Freda Paolozzi (1925-2023)

Freda Madge Elliott was born on 23 December 1925. Showing an early interest in fashion and design, she enrolled in classes in life drawing and dress design at Central School of Art. In 1943, she met Eduardo Paolozzi at the International Youth Centre on Sloane Street. At the time he was a young army recruit in the Royal Pioneer Corps, but left the following year to return to art school, attending the Slade School of Fine Art that had relocated to Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum for the duration of the War. Desperate to leave the suffocating confines of prescribed artistic tuition Eduardo moved to Paris in 1947. Freda in turn left home and rented a room from Paolozzi’s Slade School friend Nigel Henderson and his wife Judith who were living in Chisenhale Road, Bethnal Green at the time. There she continued to work for Botteschi, a boutique workshop making bespoke garments, as well as modelling at Central School of Art for the fashion department.

Having saved enough money, Freda moved to Paris in 1948 to be with Paolozzi. They rented an attic room in the Rue Bude on the Ile Saint Louis. Without a work permit Freda was unable to be officially employed but took temporary jobs as varied as childcare and working in the poste restante at the American Embassy. Initially befriended by the artist Peter Rose-Pulham and his wife Mary, their circle of friends grew to include artists, writers and American ex-servicemen who were funded by the G.I. Bill of Rights.

Returning to England in 1949, Freda and Eduardo were married in 1951 and Freda worked as a gallery assistant at the Institute of Contemporary Art, where the Independent Group would begin to meet in 1952. This important collective, comprised of such figures as Richard Hamilton, Reyner Banham, and Toni del Renzio, challenged notions of modernist art and high culture and it was here in 1952 that Paolozzi was to give his now infamous Bunk! Lecture. Out of the Independent Group emerged Pop Art with Dorothy Morland, the longtime director of the ICA, and close friend of Freda’s, christened the ‘guardian angel’ of Pop Art.

In 1954, marked by Freda’s aesthetic inclinations, Eduardo co-founded Hammer Prints Limited with his fellow Slade School friend Nigel Henderson. This textile company produced patterns for interior design, including wallpaper and ceramics. Freda and Eduardo collaborated on vibrant tapestries and intricate screenprints. Henderson’s many photographs of the couple surrounded by these fabric creations can be found in the Tate archives. Having spent almost thirty years in Essex, Freda and Eduardo divorced in 1988, whereupon she relocated to Cambridge. Freda died on 24th June 2023. She should be remembered not as a mere footnote in her husband’s career, but as a brave, adventurous creative of discerning taste who bore witness to many of the major developments in 20th Century British Art.

Collection Highlights

Dating from 1944, during his time as a young army recruit, Lot 102 depicts two head studies of fellow soldiers. Signed “Pte E. Paolozzi” he has inscribed the work with his regiment “270A Pioneer Corps”. The “A” stood for “Alien”. Also, drawn at this time, Lot 103 shows Paolozzi’s early fascination with machine objects and their mechanical aesthetic.

Following the end of World War II, Paolozzi had returned to art school. While studying at the Slade, Paolozzi felt that the Art School was “dominated by middle-class, ex-officer type attitudes with which he was unable to identify and which in his view favoured half-baked, gutless art. Oxford, the focal point of elitist and polite notions of culture made matters worse.” Lot 104, depicting old bones may be a witty swipe at the antiquated, dry ethos of the Slade in the 1940s.

The History of Nothing

The collection also includes twelve collages which featured in Paolozzi's The History of Nothing (Lots 106-117). Created in 1962, The History of Nothing is a twelve minute film of changing sepia and black and white stills put to an equally seemingly random soundtrack of locomotives, aircraft, barking dogs, church bells and Kabuki theatre. It is fundamentally a 'Surrealist collage in time'.

'The materials from which Paolozzi made these collages… were collected over ten years. At their basis is the idea that in the relationships of such diverse subjects and materials there are always poetic possibilities. The sources of the collages are pages from the 1920s and 1930s German furniture catalogues, travel magazines, exhibition catalogues of ethnic art, and manuals of machinery.' (E. Paolozzi and J. Reichardt, The History of Nothing and Other Excursions, London, 1977/2023, p. 10)

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Auction Details

Wednesday 23 October, 10.30am BST
Donnington Priory, Newbury, Berkshire RG14 2JE

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