The ‘Bunk’ collages of Eduardo Paolozzi
by JOHN-PAUL STONARD
of forty-five Bunk collages,
made by the artist in Paris and London from around 1947 to
1952, are often considered as prototypical works of Pop art.
Evadne in green dimension (Fig.22), from which the series
derives its title, is typical in its presentation of consumer
goods, sex symbols and richly toned food advertisements, all
cut from American magazines and combined in a dynamic
composition. In contrast to other collages made by Paolozzi
around the same time, which refer back to a pre-War
Surrealist aesthetic, particularly that of Kurt Schwitters or of
Max Ernst, the Bunk collages form a different category, using
up-to-date colour magazine and advertising imagery, and
presenting this material in a direct, non-pictorial format.
However, many of the works in the series are characterised
by the crudeness with which the source material has been cut
and pasted down, incorporating yellowing strips of Sellotape
and affixed to sheets of card that appear recycled from
previous collages (Figs.23 and 24). This makeshift quality
raises the question of whether the collages were intended as
works of art for display or whether they were private working material, along the lines of those collages found in
the numerous scrapbooks kept by Paolozzi during the same
period. Several of the series are not really collages, but single
‘tearsheets’ pasted down (Figs.25 and 26). The various locations in which the Bunk collages can be found further enhance
the ambiguity of their material status. Where some are kept as
works of art in a museum store (Tate, London), others are
held in Prints and Drawings collections (Victoria and Albert
Museum, London; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art,
Edinburgh) and still others are stored as archival material (Art
and Design Archive, Victoria and Albert Museum). Aside
from several works held in private collections, the location of
about fifteen of the collages remains so far unidentified (it
must be assumed) within Paolozzi’s personal archive.1 It is at
least in part due to this fugitive status that a certain amount of
myth has gathered around the Bunk series, not least concerning their prophetic stature. New research, presented in this
article, examines the construction of this myth, particularly
in the light of Paolozzi’s retrospective at the Tate Gallery in
1971, and the print series that was made from the collages
shortly thereafter. It is through this print series that the Bunk
collages are now commonly known, and most often displayed
and illustrated. In addition, some of the source material
used in the collages is examined, revealing a broader field of
EDUARDO PAOLOZZI’S SERIES
The author wishes to thank for their help in the preparation of this article Daniel
Herrmann, James Hyman, Richard Lannoy, Raymond Mason, James Mayor,
Richard Morphet, Jennifer Ramkalawon, Jeffery Sherwin, Toby Treves, William
Turnbull, Aurélie Verdier and Frank Whitford. Particular thanks to Robin Spencer
for his help and encouragement, and to Flowers Gallery, London.
1 Following Paolozzi’s death in 2005, the contents of his studio in Dovehouse Street,
Chelsea, including his archives, were placed in storage and remain to be catalogued.
2 See R. Spencer: ‘Introduction’, in idem, ed.: Eduardo Paolozzi. Writings and Interviews, Oxford 2000, pp.1–43, esp. pp.8–10.
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22. Evadne in green dimension, by Eduardo Paolozzi. 1952. Collage, 33.1 by 25.4 cm.
(Victoria and Albert Museum, London).
reference than the American magazines that became so attractive to Pop artists around the mid-1950s.
Paolozzi’s interest in collaging popular material stretched
back to his childhood in Scotland, and has been well summarised by Robin Spencer.2 The preservation of a childhood
habit into his mid- to late twenties – a number of the pages
of the surviving scrapbooks contain drawings that may be
classified as juvenilia – and as a student at the Slade School of
Fine Art when it was evacuated to Oxford during the War
3
An exhibition two years after Paolozzi’s death of hitherto unpublished erotic collages is some indication of the only gradually emerging knowledge of these ‘private’
works; see exh. cat. Eduardo Paolozzi: For Adults Only. A pornucopia of previously
unknown erotic drawings/collages, London (Mayor Gallery) 2007.
4 Paolozzi’s dating of his collages is not always accurate, particularly in the case of
the Bunk collages; see more on this question below.
5 Identification from R. Spencer: Eduardo Paolozzi: Recurring Themes, New York
1984.
6 It is collaged into S.P. Munsing, ed.: exh. cat. Kunstschaffen in Deutschland, held
THE ‘BUNK’ COLLAGES OF EDUARDO PAOLOZZI
23. A new brand
of brilliance, by
Eduardo Paolozzi.
1972. Lithograph,
29 by 41 cm.
(After 1947
collage, whereabouts unknown).
24. You can’t beat the
real thing, by Eduardo
Paolozzi. 1951.
Collage, 35.7 by 24
cm. (Victoria and
Albert Museum,
London).
(1944–45) and afterwards in London (1945–47), may have
been one reason for Paolozzi’s sense of his collages as private
working material.3 The collision of his scrapbook collage
aesthetic and his exposure to Surrealism, in part through the
agency of Nigel Henderson, whose mother, Wyn Henderson,
ran the Guggenheim Jeune Gallery, London, resulted in such
collages as Butterfly, dated by Paolozzi ‘1946’ (Fig.27).4 This
work comprises a page cut from a book (in this case Albert
Toft’s Modelling and Sculpture, first published in 1911),5 which
has been disrupted with the collaged addition of a picture of a
combustion engine in a manner reminiscent of Max Ernst.
One of Paolozzi’s most impressive and coherent scrapbooks,
the Psychological Atlas, dated 1949, carries the subtitle ‘Histoire
Naturelle’, referring directly to Ernst’s print series of 1925,
and comprises a series of ethnographically oriented images
that recall earlier Surrealist collage.6
What we know of Paolozzi’s subsequent stay in Paris
for two years from June 1947 is, largely by tradition, a story
recounting the vagaries of affinity and influence. He was in
contact with Giacometti and Dubuffet, and was also on
familiar terms with both Tristan Tzara and Mary Reynolds,
whose Duchamp collection he saw (in particular a large
collage of magazine images that Duchamp had apparently
made on a wall of Reynolds’s apartment which, unusually for
Duchamp, has not been listed as part of the artist’s œuvre).7 He
read Raymond Roussel and was influenced by Roussel’s
method of writing with ‘found’ phrases, as described in his
book Comment j’ai écrit certains de mes livres (1935). The degree
to which he benefited from contact with those such as Tzara
remains unclear. Nigel Henderson’s letters to his wife, Judith,
written during a stay in Paris in 1948, reveal Paolozzi’s friendships with artists to be a series of more or less surly conquests.8
Henderson also describes both Paolozzi’s love of Paris and
violent reaction ‘against anything “English”.’9 He recalls the
material deprivations of the time, describing how he managed
to procure drawing paper for Paolozzi and suggesting to
Judith that it was better to bring art materials from England.
Although there are no records of the details of what he saw,
there is little doubt that the principal influence on Paolozzi at
this time was what he later termed ‘the Surrealist investigation
I engaged myself in. . .’.10 Frank Whitford has recorded the
importance of Duchamp and of an exhibition of works by
Max Ernst at Raymond Duncan’s gallery in Paris.11 But there
was a clear distinction between the private results of these
‘Surrealist investigations’ and the ‘official’ work that Paolozzi
was making at that moment. His status was emphatically that
of a sculptor (at least this is how Brancusi introduced him
to Braque),12 and those works on paper that he did produce
were distinct in appearance from the Bunk collages (Fig.28).
They have been described as having ‘nothing whatever to
do with Surrealism and hark back to decorative Cubism and
to the papiers découpés of Matisse’.13
at the Central Collecting Point, Munich, from 9th June to 19th July 1949.
The scrapbook is held in London, Krazy Kat Arkive (designated by Paolozzi to
hold his collection of working material), Victoria and Albert Museum,
AAD/1985/3/6/7.
7 See, for example, U. Schneede: Eduardo Paolozzi, Cologne 1970.
8 ‘A great moment of my stay so far was a visit with Ed. to Fernand Leger [sic ] at
his studio. This is the sort of initiative of E’s that I admire without reservation. We
simply barged in – he led – I followed. Leger was most cordial & talked readily’.
Nigel Henderson to Judith Henderson, 28th August 1947; London, Tate Gallery
Archives (hereafter cited as TGA) 9211/1/1/9.
9 Ibid.
10 ‘Interview with Eduardo Paolozzi by Richard Hamilton’, Arts Yearbook 8 (1965),
reprinted in Spencer, op. cit. (note 2), pp.138–141, esp. p.139.
11 F. Whitford: ‘Eduardo Paolozzi’, in idem, ed.: exh. cat. Eduardo Paolozzi, London
(Tate Gallery) 1971, pp.6–29, esp. p.10. Whitford’s text is based on a series of conversations with Paolozzi from January to June 1971.
12 Nigel Henderson to Judith Henderson, 3rd September 1947, TGA, 9211/1/1/10.
13 Whitford, op. cit. (note 11), p.10.
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THE ‘BUNK’ COLLAGES OF EDUARDO PAOLOZZI
25. It’s daring it’s audacious, by Eduardo Paolozzi.
1949. Collage, 32.5 by 24.5 cm. (Krazy Kat Arkive,
Victoria and Albert Museum, London).
26. Fantastic weapons contrived, by Eduardo Paolozzi.
1972. Lithograph, 26 by 35 cm. (After 1952 collage,
whereabouts unknown).
27. Butterfly, by Eduardo Paolozzi. 1946. Collage.
(Whereabouts unknown).
It is often written that Paolozzi made collages from American magazines that he was given by ex-GIs stationed in Paris.14
Although it is plausible – Paolozzi and his English compatriots were very poor in comparison with American visitors – it
seems unlikely that this was a regular arrangement. Paolozzi
recalls that the ex-GI and painter Charlie Marks gave him a
number of copies of the New York-based journal View, from
which he ‘reaped images to make collages’.15 However, it is
not apparent that any image from View was used in a collage
made at this time or later, and certainly none was used in the
Bunk series. It is more likely that View would have been passed
to him by Mary Reynolds who was the Paris representative
of the magazine. In fact, the range of publications used
for the collages – individual cases are detailed below – suggests
a much broader pool of source material than American
magazines. Indeed, the majority of the collages were made in
London after his return in 1949, where such magazines
were readily available and enthusiastically collected by others
associated with the Independent Group.16
Even less is known about the first public presentation of the
Bunk collages at the inaugural meeting of the ‘Young Group’,
the precursor of the Independent Group, at the Institute of
Contemporary Arts in April 1952. This had been instigated by
Richard Lannoy and Dorothy Morland, with the help of Toni
del Renzio, to cater for the more avant-garde and intellectual
members of the Institute. Paolozzi projected collaged images
and details from these images using an epidiascope for a fairly
large and select audience who had turned up for the inaugural
meeting. Although there are no contemporary records, in
particular of the lecture being titled ‘Bunk’, a number of
published eyewitness accounts evoke the poignant atmosphere
of the evening: ‘I remember the prints steaming and peeling,
and the heavy sighs of Eduardo, and the fairly sarcastic attacks
of Reyner Banham’, Nigel Henderson told Dorothy Morland
during an interview about the ICA.17 In contrast to the intellectual approach of Banham and others, including John
McHale and Richard Hamilton, Paolozzi’s approach was for
Henderson refreshingly instinctive: ‘What I thought uniquely
valuable in Eduardo’s contribution (though he was no mean
articulator, but used, I thought, to get a bit muddled in his
terms) was sheer drive and virility, the gut reaction, which was
missing in the English scene’. This was the first presentation
of such material in an intellectual context, and was met with
‘disbelief and some hilarity’, as Paolozzi later recorded –
although this may have been due solely to Banham, whose
‘chuckles’ became ‘open laughing’, to the annoyance of many
attendees.18 According to Paolozzi, the Bunk images were
‘among’ the material that was projected, and there is little
14 For instance R. Miles: exh. cat. The Complete Prints of Eduardo Paolozzi. Prints,
drawings, collages 1944–77, London (Victoria and Albert Museum) 1977, p.8.
15 D. Robbins, ed.: The Independent Group: Postwar Britain and the Aesthetics of Plenty,
Cambridge, MA, and London 1990, p.192.
16 See J.P. Stonard: ‘Pop in the Age of Boom: Richard Hamilton’s “Just what is it
that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?”’, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE
149 (2007), pp.607–20.
17 Transcript of Dorothy Morland’s interview with Nigel Henderson, 17th August
1976, TGA, 955/1/14/6; see also Robbins, op. cit. (note 15), pp.21 and 94.
18 E. Paolozzi: ‘Eduardo Paolozzi, Retrospective Statement’, in Robbins, op. cit.
(note 15), pp.192–93. Information on Reyner Banham’s dismissive reaction from
Richard Lannoy; conversation with the present writer.
19 Unsigned catalogue entry, The Tate Gallery 1970–72 (biannual report), London 1972,
p.165.
20 It has been suggested that the exhibition Parallel of Life and Art, organised by
Paolozzi, Nigel Henderson and Alison and Peter Smithson at the Institute of
Contemporary Arts, London, in late 1953, was a response to Paolozzi’s epidiascope
lecture. But the material shown was of an entirely different order – scientific and
anthropological, rather than popular advertising.
21 M. Middleton: Eduardo Paolozzi, London 1963, unpaginated.
22 E. Paolozzi: The Metallization of a Dream, with a commentary by L. Alloway,
London 1963.
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THE ‘BUNK’ COLLAGES OF EDUARDO PAOLOZZI
reason to assume that the series as it is now known was
projected as a coherent whole at the 1952 lecture.19 At least
two of the collages (see Appendix, nos.2 and 38) had not
yet been made, as the source material indicates. It is more
plausible that Paolozzi took a selection of his collages and
scrapbooks, choosing some of the more striking images, and
that some of these later became enshrined in the Bunk series.
What can be stated with some certainty is that Paolozzi’s
presentation, although controversial, had little immediate
effect.20 Virtually all accounts of Paolozzi’s work published
before 1971 omit any reference to the Bunk collages. Michael
Middleton’s short monograph of 1962 identifies the importance of the collage technique, and of Paolozzi’s meetings with
Tzara, Giacometti and Brancusi in Paris, and his exposure to
Mary Reynolds’s Surrealist collection as well as his reading
of Roussel – but these experiences are seen as informing
his sculpture.21 Middleton writes that Paolozzi’s ‘collage conception’ culminated in the film History of Nothing completed
the same year. Those collages reproduced in The Metallization
of a Dream (1963), an examination of Paolozzi’s working
material with a commentary by Lawrence Alloway, were of
the ‘abstract’ type (Fig.28).22 Alloway’s text places Paolozzi
squarely in a humanistic tradition of expressive meaning: ‘Let
us consider Paolozzi as an example of the anthropomorphic
imagination’.23 Here there is clearly no place for Paolozzi as
the critic or enthusiast of consumer culture and Americana.
Alloway illustrates and describes a collage sheet from 1954
including images of Michelangelo’s David and a Churchman’s
cigarette card of Jack Johnson, a heavyweight boxer. Rather
than a collapsing of ‘high’ and ‘low’ categories, Alloway recommends Paolozzi’s interest in ‘patterns of connectivity’: ‘It is
the thickness of the world and of man’s artefacts in relation
to man that nourishes Paolozzi’s imagination’.24 The literalism
of Pop imagery is irrelevant – ‘the objects are turned into
symbols’, Alloway concludes.25 In his account of ‘The Development of British Pop’, published in 1966, Alloway describes
Paolozzi as an ‘important progenitor’ of Pop, but there is no
mention either of the Bunk collages or the 1952 lecture.26
It was not until 1970 that the Bunk collages resurfaced into
the consciousness both of the artist and his supporters.27 Yet
still the story emerged gradually; although Diane Kirkpatrick
made what may be one of the first published references to the
ICA projection in her monograph on Paolozzi published that
year, none of the collages was reproduced and the word
‘Bunk’ does not appear. Her description accords only in part
with the series: ‘The images ranging from a Swank man’s
jewellery advertisement from a 1938 magazine, through sheets
23
Ibid., p.15.
Ibid., p.38.
25 Ibid., p.59.
26 L. Alloway: ‘The Development of British Pop’, in L.R. Lippard, ed.: Pop Art,
London 1966, pp.27–68, esp. p.28.
27 Not one of the Bunk images was shown at the 1965 exhibition of Paolozzi’s work
at the Hatton Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne, although it included a selection of
drawings and collages from 1944: see exh. cat. Eduardo Paolozzi. Recent Sculpture,
Drawings and Collages, Newcastle upon Tyne (Hatton Gallery) 1965. More significant was the omission of the collages from the exhibition Pop Art Redefined, London
(Hayward Gallery) 1969.
28 D. Kirkpatrick: Eduardo Paolozzi, London 1970, p.84. Schneede, op. cit. (note 7),
24
28. Lotterie, by Eduardo Paolozzi. 1947. Collage. (Whereabouts unknown).
of US Army aircraft insignia and a Disney cartoon page
entitled “Mother Goose Goes to Hollywood”, to a scene of
New York Skyscrapers with a liner steaming up a background
river, a gorilla holding a swooning damsel, and a bumpy robot
pouring coffee for a scantily clad example of feminine
pulchritude’.28 The year 1970 was important for the reception
of Pop art in Britain. As Ben Highmore has recently noted
with reference to Richard Hamilton, it was in that year that
the ‘teleological story’ of Pop art was established: ‘the story
of how Richard Hamilton and other members of the Independent Group produced a prescient variety of pop art that
would go on to become a fully fledged movement, paralleling
its US variant’.29 If Hamilton, as Highmore suggests, was
established as the progenitor of Pop by his 1970 Tate Gallery
retrospective, then it was at least in part as a response to this
that the Tate retrospective of Paolozzi’s work just over one
year later similarly established his reputation.30 This was the
first time the collages had been shown in public since the 1952
projection.31 It is clear from Paolozzi’s printed annotations in
the exhibition catalogue – dates and comments written next
to reproductions of the Bunk collages – that he was concerned
to establish their precedent in the swiftly emerging story of
Pop. This point was not lost on close observers: Nigel Henderson, in a letter to his mother, described the process in
rather caustic terms: ‘There is a big attempt, both in the
exhib[ition] and in the catalogue to give him [Paolozzi]
primogeniture in the “Pop” idiom and, without doubt, here
my testimony is being solicited’. For Henderson this was
p.5, mentions the ICA projection briefly, but with no description of the contents
or reference to Bunk. He erroneously cites as a source Lawrence Alloway’s
‘The Development of British Pop’ (see note 26), but the essay has no mention of
the collage projection.
29 B. Highmore: ‘Richard Hamilton at the Ideal Home Exhibition of 1958’, Art
History 30, 5 (2007), pp. 712–37, esp. p.718.
30 The Hamilton retrospective ran from 12th March to 19th April 1970, Paolozzi’s
from 22nd September to 31st October 1971; see also the pioneering account in
A. Massey: The Independent Group. Modernism and Mass Culture in Britain 1945–59,
Manchester and New York 1995, pp.119–20.
31 Installation photographs in TGA show that all the collages were icluded in the
exhiition.
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‘Parish Pump Politics’, an ironic after-the-fact bestowal of status. Noting that Stuart Davis and Fernand Léger may equally
be considered as forerunners of Pop, Henderson continues:
. . . I would give Hamilton priority over EP, probably on
the grounds that the former traded under the sign of Pop
long before the latter who was so busy trying to satisfy,
flatter and please all & sundry (including himself) and, lacking (at that time, anyway) any revolutionary identification,
failed to see the possibilities of Pop as a graphic weapon of
social change. I think he now sees it and regrets it and would
like to falsify the record: for at the Tate he showed lots of
things torn from notebooks or portfolios (some of which I
can remember) of early date and which, though diminutive,
look authentic Pop by virtue of the idiom which others
have pioneered & some taken risks for. But the point is that
Paolozzi didn’t show these naughty, mocking irreverent
documents, didn’t take the risk of offending those in high
places which part of his Italian heritage makes him flatter
and seek – for reasons of personal prestige and gain.32
Henderson’s comments are in some respects unfair – Paolozzi
did show his collages (in 1952, and also his scrapbooks two
years later at the ICA exhibition Collages and Objects), and his
reluctance to develop the highly original use of popular advertising material was due at least in part to the negative response
to his bold ICA epidiascope projection. But it is also indisputable that Paolozzi wanted to establish his ‘primogeniture’ in a
manner that placed a heavy burden on hindsight. One of the
more well-known collages from the series, I was a rich man’s
plaything (Fig.29), was annotated by Paolozzi in the Tate catalogue with ‘The First Use of Pop? Collage, 1947’.33 There is
no guarantee that the collage was indeed made at this early
date, and even so, the use of the word ‘Pop’ (taken, as Paolozzi
later recalled, from the packet of a toy gun) was fortuitous, and
was by no means understood at this time as it was from the
mid-1950s by those associated with the Independent Group.
Paolozzi may nevertheless have considered the Tate
retrospective as something of a missed opportunity. In the
introductory text to the print portfolio Cloud Atomic Laboratory (1971), also shown in the Tate exhibition of that year,
Paolozzi complains that the ‘radical nature of this lecture
[the 1952 projection] has never properly been assessed but
is nevertheless homogeneous with the current paintings
and sculptures’.34 Although the Tate retrospective catalogue
mentions the epidiascope projection as part of a history of
the Independent Group, and the complete series of forty-five
collages was illustrated, the word ‘bunk’ was not mentioned
in relation to either, and it was clear that the story of Bunk
had yet to be properly formulated. Further, the collages had
still at this point not been given titles – Evadne in green dimension is annotated ‘Collage, 1952’. It seems highly likely that the
Bunk series was consolidated, in terms of selecting which
images were to be included and also finalising individual titles
32
Nigel Henderson to Wyn Henderson, 24th November 1971, TGA, 9211/1/2/4.
Most of the published handwritten annotations were made by Frank Whitford, to
Paolozzi’s dictations. This particular note was included by Paolozzi in Whitford's
absence. The catalogue was paid for to a large extent by Paolozzi. Thanks to Frank
Whitford for this information.
34 E. Paolozzi: introductory text to the print portfolio Cloud Atomic Laboratory, repr.
33
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29. I was a
rich man’s
plaything, by
Eduardo
Paolozzi.
1947.
Collage, 35.9
by 23.8 cm.
(Tate,
London).
30. Fun
helped them
fight, by
Eduardo
Paolozzi.
1947 [1948].
Collage, 25.6
by 17.6 cm.
(Victoria and
Albert
Museum,
London).
in Spencer, op. cit. (note 2), p.198.
35 E. Paolozzi: ‘About the Prints: The Artist Talking at an Interview’, interview with
C. Hogben and E. Bailey, in F. Whitford et al.: exh. cat. Bunk. A box-file of images
in print, London (Victoria and Albert Museum) 1973, unpaginated.
36 E. Paolozzi: ‘Paolozzi Explains About “Bash”’, Observer Magazine (19th September 1971), p.42; repr. in Spencer, op. cit. (note 2), p.219.
THE ‘BUNK’ COLLAGES OF EDUARDO PAOLOZZI
31. Will man outgrow the earth?, by Eduardo Paolozzi.
1972. Lithograph, 24 by 32 cm. (After 1952 collage,
36.3 by 25.7 cm, Victoria and Albert Museum, London).
32. Was this metal monster master or slave?, by
Eduardo Paolozzi. 1952. Collage, 36.2 by 24.8
cm. (Tate, London).
33. Vogue gorilla with Miss Harper, by Eduardo
Paolozzi. 1950. Collage, 19.5 by 32.5 cm. (Krazy
Kat Arkive, Victoria and Albert Museum, London).
and the name of the group as a whole, on the basis of those
collages chosen for reproduction in this catalogue. During an
interview the following year Paolozzi responded evasively to
the question as to whether the forty-five collages formed a
complete unit before the Tate exhibition, stating only that
‘some were chopped up, as I said, and used, and thrown
away’, but then confirming that all of the Bunk collages were
used in the 1952 ICA lecture.35 The later dates of a selection
of the collages indicates that this cannot be entirely true.
That even the title Bunk was chosen at this time (there is no
documentary record of it referring to the 1952 epidiascope
projection) and had not previously been associated with this
particular set of collages can be inferred from Paolozzi’s
description of the screenprint B.A.S.H., which was produced
at the time of the Tate retrospective. In his account of
B.A.S.H., published in the Observer Magazine three days
before the opening of the Tate exhibition, Paolozzi states
that he had originally wanted to call the work ‘Bunk!’ as a way
of distinguishing it from Pop.36 The Tate retrospective
included, as the press release revealed, a ‘continuous slide
show of images from popular sources, similar to those which
Paolozzi projected at the now historic first meeting of the
Independent Group in 1952’.37 Again, there was no mention
of the word ‘bunk’ in relation to the projection.
Paolozzi had begun planning the creation of a print portfolio of the Bunk collages at the time of the Tate exhibition.
Given the availability of the collaged material that he had
amassed and his concern to publicise his pioneering interest
and display of such material, it was a natural choice to return
to the early collages. The degree to which the Bunk series was
in fact created at this point has rarely been observed: Marco
Livingstone is one of the few writers to have acknowledged
their retrospective evaluation.38 Alongside the publication of
the collages as prints, it was at this moment that the original
collages were accorded full artistic status and began to enter
museum collections. Following his retrospective Paolozzi
donated ten of the Bunk collages to the Tate Gallery (see
Appendix for details).39 As a letter from Richard Morphet to
Paolozzi of the following year makes clear, Paolozzi had
offered clarification on the titles of the individual collages
by providing the Tate with the information sheets that were
to accompany the print series.40
A description of the creation of the print portfolio is beyond
the scope of this article.41 It is important however to note that
the first full and complete catalogue list of the series, with titles,
was created for the boxed set of prints (produced in an edition
of fifty deluxe sets and one hundred standard sets, with an
introductory essay by Frank Whitford). The life of Bunk from
that moment forward is the life of the print series, rather than
the collages themselves, some of which, Paolozzi later claimed,
were at that point thrown away.42 A touring exhibition
the next year titled Bunk. A box-file of images in print, organised
by the Victoria and Albert Museum, consolidated public
knowledge of the series. The story was further galvanised by
Wieland Schmied’s essay ‘Bunk, Bash and Pop’, first published
in the catalogue of Paolozzi’s exhibition at the Nationalgalerie,
37
included in the Krazy Kat Arkive in the same museum (see Appendix).
40 R. Morphet to E. Paolozzi, 24th July 1972, TGA 4/2/805/2.
41 See the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of Paolozzi’s prints by Daniel Herrmann.
42 Robin Spencer has suggested that this is highly unlikely; conversation with the
present writer, 2008.
Press release: ‘Eduardo Paolozzi’ (18th June 1971), TGA 92/239/1.
M. Livingstone: Pop Art. A Continuing History, London 1990, p.34.
39 A further five were included in an exhibition at the Anthony D’Offay Gallery,
London, in 1977 (Appendix, nos.7, 11, 21a, 30 and 37). Twelve entered the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1985 (see Appendix), and four were
38
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THE ‘BUNK’ COLLAGES OF EDUARDO PAOLOZZI
34. Trigger assembly removal, by Eduardo Paolozzi. 1972. Lithograph, 25 by 38 cm.
(After 1950 collage, whereabouts unknown).
35. ‘Strobe-Strip’ photographs of Winnie Garret, by Phillipe Halsman, from US
Camera (1950).
Berlin, in 1975, and reprinted for the catalogue accompanying
the Arts Council touring exhibition the following year.43 This
contains all the elements of the Bunk myth – the sensational
epidiascope presentation, the prophetic engagement with
popular material from American publications, the excitement
and pure improvisatory zeal of Paolozzi’s engagement with
his source material.44 But if the effects of this presentation, as
Schmied continues, were first felt only four years later at
the exhibition This is Tomorrow, there is little indication that
Paolozzi was acknowledged or that anyone realised the importance of the Bunk collages as prototypes of a new movement
for at least another twenty years. From then, publications dispensed with Paolozzi the Brutalist sculptor and grounded his
‘collage conception’ in the early collages, the visit to Paris, the
contact with Surrealism and the famous lecture at the
ICA on his return. The catalogue for his 1976 exhibition at
the Kestner Gesellschaft in Hanover contains a small selection
of the Bunk collages interspersed with spreads from the Psychological Atlas scrapbook. Most of the catalogue texts dealt with
the Bunk collages and the questions raised by them.
Against this background of reception and reassessment, a
more detailed analysis of individual works may be offered.
The sheer number of images complicates such an analysis, as
does the lack of narrative progression through the series
and the apparently random order in which they are presented. For the sake of clarity, comment on the themes and
sources by which the collages are related may be set out by
dividing the series into three main types. First, the ‘readymade’ type, or single unaltered tearsheet; second, the ‘layout
proposition’ type, which sees Paolozzi apparently experimenting with page layout schemes; and last the ‘composite’
type, more pictorial collages that relate to a tradition that may
be traced back to the Dada photomontage of Hannah Höch
and Raoul Hausmann.
Paolozzi retrospectively referred to the source material
for his collages as ‘ready made metaphors’, but the category
can be further refined to refer to those Bunk works that are
not in fact collages but simply tearsheets re-presented as works
of art.45 Of these, Vogue gorilla with Miss Harper (Fig.33) is
the most direct presentation of an image cut from a magazine
(in this case the source is indicated in the title) and presented
whole. Comparison of several works of this ‘readymade’ type
shows that Paolozzi’s principle of selection was often determined by the ‘collaged’ nature of the source – unexpected
juxtapositions that often take on a trompe-l’œil quality. This
43 L. Grisebach, ed.: exh. cat. Eduardo Paolozzi: Skulpturen, Zeichnungen, Collagen,
Berlin (Nationalgalerie) 1975; W. Schmied: ‘Bunk, Bash, Pop’, in F. Whitford, R.
Spencer and W. Schmied: exh. cat., Eduardo Paolozzi, London and touring (Arts
Council) 1976–77, pp.21–25.
44 Ibid., p.21.
45 Paolozzi, op. cit. (note 35), unpaginated.
46 S.E. Jones: ‘Fun Helped The Fight’, National Geographic 93 (January 1948),
illustration on p.97. Paolozzi incorrectly dated this collage to 1947 in the 1971
Tate catalogue.
47 Six further images can be put in the ‘Readymade’ group: New life for old radios; 2000
horses and turbo-powered; Goering with wings; Mother Goose goes to Hollywood, an advertisement for the Disney cartoon of the same name, released in 1938, that placed
caricatures of well-known Hollywood actors in fairy-tale roles; North Dakota’s lone sky
scraper, which was taken from a special issue of National Geographic devoted to North
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36. Yours till the
boys come home, by
Eduardo Paolozzi.
1951. Collage, 36.2
by 24.8 cm. (Tate,
London).
THE ‘BUNK’ COLLAGES OF EDUARDO PAOLOZZI
principle is clear in Fun helped them fight (Fig.30), a single
unaltered sheet from National Geographic (January 1948) showing a B-17 bomber plane at an English base being attended
by a ground crew. The cartoon character painted onto the
fuselage of the aircraft appears at first sight to have been
collaged onto it by Paolozzi himself, but is in fact part of the
source photograph. It is taken from an article illustrating the
informal customising of American aircraft by their crews –
a type of vernacular proto-Pop art, it may be suggested.46
Other ‘readymade’ collages are presented in the form
of magazine covers, such as Was this metal monster master or
slave? (Fig.32), which shows the cover of a science fiction
magazine dated February 1952. The cover of Time magazine
used for Will man outgrow the earth? (Fig.31) is dated 8th
December 1952, but the wear and tear on the cover suggests
that at least a few months, if not more, had passed before
Paolozzi affixed it to a backing sheet and preserved it as a
collage – an important point to bear in mind.47 Equally
intriguing ‘readymade’ tearsheets are those taken directly
from magazine articles. Fantastic weapons contrived (taken from
Life International of 24th September 1951; Fig.26) presents a
single unaltered page from an article about the ‘fantastic’
atomic weapons announced in Congress by President
Truman earlier that year.48 A strange collage of two pages, one
from Time magazine of March 1952, is presented in Electric
arms and hands also showing love is better than ever, the title taken
from a collaged sentence constructed from the two sheets.49
That the front page of a newspaper or a single sheet from a
magazine could be considered a work of art was suggested in
1951 by Marshall McLuhan in his book The Mechanical Bride.
37. Double-page spread from US Camera (1950) showing source material for
Paolozzi’s Take-off.
By creating connections between disparate elements, he
argues, the pages of modern newspapers provide an equivalent
for the universalism found in modern art and science: ‘the
French Symbolists, followed by James Joyce in Ulysses, saw
that there was a new art form of universal scope present in
the technical layout of the modern newspaper’.50
The second group of Bunk collages extends the principle of
selection into experimentation with page layout. Improved
beans, for example, shows two advertisements collaged side
by side in what seems like a mock-up double-page spread
from a magazine such as the Ladies’ Home Journal. The image
of Van Camps beans on the right was indeed taken from the
39. Take-off, by Eduardo
Paolozzi. 1950. Collage,
34.5 by 23.5 cm. (Dean
Gallery, Scottish
National Gallery of
Modern Art,
Edinburgh).
38. See them? A
baby’s life is not all
sunshine!, by Eduardo Paolozzi. 1948.
Collage, 28 by 38
cm. (Krazy Kat
Arkive,
Victoria and Albert
Museum, London).
Dakota (September 1951, p.291) and was presented in the 1971 Tate catalogue (where
it is incorrectly dated to 1950) on the same sheet as Will alien powers invade the Earth?,
a science-fiction illustration taken by Paolozzi and shown without alteration.
48 ‘Fantastic Weapons. What some of the talk is about’, Life International 160 (24th
September 1951), pp.121–24 and 129. The page excised by Paolozzi opposes a
science fiction-style illustration of jet planes mounting a ‘stratospheric attack [. . .]
armed with atomic warheads’. Photographs from Life were the subject of an exhibition staged at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in March 1952, shortly before the
epidiascope projection.
49 The column on the right is taken from Time (24th March 1952), reporting on the
film Retreat, Hell!, inspired by the Korean War.
50 M. McLuhan: The Mechanical Bride, New York 1951, p.4.
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THE ‘BUNK’ COLLAGES OF EDUARDO PAOLOZZI
40. You’ll soon
be congratulating
yourself!, by
Eduardo
Paolozzi. 1949.
Collage, 30.5
by 23 cm.
(Victoria and
Albert
Museum,
London).
41. Real gold, by
Eduardo Paolozzi.
1950. Collage,
35.6 by 23.5 cm.
(Tate, London).
December 1946 issue of that magazine, cut in half to omit a
diagonal strip of text.51 Such layout propositions are also used
in two other related collages: No 0ne’s sure how good it is, a
horizontal juxtaposition of a laboratory interior above a citystreet scene showing a lorry advertising Alfalfa. As with
Fun helped them fight, Paolozzi has selected a deceptive image of
collage in the real world – here the two female figures that
appear to be standing on the lorry are cardboard cut-outs.52
Four further collages of the ‘layout’ type are related by a single
source. Windtunnel test shows six images of a man’s face at progressive stages of distortion with exposure to a high-velocity
air current. The collage itself has been inscribed with its source:
US Camera from 1950.53 This was an annual compendium of
the work of well-known professional photographers, including both reportage and ‘art’ photography. The sequence of the
photographs in Windtunnel test has been switched to disrupt a
chronological reading, and the sheets have been affixed to a
sheet of blue paper which itself appears to be attached to the
detached front or back boards of a book. Trigger assembly
removal (Fig.34) is a similar rearrangement of sequential images
taken from the same edition of US Camera, ‘strobe-strip’
photographs of the well-known striptease artist Winnie
Garret taken by the photographer Phillipe Halsman (Fig.35).54
Halsman’s photographs were also used in Yours till the boys
come home (Fig.36), which combines the two larger images of
Winnie Garret with three of an aircraft after an accident, taken
from the same edition of US Camera.55 These crash photographs were taken by Naval photographers in the Pacific
during the War, and were chosen by ‘Capt. Edward Steichen,
in command of Navy Combat photography’ as a tribute to war
photographers.56 Winnie Garret’s pose in the top photograph
is dramatised by its combination with the flight deck crash,
while the naval photographs take their place within the erotic
sequence. Again, McLuhan’s analysis of American advertising
in The Mechanical Bride provides illuminating contemporary
background to Paolozzi’s preoccupations, particularly his
description of advertising as a revelation of the ‘interfusion
of sex and technology’.57 In effect, Yours till the boys come home
shows Paolozzi taking raw photographic material and creating
juxtapositions that adopt the language of advertising without
referring to a particular product. For sale, it may be said, is
the language of advertising itself. Paolozzi repeated this
combination in a further collage made with material from
US Camera of 1950, the collage Take-off (Fig.39), showing a
leaping ice skater whose pose provides a dynamic response to
the image above of a plane preparing for take-off. Both these
images derive from a double-page spread in the advertising
section of US Camera of 1950 (Fig.37).58
A further common source for collage material was the
Ladies’ Home Journal, a leading American magazine and one
of the most frequently cited sources of advertising imagery
for English artists in the post-War period.59 Advertisements
51
illustrated in the 1971 Tate catalogue and appears to have been appended at a later
moment.
55 Ibid., p.13. Paolozzi captions this in the 1971 Tate catalogue as ‘US Camera, 1951’,
a rare moment of post-dating.
56 Ibid., p.11.
57 McLuhan, op. cit. (note 50), p.94. Robin Spencer provides an excellent account of
McLuhan’s writings in relation to the Bunk collages, without commenting on the
possibility of a direct influence; see Spencer, op. cit. (note 2), pp.20–24.
58 Two further ‘layout’ collages may be connected by source material: both Folks
always invite me for the holidays and What a treat for a nickel! use Planters Peanuts advertisements taken from the Ladies’ Home Journal.
59 See Stonard, op. cit. (note 16), p.615.
The format is used elsewhere to create front- and back-cover spreads. The ultimate
planet combines the cover of Thrilling Wonder Stories, a collection of pulp science fiction published in April 1949, and Science Fantasy (Spring 1952), published just in time
for the ICA projection. Similarly, Headlines from horrorsville shows the cover of the first
issue of Unknown Worlds (1948) and that of Popular Mechanics from January 1951.
52 A similar combination of serious and popular science is provided by Merry Xmas with
T-1 space suits, which shows an image of ‘T-1 Space Suits’, constructed from a doublepage spread over a similarly patched-together image of toy ‘rocket guns and interplanetary ships’ which will ‘whoosh down U.S. chimneys for 1952’s space-suited kids’.
53 T. Maloney, ed.: US Camera Annual 1950. International Edition, New York 1949,
pp.332–33.
54 Ibid, pp.160–61. It is the only Bunk collage used in the print portfolio that was not
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THE ‘BUNK’ COLLAGES OF EDUARDO PAOLOZZI
42. Refreshing and
delicious, by Eduardo
Paolozzi. 1949. Collage,
39.4 by 27.9 cm.
(Collection Jeffery
Sherwin).
43. Double-page spread from the Yale Iron scrapbook, by Eduardo Paolozzi.
(Krazy Kat Arkive, Victoria and Albert Museum, London)
for Johnson’s Baby Powder, featuring a giant baby and
diminutive mother appeared in the magazine around 1946
to 1947, four of which were brought together by Paolozzi
to form See them? A baby’s life is not all sunshine! (Fig.38).60
Paolozzi also mined the Ladies’ Home Journal for source
material to create It’s a psychological fact pleasure helps your
disposition, the title of which was a slogan used for a
number of years to advertise Camel cigarettes, here taken as a
general mantra of the meeting of psychology, consumption
and the new concept of market research. Both interiors
depicted in the collage were taken from the same issue of the
Ladies’ Home Journal (April 1947), the top from an advertisement for gasoline (p.86), the bottom from an advertisement
for Johnson’s Glo-Coat floor polish (p.110). It is clear that
Paolozzi’s intention in pasting in figures from other advertisements 61 was not to create collage-like discrepancies of scale or
Surreal juxtapositions of foreign bodies, but rather to create a
new, seamless image. This effect may be seen in a number of
the Bunk works. Whereas photographic images, or at least
magazine spreads, were selected on the basis that they were
already collage, a sort of pre-collage perhaps, Paolozzi’s
manipulation of the material often ‘de-collages’ the material,
in the sense of creating new naturalistic scenarios (for similar
seamless collages, see Appendix, nos.13, 30 and 35). Henderson was right to suggest that the Bunk collages were by no
means ‘graphic weapons of social change’.62
The third group within the Bunk series can be identified
from their composite, pictorial nature. Although these too are
hardly ‘graphic weapons’, and may even be described in terms
of a consumerist pastoral, they still more readily evoke the
traditional photomontage of John Heartfield or Max Ernst.
Paolozzi is at his most critical when he is effacing works of
art – or at least reproductions. Sack-o-sauce affixes a variety of
popular imagery, including a hand proffering a tin of Wiener
hot dogs containing its own ‘sack of sauce’, over a work by
Joan Miró – in this case a photolithograph called Summer taken
from Verve of October 1938. The new landscape Paolozzi
creates seems at least partially sympathetic to the original. His
treatment of another source is far more dismissive. Although
Evadne in green dimension (Fig.22) gives the series its name
by the inclusion of the word ‘Bunk!’,63 the strange title of
the work is derived from a painting by the German émigré
impresario Jack Bilbo. A one-time bodyguard of Al Capone
and career conman, Bilbo turned to art and opened a gallery of
modern painting, improbably, in London during the Blitz.64 In
1948 he published his vastly egotistical autobiography, complete with extensive text and numerous images, reproduced as
stuck-down plates.65 His painting Evadne in green dimension,
from 1945, is typical of his amateur efforts, and Paolozzi clearly had no reservations about dispensing with the pasted-down
illustration and using both the page and (when he came to
naming the collage in 1972) the title of Bilbo’s painting. The
title sheds little light on the subject of the collage, which shows
a bodybuilder and pin-up figure in a relation that looks
forward to the Adam and Eve characters that were to appear
in Richard Hamilton’s Just what is it that makes today’s homes so
different, so appealing? (1956). As with Hamilton’s collage, most
of Paolozzi’s titles are derived from advertising copy, and often
60 The title, first given in the 1972 print portfolio, is a misreading of the slightly
unusual typeface, partly missing from the original advertisement, which appeared in
April 1946, that reads ‘See Mom? A Baby’s Life isn’t all Sunshine!’.
61 The bottom figure is found in an advertisement for Simoniz floor polish, included in the Ladies’ Home Journal (June 1949).
62 Other images of the ‘layout’ type are: Man holds the key; Has jazz a future?; Hazards
include dust, hailstones and bullets, which was paired with Survival in the 1972 portfolio;
Poor Eleanor knows them by heart; Shots from peep show, which appears at first as a ‘readymade’ tearsheet, but a closer look reveals that the figure on the right is collaged; and
Never leave well enough alone, the only image listed in the 1971 Tate catalogue as a
‘Scrapbook page’, and which may still exist as such. Its title is that of the autobiography
of Raymond Loewy, the designer of the Studebaker illustrated on the left side.
63 The source for the Charles Atlas figure is often given as the December 1936 issue
of Mechanics and Handicraft (e.g., M. Francis: Pop, London 2005, p.51). This is visibly
not the case as a comparison of the lettering for the word ‘Bunk!’ shows. An example of the advertisement for the Charles Atlas ‘dynamic tension’ method can be found
in the October 1952 issue of GI Joe comic.
64 See J. Vinzent: ‘Muteness as Utterance of a Forced Reality – Jack Bilbo’s Modern
Art Gallery (1941–1948)’, in S. Behr and M. Malet, eds.: Arts in Exile in Britain
1933–1945. Politics and cultural identity, The Yearbook of the Research Centre for German
and Austrian Exile Studies 6, Amsterdam and New York 2004, pp.301–38.
65 J. Bilbo: Jack Bilbo, an autobiography, London 1948. Other collages by Paolozzi, though
not from the Bunk series, use illustrated pages torn from Bilbo’s book and replicate
the titles, for instance Holiday and Sadistic confession, both erroneously dated to 1947.
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THE ‘BUNK’ COLLAGES OF EDUARDO PAOLOZZI
appear within the collage itself. You’ll soon be congratulating
yourself! (Fig.40) is a precursor of Hamilton’s collage, using an
earlier advertisement for Armstrong Floors (Hamilton had
used one published in 1955) and similarly taking the title from
a line in the advertising copy, visible just above the image.66
One further source may be used to group the works. The
backing sheet for You’ll soon be congratulating yourself! was taken
from an unidentified book on interior decoration, which
was also used as the basis for two other ‘composite’ collages
from the Bunk series. Paolozzi often used printed books as
scrapbooks, and it is likely that these collages were taken from
such a source. Meet the people is made from five elements
affixed to a page from this spiral-bound book, including a
large photograph of the Hollywood actress Lucille Ball. As
Mark Francis has noted, Paolozzi dated the collage to the same
year that Ball became a household name, owing to her success
in the CBS radio programme My Favourite Husband. She
was a ‘commonly recognised icon in magazines and on the
airwaves, like the food and drink products, the serving
suggestions and the mouse cartoon character, which all seem
to be vying for equal billing in the artist’s composition’.67
The point is important – within the composite type images,
but also with the series as a whole, Paolozzi appears intent
on creating some sort of natural space where heterogeneous
elements can co-exist: collage is used as a way of creating links
and associations, rather than forcing dissonance.
A sheet from the spiral-bound decoration book was also
used as a backing for a further collage of the composite
type, Real gold (Fig.41). The title derives from the tin of
Real Gold lemon juice, displaying two ripe fruit that Paolozzi
has cheerily juxtaposed with the bosom of the cover girl of
Breezy Stories. This is the 1948 British edition of the magazine
(Paolozzi has obscured these cover details with the orange
star bearing the numeral ‘6’).68 Many advertising sources
similar to those used in Meet the people and Real gold can be
found in Paolozzi’s Yale Iron scrapbook (so called because of
the advertisement for Yale domestic irons pasted on the cover;
Fig.43).69 Yale Iron is distinct from the nine other scrapbooks
held in this archive (in particular from the Pyschological
Atlas, mentioned above) in that it comprises glossy colour
advertisements taken exclusively from Ladies’ Home Journaltype publications. None of the Bunk collages was taken
from the Yale Iron scrapbook, which remains intact, and is
more of an archival accumulation of material. Refreshing and
delicious (Fig.42) is also of the ‘Yale Iron’ type, showing on the
left side an advertisement for Ivory Flakes washing powder,
taken from the Ladies’ Home Journal (April 1947), and on
the right side an advertisement for Kool-Aid, taken from
the July 1949 issue of the same magazine (the facing page
of which provided the Planter’s advertisement used in What
a treat for a nickel!).
66 The female figure collaged naturalistically into the interior is the actress Paulette
Goddard, taken from an advertisement for Lipton Tea from the Ladies’ Home Journal
(April 1947).
67 Francis, op. cit. (note 63), p.51.
68 The striking cover is by the illustrator Enoch Bolles, often credited with creating
the pin-up genre. His female figures have been described as the ‘embodiment of
several styles and eras; from the Edwardian, to the flapper to the vamp’; see J. Raglin:
‘Beauty by Design: The Art of Enoch Bolles’, Illustration Magazine 9 (2004), pp.4–30.
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44. Hi-Ho, by
Eduardo Paolozzi.
1947. Collage, 37.9
by 24 cm. (Victoria
and Albert Museum,
London).
Only a selection of source material and contextual information can be presented here. Themes identified, including the
collaged nature of source material, ‘collage in the real world’,
perhaps; the combination of female figures and technology,
particularly military; the overwriting of fine art with popular
imagery, as well as the repeated use of particular source books
and magazines, may be extended to other collages in the
series, and also to the numerous images in contemporaneous
scrapbooks.
A further question that can be dealt with only briefly here is
that of dating. It is widely held that the dating of many of
the collages is spurious and, as examples cited above show,
these suspicions are entirely justified. In some cases Paolozzi’s
backdating of the collages is obvious, and naïve. The dynamics
of biology is given in the 1971 Tate catalogue as 1950, but shows
clearly the source image as the cover of Life magazine of
22nd September 1952. But this should not always be taken as
evidence of a breathless effort to establish ‘primogeniture’;
two decades had elapsed, and the exact sequence was most
probably beyond accurate recall. It seems clear from their
physical condition that certain tearsheets, in particular comic
and magazine covers, were affixed in their current form much
later than the 1952 projection. Hi-Ho (Fig.44), for example,
features the cover of the second issue of Hi-Ho Comics, published in 1946 (showing the character ‘Lil Chief Hot Shot’
attacking a character who may be identified with a Japanese
soldier), above which are pasted a fantasy mechanical skeleton
of a man and an unappetising plate of food. The elements are
69
London, Victoria and Albert Museum, Krazy Kat Arkive, AAD1985/3/6/2.
E. Paolozzi: ‘Collage or a Scenario for a Comedy of Critical Hallucination’, in exh.
cat. Eduardo Paolozzi, Collages and Drawings, London (Anthony D’Offay Gallery)
1977; repr. in Spencer, op. cit. (note 2), p.251.
71 W. Konnertz: Eduardo Paolozzi, Cologne 1984, p.196.
72 B. Groys: ‘Art as the Attribution of Worth to the Worthless’, in M. Stockebrand
and B. Groys: exh. cat. Geld spielt keine Rolle: Georg Herold, Cologne (Kölnischer
Kunstverein) 1990.
70
THE ‘BUNK’ COLLAGES OF EDUARDO PAOLOZZI
in poor condition, the magazine frayed at the edges, with a
strip of Sellotape that once held the spine together still in place.
The date given in the 1971 Tate catalogue is 1947, although
the state of the cover of the comic book indicates more than a
year’s wear. A similar point may be made for You can’t beat the
real thing (Fig.24), which comprises a cover for Cover Girls
Models magazine of October 1951 placed over the cover of
another magazine dated January 1950, which can be identified
as Scientific American. An advertisement for Firestone Tyres has
been placed beneath the model, identified as Lila Leeds (the
‘Bad Girl’ Hollywood actress who was notorious for having
been arrested in 1948 with Robert Mitchum and charged with
possession of marijuana). In both cases it seems that Paolozzi
dated the collage to the year of publication of the source material, which may suggest that as ‘readymades’ this date was more
important than the year the collage was assembled.
Beyond the question of dating, the poor physical quality
of the collages is of interest for other, more interpretative,
reasons. It was only once used-up, out-of-date, creased,
stained and torn that the sources became viable as collage
material. Paolozzi appears to have been strongly aware of
this, once recording that ‘the word collage is inadequate
because the concept should include damage, erase, destroy,
deface and transform – all parts of a metaphor for the creative
act itself’.70 A new brand of brilliance (Fig.23) uses the cover of
Picture Post from 13th March 1943, showing Fred Astaire
and Rita Hayworth dancing, below which the banner from a
later issue of the same publication (2nd October 1943) has
been affixed. The importance of the damage to the cover,
which is held together with sections of brown gum strip, is
signified by its accurate reproduction in the 1972 lithograph
of the collage (although the original collage has not been
located, it is reasonable to assume that it is the source of these
signs of wear). Winfried Konnertz compares Paolozzi’s efforts
to reproduce these signs of damage and rudimentary repair
with Duchamp’s creation of his Boîte-en-valise, although the
comparison may be better made with the Green box, for which
Duchamp recreated the many irregular scraps of paper that
contained notes relating to the Large glass.71 The comparison
may also be extended to Duchamp’s readymades themselves,
which suffered neglect for a number of years, and in a
number of cases were thrown away, before being revived
through replicas made at a much later date. It may seem
as integral to the fate of ‘readymade’ art that it sustains a
burden of anonymity before achieving full artistic value, but
only as a result of nostalgia for lost origins. It is in this sense
that the notion of the readymade converges with that of
reception in the historiography of art. In a different context,
Boris Groys has described the conservative, even reactionary
affinity between art and ‘garbage’ as an ‘aestheticisation of
poverty’ that reflects on the ‘electness’ of art – ‘the miracle
of value produced by a single touch of the artist or saint’.72
In either case, behind both the original creation of the
Bunk series and their replication as a print series in 1972 is
an impulse towards preservation of the forgotten and the
devalued, or perhaps an ecological principle of recycling
and revaluation, which was to become one of the most salient,
yet unexamined, aspects of Pop art.
Appendix
Complete list of collages in Eduardo Paolozzi’s ‘Bunk’ series.
All dates are those given in the 1971 Tate Gallery retrospective catalogue. Terminus
post quem dates based on the research presented here are given in square brackets.
Many of those collages marked ‘untraced’ may be assumed to remain in Paolozzi’s
personal archive, unavailable to the present writer.
1. Evadne in green dimension. 1952. 33.1 by 25.4 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum,
Prints and Drawings collection, London.
2. Will man outgrow the earth?. 1952. 36.3 by 25.7 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum,
Prints and Drawings collection, London.
3. Fun helped them fight. 1947 [1948]. 25.6 by 17.6 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum,
Prints and Drawings collection, London.
4. The ultimate planet. 1952. 25.1 by 38.1 cm. Tate, London.
5. See them? A baby’s life is not all sunshine!. 1948. 28 by 38 cm. Krazy Kat Arkive,
Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
6. Sack-o-sauce. 1948, 35.6 by 26.4 cm. Tate, London.
7. Take-off. 1950. Dean Gallery, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art,
Edinburgh.
8a. Hazards include dust, hailstones and bullets. 1950. 24.8 by 18.6 cm. Victoria and
Albert Museum, Prints and Drawings collection, London.
8b. Survival. 1950. 24.8 by 18.6 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum, Prints and
Drawings collection, London.
9. Was this metal monster master or slave?. 1952. 36.2 by 24.8 cm. Tate, London.
10. Meet the people. 1948, 35.9 by 24.1 cm. Tate, London.
11. Improved beans. 1949. Untraced.
12. Refreshing and delicious. 1949. Collection Jeffery Sherwin.
13. You’ll soon be congratulating yourself!. 1949. 30.5 by 23 cm. Victoria and Albert
Museum, Prints and Drawings collection, London.
14. Goering with wings. 1941. Untraced.
15. Real gold. 1950. 35.6 by 23.5 cm. Tate, London.
16. Fantastic weapons contrived. 1952. Untraced.
17. Has jazz a future?. 1944. Untraced.
18. Vogue gorilla with Miss Harper. 1950. 19.5 by 32.5 cm. Krazy Kat Arkive, Victoria
and Albert Museum, London.
19. Electric arms and hands also showing love is better than ever. 1952. Untraced.
20. It’s daring it’s audacious. 1949, 32.5 by 24.5 cm. Krazy Kat Arkive, Victoria and
Albert Museum, London.
21a. North Dakota’s lone sky scraper. 1950. Untraced.
21b. Will alien powers invade the Earth?. 1950. Untraced.
22. Windtunnel test. 1950. 24.8 by 36.5 cm. Tate, London.
23. New life for old radios. 1952. Untraced.
24. 2000 horses and turbo-powered. 1952. Untraced.
25. I was a rich man’s plaything. 1947 [1951]. 35.9 by 23.8 cm. Tate, London.
26. Never leave well enough alone. 1949. Untraced.
27. No one’s sure how good it is. 1952. 30.5 by 16.1 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum,
Prints and Drawings collection, London.
28. Man holds the key. 1950. 36.4 by 25.4 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum, Prints
and Drawings collection, London.
29. Merry Xmas with T-1 space suits. 1952. 38.2 by 28.5 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum, Prints and Drawings collection, London.
30. A new brand of brilliance. 1947. Untraced.
31. Hi-Ho. 1947, 25.6 by 17.6 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum, Prints and Drawings collection, London.
32. You can’t beat the real thing. 1951. 35.7 by 24 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum,
Prints and Drawings collection, London.
33. It’s a psychological fact pleasure helps your disposition. 1950. 36.2 by 24.4 cm. Tate,
London.
34. Mother Goose goes to Hollywood. 1948. Untraced.
35. Shots from peep show. 1952. 30.8 by 34.2 cm. Krazy Kat Arkive, Victoria
and Albert Museum, London.
36. Lessons of last time. 1947, 22.9 by 31.1 cm. Tate, London.
37. A funny thing happened on the way to the airport. 1952. Untraced.
38. The dynamics of biology, 1950 [1952]. Untraced.
39. Poor Eleanor knows them by heart. 1952. 24.8 by 20.5 cm. Krazy Kat Arkive,
Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
40. Write Dept P-I for beautiful full-colour catalog. 1949. Untraced.
41. Folks always invite me for the holidays. 1949. Untraced.
42. What a treat for a nickel!. 1950. Untraced.
43. Yours till the boys come home. 1951. 36.2 by 24.8 cm. Tate, London.
44. Headlines from horrorsville. 1951. 25.3 by 39 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum,
Prints and Drawings collection, London.
45. Trigger assembly removal. 1950. Untraced.
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