OPENING today at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art is an exhibition exploring how technology and consumerism influenced Andy Warhol and Eduardo Paolozzi, two artists whose work, in the words of gallery director Simon Groom, “was to change the way the world looked, and was looked at, forever”.

Warhol’s multi-coloured prints of Marilyn Monroe and Paolozzi’s kaleidoscopic 1960s works feature in I want to be a machine, an exhibition formed of parallel displays devoted to both artists.

The displays will examine how the American and the Leith-born artist were each inspired by images from the post-war consumer boom and the possibilities opened up by screen-printing.

The exhibition, which includes a recently acquired collection of Warhol’s “stitched” photographs from the 1980s, takes its name from a declaration he made in an interview in 1963.

In those days, Warhol was electrifying the American art world with his bold ideas work, such as Marilyn Diptych, 200 One Dollar Bills, 32 Campbell’s Soup Cans and 100 Coke Bottles – work produced using a semi-mechanised screen-printing process. While the publicity savvy former ad man knew the power of a good soundbite, I Want To Be a Machine could have equally have come from Paolozzi, says Keith Hartley, who put the exhibition together.

“Paolozzi makes use of machines all the way from the 1940s to the end of his life,” says Hartley, chief curator and deputy director of modern and contemporary art at the National Galleries of Scotland. He was fascinated with machines and their relationship with human beings; the idea of the robot and the increasing mechanisation he was seeing in the post-war period: Cars, new trains, computers.”

Hartley adds: “He was omnivorous in his approach to knowledge, he consumed everything that was going. He even went to the University of Berkeley to study new developments in computers. He realised they were going to be a massive thing. You can see it in the prints he makes, where he layers image-upon-image.”

That all-devouring approach began early, with Paolozzi creating collages of images snipped from magazines from boyhood. After the end of the Second World War, the young man lived in Paris where he befriended American GIs and their girlfriends.

“He would ask for their magazines when they had finished with them,” says Hartley. “Coming from a ration book Britain, Paolozzi was goggle-eye at these images of abundance and huge progress coming out of America.”

Paolozzi showed his Paris-era collages at Bunk!, a ground-breaking lecture he gave at the ICA in London in 1952. One from 1947, titled I Was A Rich Man’s Plaything, juxtaposes a US fighter plane, a Coca-Cola bottle and a scandal mag cover girl. “Pop!” says a speech bubble from a gun pointing at her head.

“There and then, pop art was born, back in 1952,” says Hartley, whose book I Want To Be A Machine: Andy Warhol & Eduardo Paolozzi, is published to coincide with the exhibition. “The lecture was given to fellow artists and art critics and architects, and it percolated out to others; they would have spoken about it and the ideas gradually fed into what other people in Britain were doing.”

On the other side of the Atlantic, Warhol was doing commercial drawings and designs for magazines and newspapers, such as The New York Times which regularly featured his ads for the likes of I. Miller Shoes.

“He was the highest paid commercial designer on Madison Avenue in the 1950s,” Hartley says. “This all fed into the art he made, based on publicity shots of Hollywood icons such as Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley, and the products that made America famous such as Coca Cola and Campbell’s Soup. He took items from ordinary, everyday life, items which were being commercially pushed through advertising on television and in magazines, and realised that he could make important art about how these things were changing our world.”

Hartley says he was partly inspired to put the exhibition together after reading about an exhibition involving the two artists at New York’s Four Seasons Hotel in 1968.

“I thought this was fascinating,” says Hartley. “They both had discovered screen printing around about the same time, and were both exploring the possibilities this opened up. I’ve haven’t been able to track down whether they met each other, although they probably did meet. Certainly, they didn’t create a warm friendship or anything. Paolozzi was not much of a ‘clubbable’ person.”

Neither was Warhol, Hartley adds.

“He liked to have something between him and other people, like a tape recorder or camera. He liked this impersonality of the machine. The process interested Warhol. He was never someone who wanted to put himself personally into the picture; he was far more interested in using machines to create a new type of art.”

Today until June 2 2019, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, 10am to 5pm daily, free. Tel: 0131 624 6200. www.nationalgalleries.org