzi wanted the Cadillacs and glamour girls he cut and pasted just as he had done the Lehman toys - but there's a rip tide.

The fulfilment of our desire to buy creates, not a sense of achievement, but a lack. The objects of our desire are diminished by acquisition so the impulse to own remains. The eye then searches for something else, something better, bigger, a compulsive cycle illustrated in British Pop Art.

Richard Hamilton, a member of the Independent Group which also included Paolozzi and Henderson, exhibited 'Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?' at the 'This is Tomorrow' exhibition in the Whitechapel Gallery. The bodybuilder portrayed is not muscle and bone but a blow up that goes "pop." Similarly, Paolozzi and Henderson's 'Toys' are juxtaposed against a phrenology head and cherubs, emblems of pseudo-science and misplaced faith.

Fat on ice cream that, like all sweet things creates a hunger for more, Eduardo Paolozzi knew well that the best toys are the ones we don't have. Moreover, in illustrating that paradox, the blind, crazy driver of consumer culture, British Pop has an unresolved tension that gives it relevance even in the age of the buy it now button.