Illumination and the Eye, 1967

Collection of Joe Wolpe, Cape Town A Private Canadian Collection

While suspending his formal studies for a year of military service in the Royal Pioneer Corps in the early 1940s, Paolozzi discovered La peinture moderne (1925) by the French Cubist painter Amédée Ozenfant and architect Le Corbusier, as well as Art (1928) by Ozenfant. These texts introduced him to formative images of Parisian avant-garde art, particularly Cubism and Purism, and reproductions of machinery—all prominent themes in his art throughout his career. In the 1960s and 1970s, Paolozzi revisited these subjects in serigraphs referencing machine imagery, including Illumination and the Eye, 1967. The abstract colour serigraph embodies the combination of the artist’s influences, namely, the later Cubist works of Ozenfant and Léger, together with machinery and architectural elements. Also during this period, Paolozzi experimented with industrial processes in large-scale sculpture, using aluminum, chrome-plated steel, and bronze to create abstracted anthropomorphic shapes.