A window onto a country he had never seen

In 1947, Britain was two years past the war and still living on ration books, the little coupon booklets that capped how much food, clothing and fuel a household could buy, because so much was still in short supply. Meat was rationed, sweets were rationed, and would stay that way for years. Into this gray, careful country leaked something bright and excessive from across the Atlantic: American magazines. Glossy ads for cars and soda, lurid pulp-fiction covers, full-color packaging for things you could not get here, the printed exhaust of a society that, to a young Briton queuing for bread, looked impossibly rich.

The young man cutting them up was Eduardo Paolozzi (1924–2005), born in Leith, the dock district of Edinburgh, to Italian immigrant parents who ran an ice-cream shop. He had trained as a sculptor, and would become one of post-war Britain’s major ones (the Newtonoutside the British Library and the Tottenham Court Road tube mosaics are his) so these glued-up sheets were a private side-channel, not his day job. But he was a magpie for printed images, and he was hungry for exactly the material the magazines were full of. He had never been to America. He knew it only the way the rest of Britain did, through this stream of advertising, and to him it read as an “exotic society, bountiful and generous”, a place glimpsed entirely through its own salesmanship.

Where did the magazines come from? Largely from American servicemen, who had them and passed them on. (The collecting really got going during Paolozzi’s years in Paris, 1947–49, where he was living when he made this collage; some of the material was picked up in London shops too.) The point is simply that this stuff was not freely on sale to him. It arrived as a gift or a leftover, secondhand, the way anything desirable arrived in 1947. He hoarded it, and then he did something almost no one had yet done with this material, the throwaway commercial print of the American magazine. He started gluing it down.