Eduardo Paolozzi 1924-2005
44.5 x 60.5 x 34 cm
Eduardo Paolozzi’s Newton after Blake (1988) is inspired by William Blake’s colour print Newton: Personification of Man Limited by Reason (1795), which is held in the collection of Tate Britain, London. It depicts the naked seated figure of Isaac Newton under the ocean, measuring the universe with a pair of dividers. Paolozzi developed this idea in 1987 alongside a commission he received from the National Portrait Gallery to make a portrait sculpture of the British-Italian architect Richard Rogers. Paolozzi subsequently went on to make a crouching figure with a head of Rogers based on Newton’s Blake, as well as a second figure with an anonymous head. The anonymous figure was cast in bronze in an edition of three; two casts were given a dark brown patina while the third has a golden patina. The present edition is unusual due to the stool on which the figure sits, as unlike its counterparts the stool was completed with open spaces. Making reference to Roger’s architectural profession, we find the subject ruminating over the incomplete structure before him. A twelve-foot-high version of Paolozzi’s Newton after Blake was unveiled in 1995 in the courtyard directly outside the British Library in London, where it has stood ever since.