June 24, 2004 Paul Neagu Devil-may-care Romanian sculptor and teacher whose Hyphens and Starheads were intriguing, convincing, yet elusive IN HIS later years Paul Neagu was known in Britain almost entirely as the man who had taught Rachel Whiteread, Anthony Gormley, Anish Kapoor and Tony Cragg. This was a pity, for though he clearly had a decisive influence on the development of a generation of British sculptors during his period teaching at that famous centre of artistic disaffection, Hornsey College of Art, he was also a substantial figure in his own right. Neagu was Romanian born and trained - insofar as he received training from anyone but himself - and never totally acclimatised to the art world of Britain, where he settled in 1970 and spent most of his subsequent life. He came from an almost defiantly non- artistic background: his father was a shoemaker; he left school at 15 and worked first in a power station and as a technical draughtsman for the Romanian railways. But every bit of his apparently non-artistic experience fed into his mature artistic work, especially in his ability to handle such slightly off-centre sculptural materials as leather and ball bearings. Though he should perhaps be regarded mainly as a sculptor, his interests spread much wider. When he first came to the West - he was finally allowed out of Romania on a travelling scholarship in 1968, when he was 30 - he was very interested in performance art, and frequently performed in front of and around his sculptures, becoming almost an extra, mobile element of them, or using them as props in his own performance. Certainly almost all he did was boldly innovative, whether it was painting, drawing, sculpting or performing. This created difficulties when he arrived in 1970s Britain, where artists were expected to be much more neat and consistent in what they did, and the alleged jack-of-all-trades was generally frowned upon. Especially if he was given, as Neagu was, to writing about his work and ideas in grandly metaphysical terms. (He had wanted to read philosophy at Bucharest University, but ended up, none too productively, according to his own account, at the Bucharest Academy of Fine Art.) Nevertheless, he rapidly achieved a remarkable degree of success, if largely d'estime. Arriving on the British scene by showing in Edinburgh in Richard Demarco's fringe gallery, which was largely devoted to alarming the bourgeoisie and frightening the horses, he was given an impressive one-man show within four years at what was then the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, and before the decade was out he had mounted a major show in London, at the ICA. In some respects Neagu was akin to the most famous of 20th-century Romanian artists, Constantin Brancusi, with whom he shared a continuing interest in folksy, peasant materials and a remarkable facility for slipping unobtrusively backwards and forwards across the border of abstraction. But in other respects he was more like that model of postwar modernity Joseph Beuys, in that the man, rather than the tangible work, was both the medium and the message. He did, in fact, sympathise intensely with Beuys, and was one of the first people in Britain to show Beuys, after determining to turn his studio in Shaftesbury Avenue into an artist-managed exhibition space - a novel idea in itself at the time. As if all this were not puzzling enough to the British public, Neagu had little time for the sort of consistency and predictability which might have endeared him to a wider public than he ever commanded. On the contrary, he revelled in his own diversity, even inventing something called the Generative Art Group, which consisted of various discordant and sometimes seemingly incompatible aspects of himself, each fitted with its own pseudonym. Not for nothing did many of his most enthusiastic friends and admirers see him as in many ways his own worst enemy. Despite all this, his sculpture was informed by an extraordinary gift for making convincing shapes in three dimensions, whether as variant boxes, or deriving from what he called Hyphens and Starheads. Frequently his works conformed, deliberately or accidentally, to Lord Berners's whimsical definition of a Surrealist object, a "thing that is almost a Thing". Spectators had a vague and disquieting feeling that they had encountered them before, but maddeningly could not affix names to them, or say precisely where they had seen them. After leaving Romania on licence in 1968, Neagu did not return there until he had taken British nationality in 1977, but eventually, particularly after the fall of Ceausescu, he renewed contact. He acquired a studio in Romania, and executed several major commissions both in his birthplace, Bucharest, and in Timisoara, where he had spent the larger part of his youth. During his last years he suffered from chronic ill-health, mostly connected with a defective kidney and his typical refusal, even after a successful transplant, to take reasonable care of himself. Neagu was of the breed of artist who devote themselves to art to the virtual exclusion of anything else. He married twice, in 1965 and 1997; both marriages ended in divorce. Paul Neagu, artist, was born on February 22, 1938. He died on June 16, 2004, aged 66.