Scottish National Gallery Of Modern Art, Edinburgh
Image credit:
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh
Costume Design for One of
the Three Kings in 'La Liturgie',1915
Natalia Goncharov
REMEMBER the first time you set eyes upon the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover? Or, if you're of a certain age, perhaps you even owned the LP record in its iconic sleeve. The design, created by the husband and wife team, pop artists Peter Blake and Jann Haworth, is a collage made up of 57 photographs and nine waxworks of well-known personalities as diverse as Edgar Allan Poe, Karl Marx, Bob Dylan, Marilyn Monroe and the Hindu guru, Sri Yukteswar Giri, depicted in three rows behind the cut-outs, in their customary black and in costume, of the Fab Four themselves. It's a work so rich in detail that it's able to reveal something new to the viewer no matter how often it is examined.
The art work for the album cover is just one of nearly 200 items by over 150 artists brought together under one roof in this remarkable exhibition entitled, Cut and Paste: 400 Years of Collage. For the first time visitors can follow the entire development of collage art from the first anatomical 'flap' prints of the 1570s through to the present day. In the excellent catalogue accompanying the show Patrick Elliott, the exhibition's curator, explains the idea behind many of the collages on display thus:
"The common thread is the notion of play and experiment: of manipulation, swapping, lifting and testing, by taking two images and creating a third through overlapping and juxtaposition."
Yuval Etgar, in his essay, expands this theory further, writing:
"Collage marked a new tendency in the process of art-making that appeared in the
so-called 'age of mechanical reproduction' whereby linear narrative is interrupted by means of dislocation and / or assembly of elements in order to form a picture."Anatomical flap books, also known as 'fugitive sheets' came into being during the late sixteenth century. Printed paper flaps detailing sections of the body were hinged and glued onto woodcuts of human figures. Lifting the flaps revealed the insides of the body. Intended primarily as teaching aids for medical students they also served to satisfy popular curiosity. The earliest known, showing various stages of dissection, were created by the German engraver and printer, Heinrich Vogtherr (1490 – 1556), and published in Strasbourg in 1538. One of two examples in the present exhibition, dates from 1573 and is an anonymous representation of a seated nude male figure. Lifting the paper flaps reveals the organs hidden beneath. Alongside the picture is printed text giving detailed explanations of what the student can see.
Among the more well-known pieces on display is Pablo Picasso's 1913 collage, Bottle of Vieux Marc, Glass, Guitar and Newspaper which the Gallery acquired in 2015 and which, as its Director-General, Sir John Leighton, writes in the catalogue's Foreword, inspired the idea for the exhibition. The colours are a becalming complement of a background in pale grey on which the guitar is offset in white with the other objects cut from paper in various shades of brown and black stuck on at angles to give it that slightly disorientated feeling that makes it abstract. The outlines drawn underneath, almost like shadows of the objects, partly obscure and overlap the paper cut-outs. The word ‘Vieux’ is handwritten on the bottle’s neck. What draws the eye most directly to this exquisite small collage are the two fragments cut from the French newspaper, Le Figaro, dated 28 May 1883. The masthead is pasted slightly off-centre to the left. A strip above it is set at right-angles towards the centre.
Mary Delany (1700 – 1788) was a keen horticulturist, embroiderer and dressmaker. Calling her beautiful flower collages 'paper mosaicks', she created them from hand-dyed tissue paper and mounted them on black paper to offset their delicacy. The names of the flowers and her initials are cut and pasted in the corner of her pictures. Delany also created images on laid paper, utilising its ingrained parallel lines to depict the veins in leaves and petals. Integrating the natural texture of paper into his art was a method later also employed by Georges Braque (1882 – 1963) who, together with Picasso (1881 – 1973), is considered by many art historians to have been instrumental in re-directing collage away from being a popular craft activity into a recognised art form.
No one can fail to be enthralled by The Goosewoman and The Postman, two pieces by George Smart (1774 – 1846). He was a tailor by trade and employed by the Duke of Sussex. Using off-cuts of fabric and paper and painting in the backgrounds with watercolours he created collages to sell in his shop. The Goosewoman is dressed in a red cloak, beige dress with a leaf pattern and a white apron. She is wearing a black bonnet, carries a basket bearing two geese over her arm and a stick in her other hand. The Postman wears blue trousers, a black flat hat and coat. He leads a donkey and has a bag over his shoulder cut from a piece of newspaper. Both characters are in profile and wear expressions of concentration on their faces. Their pictures are hung in such a way that it looks as though they are walking towards each other along the same stretch of country road.
Who knew that Charles Dickens possessed an artistic streak? Together with his friend, the Shakespearean actor, William Macready, he created a scrap-work screen (c.1860), decorated with almost 400 engravings of actors, actresses, scenes from Shakespeare’s plays, as well as a picture of himself. Meticulously assembled on both sides of the screen, the effect is one of crowded images in browns and sepia collage which tells the story of the stage in Dickens' day.
There is much to admire along the journey through the history of collage this exhibition takes the viewer on. Among my personal favourites is one of Natalia Goncharova's costume designs commissioned in 1915 by Sergei Diaghilev for La Liturgie, a ballet telling the story of the Passion of Christ. The Russian artist (1881 – 1962) is perhaps best known for developing Rayonism, a method of painting that focuses on heightened colours and the changing effects of light. Her designs for La Liturgie employ this idea through the assembly of, variously, paper flowers and cut-out and painted-on patterns in contrasting hues of pinks, oranges and yellow. Goncharova drew inspiration from the Orthodox tradition of icon-painting and Lubok, an early Russian form of woodblock art. The costume design on display is for one of the three kings. Wearing a crown, he looks as if he is running, but it is more likely that he is meant to appear engaged in balletic motion. The sense of movement is incredibly vivid and gives the viewer a real feeling of being drawn into the action. Sadly the First World War intervened and the ballet was never performed.
Not only is collage the theme of the show, but the very arrangement of items on display is frequently a juxtaposition and joining together of pieces. No space of the two exhibition halls is wasted. Every niche and alcove is filled with something collage-related and even the staircase between the upper and lower floors plays a teleologic role in leading the visitor from art of earlier periods through to pieces created within the last five years in fulfilment of the exhibition's promise: a journey through the history of collage.
For this visitor the boldest of these recent works is by the American artist, Fred Tomaselli (b.1956). Known for collages using hallucinogenic plants together with images of flowers, birds, butterflies and insects cut from books and magazines, the piece in the current exhibition, titled Violent Reaction to a Tuition Increase in Britain (2014), employs digital technology, leaves and acrylic paint sealed with resin. A richly-coloured kaleidoscope of patterns and photographic fragments, overlaid and overlapping, are set on a vibrant red background. The initial impression is of hallucinatory mental overload, but the eye quickly adjusts, allowing the viewer to study the separate parts that make up the image in order to further appreciate it as a whole.
The most recent work of this passage through the evolution of collage art is one of eight astonishing 'hypophotographic panoramas', by Jean-François Rauzier (b.1952) in which the artist attempts to digitally capture the entire essence of a place. In this one, of the National Gallery in London (2018), Rauzier represents around 3000 paintings in microscopic detail, giving the viewer the impression of standing at a central point in the Gallery below the glass dome with the arches leading off to different rooms as he looks up at rows upon rows of paintings.
Seen sometimes in the past as a method of rebellion or promoting protest collage, as an art form, is immensely versatile, capable of shocking as well as expressing great beauty and charm. It's long been an exciting and innovative discipline for artists to explore as this exhibition, following 400 years of collage, has shown.
NOTES
Cut and Paste: 400 Years of Collage, National Galleries of Scotland: Edinburgh, 2019. Editor & Foreword Patrick Elliott. Articles by Freya Gowrley: Collage before Modernism & Yuval Etgar: Definitions of Collage and Use of the Word in Modern Times.
National Galleries of Scotland website
https://www.nationalgalleries.org/exhibition/cut-and-paste-400-years-collage
