EDUARDO Paolozzi was a child of surrealism and one of the founding fathers of the pop art movement. He was a massive, powerful presence in the art world and in person.

The strong features, the broad hands and the all-seeing gaze were allied with sensitivity, generosity and an appetite for information. This omnivorous collecting of material happened intellectually and in reality. His Aladdin's cave of a studio in London became so crammed with sculptures, prints, books, photographs, slides and papers that he gave away four lorry loads in 1995.

This material eventually found its way into a recreation of his studio at the Dean Gallery in Edinburgh (Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art).

Munificence had been a feature of Paolozzi's career. Gifts were also given to the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Tate Gallery.

Paolozzi's career stretched from student days studying surrealism to the execution of public sculptures, stained-glass windows and innovative prints. The imagination of the artist was first inspired by the confectionery wrappings in his father's sweet shop off Leith Walk, linking Leith with Edinburgh. His father came to Scotland from Italy in 1921 to marry Carmela Rossi, daughter of Carlo Rossi who had settled in Edinburgh.

Eduardo Luigi Paolozzi was born in 1924, the elder of two children. His father had ambitions for Eduardo to become an engineer. But the 1940 sinking of the SS Arandora Star, carrying his father, grandfather and an uncle as enemy aliens to Canada, meant the loss of half his family. Paolozzi was himself interned in Saughton Prison.

Freed of parental constraint, he determined to become a commercial artist and enrolled at Edinburgh College of Art.

In 1943, he was called up.

During his time in the Pioneer Corps he came across a book by Amedee Ozenfant, entitled The Foundations of Modern Art. This book inspired him to take up fine art as a career.

Discharged in 1944, Paolozzi went on to study at the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford, and the Slade School of Fine Art, London. There he met Nigel Henderson, William Turnbull, Raymond Mason and Richard Hamilton. Inspired by Mason, Paolozzi went to Paris in 1947 to learn more about surrealism and the modern movement.

As a student in Paris from 1947-49, he took magazines from resident GIs and made collages that were the forerunners of pop art. He became friends with Alberto Giacometti and the Dada poet, Tristan Tzara. He also visited Braque, Brancusi and Leger.

In 1949, he began a teaching career at the Central School of Art and Design. He taught textile design and made screenprints under the tutelage of his colleague, Anton Ehrenzweig.

Based in London, Paolozzi met once more with his Slade friends and they became part of the Independent Group, which met to discuss new ideas at the Institute of Contemporary Arts.

The first event was Paolozzi's lecture, Bunk, which consisted of showing random images from pulp literature and other popular sources. This was later seen to be the starting point for the pop art movement.

In 1951, Paolozzi married Freda Elliott and the couple had three daughters. In the Independent Group years, Freda played an active role in the ICA.

Paolozzi was commissioned to make a fountain for the 1951 Festival of Britain and, the following year, was a finalist in the competition for a monument to "the Unknown Political Prisoner". It was at this time that he had his first experience of curating exhibitions. Parallel of Life and Art (ICA) and This is Tomorrow (Whitechapel Art Gallery) were two groundbreaking shows. He worked closely with Nigel Henderson and the two made experiments with photography. They later ran a business, Hammer Prints, making ceramics, textiles and wallpaper. During these early years Paolozzi was given support by a number of people including Lucian Freud, Kathleen Raine, Dorothy Morland and Margaret Gardiner.

Paolozzi taught sculpture at St Martin's School of Art from 1955-58 and developed a new brutalist style. A sojourn in Hamburg in 1960-62 introduced him to shipbreakers' yards full of prefabricated machine elements that were to lead to a new type of sculpture.

On his return from Germany, he worked for more than a decade with Juby's of Ipswich, collaging together prefabricated parts. He also painted some of these assemblages with psychedelic patterns, most notably Hamlet in a Japanese Manner (GlasgowArt Galleries and Museums). These bright manifestations of pop art were sold by the art dealer, Robert Fraser. At the same time, Paolozzi was revelling in the possibilities of screenprinting and worked with Chris Prater of the Kelpra Studio. The seminal print suite, As Is When, was followed by Moonstrips Empire News, General Dynamic Fun, Zero Energy Experimental Pile and other innovative suites looking at robots, animal experiments and dummies.

In 1968, Paolozzi was made a CBE and, in 1971, was given a retrospective at the Tate. The curators were perplexed to find that, instead of a chronological selection of works, Paolozzi planned installations making satirical comments on modern art and the Vietnam war. The print BASH, with its inclusion of Marilyn Monroe and J F Kennedy, was published by the Observer newspaper in a huge issue to mark the show.

The reliefs commissioned for the ceiling of Cleish Castle in Fife heralded a new chapter in Paolozzi's career. It led to a set of doors for the Hunterian Art Gallery in Glasgow - the first of many public commissions in Britain and Germany.

In the 1980s, he returned to the human figure. In 1980, he became professor of sculpture at the Academy of Fine Art in Munich and was influenced by Greek sculpture. He began a series of heads with elements cut and collaged with geometric shapes. Once more his work explored the theme of man and machine. In 1989, he took William Blake's image of Isaac Newton and adapted it to become a semi-robotic Master of the Universe. This work eventually led to the monumental figure of Newton in the forecourt of the new British Library. Two large figures of Vulcan, half-man, halfmachine, were made in 1999, one for the Dean Gallery in Edinburgh and the other for Newcastle upon Tyne.

Paolozzi became a royal academician in 1979, Her Majesty's Sculptor in Ordinary for Scotland in 1986 and was knighted in 1989. His long teaching career at the Royal College of Art was marked by an emeritus professorship and he was given several honorary degrees.

J G Ballard once said that, if ever there were a holocaust, one could reconstruct the twentieth century from the works of Eduardo Paolozzi.

Paolozzi said in 1990: "If the world does not fit any more, how does man? A sculptor in the urban world must concern himself with the contradictions of man and machine, with bizarre hidden currents of antiquity, religion and magic - he must use his vision to open wider views to others."