Paolozzi's Hermes des Praxiteles (1947) embodies the past, the present and the future of Western man: the ideal of a classical marble torso, the contemporary reality of flesh and blood and the mechanical future of the cyborg. However, the limbs of the classical torso are broken, the machine has no apparent function and the figure is covered in bodily stains.

In such works Paolozzi may have been inspired by such Surrealist precursors as Max Ernst's collage novel, Une Semaine de Bonté, which he admired, but he replaced the surrealist's unfolding psychosexual dramas with a focus on the treatment of the body that eschewed individualisation and dispensed with narrative. It is the survival of the classical torso as well as its fragmentation that is crucial to the artist:

'In normal society something which is broken is regarded as flawed but to an artist it is an enchantment. In museums one seldom sees Greek sculpture intact. You see fragments which are left ... Scholars decipher whole civilisations through their remains.' Eduardo Paolozzi, quoted in Judith Collins, Eduardo Paolozzi: works on paper 1946-1995, 1996.

By allowing for the coexistence of the Greek statue with machine parts Paolozzi suggests a comparable signification: it will be the fragments of machines, not of statues, by which our own culture will be recaptured.