Ways to Blend Things Together in a Collage Fine Art
Past Samuel Reilly
Collage is frequently idea of as an archetypally modern artistic technique. The word – from the French verb coller, meaning "to stick" – was kickoff used to describe the Cubist innovations of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, who began to stick newspaper cuttings and other materials onto their canvases in 1912. Since that moment, the story goes, artists accept used the act of snipping and sticking as a ways of bringing the world around us into unexpected, transformative combinations on canvas. Just that narrative isn't quite correct, declares an enthralling exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh. Surprisingly the first survey of its kind, "Cut and Paste" shows that collage is both a much older phenomenon than is commonly idea, and 1 that extends far beyond the boundaries of traditional art history.
Japanese artists began to stick paper onto silk equally early as the 1100s. In Europe, paper collage is first recorded in Europe in the 1400s. Past the following century, the technique was existence put to practical use in anatomical "flap-books" – woodcut prints layering skin and sinew over internal organs. In the Victorian era, collage in the class of scrapbooks and homemade Valentine'south cards became an immensely pop pastime. Many young ladies caught the bug; so too did Charles Dickens. He and the actor William Macready created a huge fleck-work folding screen, with 400 engravings collaged on both sides. Collage was not always a mere hobby. Early photographers developed a practice of splicing images together, allowing them to meddle with temporality and dissolve the boundaries between the natural and supernatural – a theme that the Surrealists would explore.
Collage proved particularly well suited to the Surrealists. The act of splicing together disparate images and fragments of text mirrored their belief that meaning was generated by the subconscious. But collage as a technique has been more than influential than Surrealism on the fashion we imagine (or reimagine) the world. The technique was taken upwardly by feminist artists in the 1960s. In Carolee Schneemann's "Body Collage" (1967), a watershed work in the history of performance art, she rolls around in shredded printer paper, her body painted in wallpaper paste, in what she called an "agile collage". The technique offered Pop artists like Peter Blake a ways of incorporating everyday, ordinary objects into their work, disrupting the traditional hierarchies that adamant what was "fine" and what was "folk" art. Likewise, it provided a modus operandi for the punk and protest movements of the 1970s and 1980s – recall of the "ransom note" artful of Jamie Reed's posters for the Sex Pistols. Throughout the 20th century, collage has been used as a tool for disruption and subversion – a mode of ripping up the rulebook and creating something new from the fragments.
"I've come to recognise that the way I think is collage," Louise Nevelson, an American sculptor, said in 1975. Collage has changed hugely over the centuries, and in our present era of PhotoShop and internet memes, the words "cut and paste" are more than likely to call to listen a computer keyboard than glue and scissors. But perchance, this original exhibition suggests, it is a "manner of thinking" that we have e'er shared.
"Cotyledon Umbilicus, Navel Wort" (1779) by Mary Delany
Built-in to an aristocratic family unit in 1700, the artist Mary Delany discovered the medium of collage late in life. Story has it that, at the age of 72, Delany was struck by how closely a slice of blood-red paper on her bedside table resembled a geranium, and took up her scissors. "I accept invented a new mode of imitating flowers," she wrote to her niece that year. Between 1772 and 1783, when her eyesight failed, Delany produced nearly a thousand botanical "paper mosaicks". Sometimes using as many as 200 minutely cut paper petals for each flower, sometimes incorporating real dried petals and leaves, Delany's collages were so accurate that the botanist Joseph Banks one time alleged yous could look at them and "describe botanically any plant without the least fear of committing an fault".
British Museum, London: bequeathed by Augusta Hall, Baroness Llannover, 1897
"Baby" (c.1890) by Bearding
Such was the Victorian passion for "chip-work" that by the 1880s and 1890s, industrial machines had been built for the express purpose of churning out color-printed, glazed and dice-cut "bit" shapes. These were sold in vast quantities; people glued them onto Christmas gifts, scrapbooks and Valentine'due south cards, and they were used in nurseries and schools as decoration and teaching tools. In this bearding collage from effectually 1890, a multifariousness of these machine-prepared chromolithographic "scraps" – floral wreaths, little flower girls and storybook figures – accept been arrayed effectually the central image of a infant.
© England & Co, London
"Bottle of Vieux Marc, Glass, Guitar and Newspaper" (1913) past Pablo Picasso
One of the chief concerns of the Cubists in the early 1910s was how to represent, upon the flat surface of the picture aeroplane, a three-dimensional earth. With the incorporation of collage into their paintings, they were no longer reduced to merely imitating the world; past sticking elements of the real world onto their canvases, they recreated the experience of interacting with it.
In this yet life, Picasso stuck a chip of real newspaper onto the canvas. The viewer tin stand up and read the words, if they want. Whether the specific story, about the coronation of Tsar Alexander III in Russian federation, was intended to have any specific symbolic significant remains a moot bespeak. By introducing a real newspaper into the composition, rather than painting one, Picasso has conjured a world that exists in time as well as space.
© Succession Picasso/DACS 2018
"Untitled (Unpublished collage for 'Une semaine de bonté')" (1934) by Max Ernst
German language artist Max Ernst co-founded the Cologne branch of the Dada group in 1919 and after became a leading figure among the Surrealists in Paris. He adult a practice of collaging together old prints, taken from a vast range of sources, to construct visions of fantastical worlds – a manner of working that has influenced everyone from fellow Surrealists like André Breton to Terry Gilliam, who fabricated the "Monty Python" montages.
Yet Ernst was by no means the first to use collage to this effect. With its spectral, contorted figures, superimposed onto an analogy from a French pulp novel, this work recalls the famous "Cottingley Fairy" photographs of Elsie Wright and Frances Griffith, on show earlier in the exhibition. These two young girls from Cottingley, a village in West Yorkshire, collaged pictures of fairies onto photographs of themselves in 1920, accidentally causing a media storm over the possible existence of supernatural beings.
© ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2018
"GRIMA – Selbst mit Katze (Der Schrei)" (GRIMA – Self with cat (The Scream)) (1986) past Annegret Soltau
In the work of Annegret Soltau, the act of collage becomes violent. In the 1970s, the High german artist began violent photos of herself apart and stitching them back together with needle and thread. In subsequently images, such equally her "GRIMA" series, photographs of Soltau are juxtaposed with fragments of images of other people, including her children, and animals. Her art makes visible the fragmented psychological states associated with sickness and ageing – linking her with a long lineage of artists who have used collage to blend the imagined and the real.
© DACS 2018. Courtesy of Richard Saltoun Gallery
"Haywain with Cruise Missiles" (1980) by Peter Kennard
Disruptive by its nature, collage was perfectly suited to the culture of punk and protestation that arose in Britain in the late 1970s. In 1980 this photomontage by Peter Kennard became the defining prototype of anti-nuclear protest in the UK. It was created and published after the announcement that American cruise missiles were to be stationed nigh Newbury, a market boondocks in Berkshire. To allay public hostility to the decision, the Ministry of Defence issued a pamphlet, illustrated by a frail watercolour in which the missiles were shown to alloy harmoniously with the rural mural. In Kennard's venomously satirical response, he introduced three prominent prowl missiles into a bromide photograph of John Constable'south painting "The Hay Wain" (1821), a classic depiction of rural England.
Cut and Paste: 400 Years of Collage Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, until October 27th
moralesexpearl1964.blogspot.com
Source: https://www.economist.com/1843/2019/07/24/stick-em-up-a-surprising-history-of-collage
0 Response to "Ways to Blend Things Together in a Collage Fine Art"
Postar um comentário