Eduardo Paolozzi
Whitechapel Gallery, London

Outsize Athena sits magical and mysterious, half-human, half-machine, bolts for her knees and sturdy, chiselled lines on her geometric face. She is a masterpiece by Eduardo Paolozzi, whose work has been assembled at the Whitechapel Gallery in London for a major retrospective (to 14 May). But Athena is not part of the show at the Whitechapel; instead, she is a permanent fixture at my daughter’s school, the London Oratory, where she sits majestically at the entrance to the arts centre.

Not many comprehensive schools boast an important artwork by a major twentieth-century artist; and beyond the eight-foot bronze there is also a series of colourful Paolozzi screenprints, as well as a maquette of Athena in the main school reception. The story of how they came to be there reveals much about Paolozzi, who is known as the godfather of Pop Art, and the Whitechapel works show him to be one of the most adventurous, wide-ranging and experimental artists of modern times.

Paolozzi was born in Leith in Edinburgh in 1924, the son of a family of Italian immigrants who ran an ice cream shop; he was educated at the now-closed Holy Cross Academy, the first Catholic secondary school in the Scottish capital. One of his first inspirations for the art that would later come to define him came from a collection of picture cards from cigarette packets that he amassed, many of them given to him by customers at his parents’ shop.