Just opened at the Metropolitan Museum in New York is “Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage,” a small exhibition that’s well worth a visit. Originally at the Art Institute of Chicago, the show presents collages from long before the word “collage” was even used. In the 1860s, upper-class Victorians took to using photographs of themselves as visiting cards; people assembled collections, much like baseball cards. Inevitably, someone realized that sticking a photograph of somebody’s head on somebody else’s body was hilarious – and thus began a small fad for collaging photos of one’s family or friends with painted or drawn backdrops. Albums of these were created, almost always by women. Some are predictable, some less so. Here’s a sampling:
(Georgina Berkeley, untitled page from the Berkeley Album, 1867/71, Musée d’Orsay, Paris.)
(Elizabeth Pleydell-Bouverie and Jane Pleydell-Bouverie or Ellen Pleydell-Bouverie and Janet Pleydell-Bouverie, untitled page from the Bouverie Album, 1872/77, George Eastman House.)
(Marie-Blanche-Hennelle Fournier, untitled page from the Madame B Album, 1870s,The Art Institute of Chicago.)
While these are figurative, many are more abstract than you might expect from the era. Particularly interesting is an album on show opened to a page with a smaller book on its page: the book-inside-the-book’s pages can be turned, making it a scrapbook about a scrapbook. The exhibition started at the Art Institute of Chicago; it will travel to Ontario. Elizabeth Siegel’s catalogue is a fine alternative for those that can’t make it to the show.
It’s surprising to see collage so early: collage is something we associate with the twentieth century, as traditionally the collage tradition in the visual arts begins with Picasso. But everything has a past, and in a sense it’s natural that we should find the roots of collage in the Victorian era, as was illustrated by recent show at the Ubu Gallery, “Metamorphosis Victorianus: Modern Collage, Victorian Engravings & Nostalgia”. Max Ernst is well-known for cutting up Victorian engravings to make his own Surrealist inventions. (Giornale Nuovo has a fine selection of his images, should you be unfamiliar.) But plenty of others drew inspiration from Victorian illustrations as well, from fellow Surrealists Joseph Cornell and Jindřich Štyrský down to people like Ray Johnson, Bruce Conner, and Jess.
Another antecedent of the twentieth-century avant-garde is E. V. Lucas and George Morrow’s What a Life!, originally published in 1911. This little book – ostensibly an autobiography – is composed of illustrations taken from a Whiteley’s catalogue with bits of text attached to create a story. It’s a deeply hilarious book. Here’s a representative spread:
And another:
Unfortunately, it’s out of print, and because it’s mostly composed of illustrations it’s not available for free on Google Books. An electronic edition of What a Life! is available here; the resolution and layout of the HTML version isn’t quite as nice as the PDF. Dover published an American edition in 1975: it’s worth tracking down for the introduction by John Ashbery, also available in his Selected Prose, where I first discovered Lucas & Morrow’s work. Ashbery notes the afterlife of the book in the art world:
Raymond Queneau, the French novelist and former member of the Surrealist group, has a brief essay on What a Life! in his book B&eacirc;tons, Chiffres et Lettres, citing its publication date (August 17, 1911) as the moment of the first conjunction of scissors and glue-pot “with disinterested ends in view.” The book’s importance as an object of fantastic art was consecrated in the 1936 Museum of Modern Art exhibition “Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism,” where two of its illustrations were included at the suggestion of the writer Jay Leyda, who was at that time on the Museum’s staff and had discovered What a Life! in a London bookshop a few years before.
Although there is no evidence that Max Ernst knew Lucas’s and Morrow’s little book, the resemblance between it and such a work as Ernst’s collage novel Une Semaine de Bonté are striking. Of course the raw materials – those old steel engravings – was already charged with disturbing suggestions, waiting to be incorporated into fantasy. Queneau mentions the “memory of the precise uneasiness” produced by the catalogues his mother received from the Grande Maison de Blanc. And Marcel Jean in his History of Surrealist Paintings has noted that at the time when Ernst first began cutting up steel-engraved illustrations, this method of reproduction was already old-fashioned and evocative of childhood memories for the people of his generation: “possessing a picturesque quality that is both derisive and very engaging, and which becomes enhanced, revivified by the very humor of the collage.”
Jean’s statement could lead back to the Victorian photocollages now on view at the Met; and with that I’ll stop.
[...] short piece on Victorian collage that I wrote at Hotel St. [...]