by Lee Siegel
“The true artist,”
wrote John Marin, one of the first American abstractionists, “must perforce go
from time to time… to sort of re-true himself up.” When in 1912 Picasso
created the first collage by gluing a piece of oil-cloth, one bearing a pattern
of wood caning, onto an analytic cubist painting, he was re-truing himself up by
driving his art down to its origins. Collage shattered—desublimated, one might
say—the musical grid of analytic cubism back into its sources in the world’s
disorder.
If history’s great paintings dreamed at night, they would dream in the
particles of their beginnings. They would travel through detached planes of
color, fragments of glass and wood and cloth, floating eyeballs and
disaffiliated noses. Whether composed of paper cut-outs or mundane objects,
collage is, in one of its dimensions, art’s subconscious. It seemed inevitable
that after the cool harmonic dissonances of Picasso and Braque, collage would
reach another perfection in the psychic delvings of dadaists and surrealists
like Jean Arp, Max Ernst and, especially Kurt Schwitters.
In these artists’ fantastical hands, repressed thoughts joined forces with
abandoned objects to remind ”high art” and “culture” where they came
from. William Butler Yeats wrote famously of renewing his poetry with its
rudiments: “I must lie down where all the ladders start/In the foul
rag-and-bone shop of the heart.” Collage makes its bed down in the sensual
detritus of our days. Amid colorful ticket stubs and discarded newspapers and
faded postmarks and chipped buttons and oddly shaped wire and just plain old
pieces of colored paper—that is where collage rescues the huddled masses of
neglected things, where the seeming child’s play of paper cut-outs frees color
and form from the chains of utility.
Collage’s resources can achieve just about any kind of effect short of the
heroic and the sublime (in its blatant or subtle discordances, every collage, no
matter how violently yoked together, is a little bit funny) but the advent of
collage also solved formal problems for painters. Papier collé—cut and pasted
strips of paper—allowed Picasso and Braque to keep color both representational
and autonomous, both a reference to visible reality and a private gift to the
eye in an increasingly fabricated world. Papier dechiré—paper that is torn
rather than cut—was a specialty of the dadaists and surrealists, who used the
ragged evidence of the human hand to stage encounters between chance, human will
and the buried mental forces that shape both.
Collage distinguishes itself from these two other forms by its embrace of
materials extraneous to painting: wood, plastic, wire, newspaper, etc. Formally,
collage comments on the relationship between painting and sculpture and
sculptural relief; conceptually, it meets modernity head on. Collage preserves
the primacy of material in the flood of a materialistic epoch’s reproductions
and fakes. Along with its cousin, montage, it keeps art viable in the age of
photography and film. And at a time of art’s doubts about itself in the face
of new experiences that defy the imagination, collage brings experience directly
into art’s arena.
This gradual melding of art and life—from the cubists through the surrealists
up to the combines of Robert Rauschenberg and the international Assemblage
movement in the late 1950s—throws an interesting light on collage in
Because of its easy relationship with experience, collage is more steadfast than
the other visual arts. Unlike painting and sculpture, which both have passed
through upheaval after upheaval, collage has never been in crisis. Instead, it
has “re-trued” painting at critical junctures. Papier collé supplied the
catalyst for the transition from analytic to synthetic cubism; Matisse’s
cut-outs inspired Ellsworth Kelly’s fusions of color and form; Robert
Rauschenberg’s combines led Jasper Johns to make his enigmatic painted
combinations.
The five American artists represented in this show are masters of collage, and
their work runs the gamut of the form, incorporating historical influences and
surpassing them, each in his or her own way. One, Joseph Stella (1877-1946), is
closer to history than the others, probably having seen the first cubist
collages in
Stella’s collages are like the primal stage of collage; they are, to extend
the image, what the other collages in this show might dream of. The viewer looks
at “Untitled,” with the raw materiality of its cracked and crumbling
fragment of black paper, and recalls Yeats’s lines about beginning again from
art’s origins. Stella himself, born in a mountain village near
Stella was a religious man, and his collages make one think of Michelangelo’s
renunciation of art as an impious endeavor. The starkly disintegrating black
paper in “Untitled,” is set on a bland white background, which itself is
positioned on a field of red paper. It is as if the drama of decomposition were
the self-annulling point of Stella’s composition. The red is so artistic, so
esthetical; the black’s candid materiality strikes the respectable red dumb.
Stella seems to want physically to make art disappear into the natural elements
from which it came.
Perhaps an ambivalence about art is why Stella’s paintings swing so unstably
from style to style, from the wonderful “The Port” and the deservedly famous
“
In the magnificent “Serenado”’s corroding theater ticket and decaying
product-label, “serenado”—was it a cigar?—Stella very pointedly wants to
send back to the elements not just art, not just artificiality, but civilization
itself. In this collage, however, something else is happening. Stella’s devout
physicality converges with his tactile spirituality. He is not just powerfully
celebrating the unique tangible presence of things now lost in a modern sea of
fabrication; he is pushing into an age of materialism the theme of vanitas, the
subject of still lifes and religious art. Beside the ticket and the label is a
paper with no civilized lettering at all, and beside that are two stripped
pieces of paper, the remnants of something that had been stuck to them and then
torn off. Attend to the fate of these forgotten objects: mortal glue comes
undone, too.
Like Stella, Janet Malcolm also replies to space with scissors and glue, but for
encounters with time, she cherishes the pocket and the drawer. If Stella wants
to reach some primal matter beyond history, beyond even time, Malcolm wants to
save the material emblems of our days from the destructions of both. Addressed
and postmarked envelopes, the page of a family bible noting names and dates of
birth from the early 1800’s, a receipt, a list of expenses, pages of old
books—these are the small replenishing motions of life that Malcolm gently
cuts and rescues from obscurity, consecrating them in her collages.
Malcolm’s esthetic choices have a fatality to them: she combines her colors
and textures so unerringly that the harmony of her collages seems to be a
condition that she discovered rather than an illusion that she brought into
being. The result is to make you feel that the small replenishing motions of
life have more reality than the large depleting disruptions of life. A goodness
wells up from Malcolm’s beauty.
Sometimes the goodness tears itself from a terrible beauty. Just about every one
of the collages Malcolm has chosen for this show bears a red strip of
paper—russet, really—and a black strip of paper. Sometimes one color is
evocatively absent: in “October 15, 1908,” the red appears alone alongside
the page from the family bible, as if the early nineteenth-century dates of
birth spoke enough of black finality.
Malcolm’s red and black are destiny’s antipodes, casting their consequences
differently from collage to collage, but she presents them as being always
casually underfoot. They are more polished and groomed, more lyrical and yet
also much less imposing than Stella’s ruined black and dumbstruck red.
Nietzsche located the “birth of tragedy” in the Bacchantes’ tearing apart
of Dionysus. Malcolm’s collages roll their eyes at such idealizing of pain.
Rather than tragic dismemberments of the familiar, they are elegiacal or witty
re-memberments of the obscure. If red and black are Malcolm’s Alpha and Omega,
they are also her
Malcom’s fragments heal the world’s fractures, but many of her collages
quietly and humorously ache with fracture. “Censura,” where you find the
characteristic red and black, is typically rich. The censor’s mark on a
foreign envelope appears next to a yellow label with the words, “Damaged in
Handling in the Postal Service.” Across from the label, and lower down, you
see a
Patient looking yields some partially obscured words on the black paper that
spell out “Mozart: Le Nozze de Figaro.” Hanging from the black is a
rectangular piece of pink paper; if you turn your head to the side, you can read
the word, running vertically, “Kantwerk.” This, surely, is a reference to
the great German philosopher’s writing. Yet is it also a pun—“can’t
work”—that refers to marriage? To a particular marriage? Perhaps to the
dream of fulfillment in a new place, or to the struggle to keep living in the
dangerous old place, or to the censor’s attempt to stifle and destroy? But
only a censor pretends to absolute certitude. Kant, after all, believed that
reality was all in our heads. “Censura” becomes a gorgeously ordered
perplexity. Like Malcolm’s other collages, it will never satisfy the
viewer’s curiosity, and it will never stop rewarding the viewer’s curiosity.
Each of Malcolm’s collages is a modest miracle of entwined music and meaning.
In “Lieber Pepik,” a feast for the eye, the artist juxtaposes references to
Schwitters—the father of modern collage—and Cezanne—the father of
modernism—with the salutation from a letter. But who is the mysterious Pepik?
A father-figure himself? A text about Schwitters ends with the half-hidden words
“life’s traces.” Further down is the scrap of a recipe for matzoh brye.
One has to wonder about the personal import of such a tantalizingly disjunctive
importation. A person’s particular life, almost certainly the artist’s, is
hinted at here but not disclosed. What is disclosed is the ultimate
unknowability of a person. This unknowability Malcolm embeds, throughout all of
her collages, in what might be her own “life’s traces” She does this so
teasingly and palpably and expressively that experiencing Malcolm’s collages
is, ultimately, like experiencing the enigma of another personality, but one
that has surrendered its ego to its intuition of larger patterns of existence.
Henry Rothman is the perfect counterpoint to Malcolm, and to Stella. Where
Malcolm exquisitely preserves the tension between small forgotten things and
art, Rothman sweeps life up into the supremacy of art. Where Stella returns art
to its origins in pure matter, Rothman returns materials to their origins in
art’s animistic spirit.
Rothman, a framemaker who died in 1990 at the age of eighty, spent his life
making collages at his studio in
Consider “Untitled (Puppa),” in which Rothman does for jagged Clifford Styll-like
streaks what Stella did for a theater ticket. Rothman redeems this iconic
creation of abstract expressionism from the triteness and redundancy that waits
for a famous image. He collagifies the abstract style by displacing it into an
environment of layered paper, mixing childish letters scrawled in pencil with
big orange letters right out of a circus handbill.
Rothman presents Styll’s streaks themselves as flagrantly three-dimensional:
frayed, ripped, peeling. He turns a style into an object that you might see
lying on the sidewalk. The collage’s primary layer, a fragment of which
appears in the upper right-hand corner, reveals the printed bottom of a circle
and part of an unreadable word. The contrast between the abstract image and the
tame design-feeling of the printed circle and letters transforms the former into
a living organism, something feral for the eye. Indeed, the image’s powerful
appeal to the viewer’s intuition also lends its power to the unreadable word.
The abstract image pulls the nonsensical letters into the circle of intuition as
an abstract image themselves, making irrelevant the rational comprehension of
what they actually spell. A broken word becomes a complete enchantment.
Rothman has a shaman’s touch. Oval-shaped, like a portal on a ship, the
masterpiece “
The same aura of delicious disorientation encircles “Quest’s Italian words
in big playful red letters, which appear on several torn and folded pieces of
white paper that have been placed against a blue background. A delicate struggle
unfolds between the letters and their color, and then between the floating,
dislocated words and the scraps of paper. Meaning is jostled, jumbled and
humbled by the higher, freer clarity of form.
This is not just collage, but the quiddity of collage. As you move among
Rothman’s work here, you realize that their seemingly different styles are
facets of a single, and singular plasticity. The juxtaposition of corroded paper
and faded paper and textured paper in “S,” its combinations of printed lines
and reproduced drawn lines and of letters and numbers and the half of another
big orange “O” -these elements might just as well be the oversized words in
“Quest,” or the North African artifacts in “Casablanca”, or the strips
of varied width in “O.” Rothman’s individual collages are themselves
pieces of his unifying imagination. They are the dialects of a single creative
language, in which forms refresh themselves by shifting into other, stranger
forms. There are no disconnected differences for Rothman, as there seem to be in
our literal world, only the inflections of a wholeness.
Varujan Boghosian, too, works in disparate styles that are really phases of a
bountiful vision. A visitor to the retrospective of Boghosian’s work, held at
the Hood Museum of Art in 1989, would have seen the New Hampshire-based artist
fluently at home in mediums and materials from ink and watercolor and paper
collage to steel, stone blocks, linen, wood, tin, string, cloth and bronze. The
European dadaists and surrealists, whose influence Boghosian has deftly
assimilated, alluded to the polymorphous nature of the imagination. Boghosian,
at the literal level of material, enacts polymorphousness.
What Boghosian hasn’t assimilated, he has purposefully debunked. Unlike the
arid mental puzzles of Duchamp and Picabia and Magritte, Boghosian’s alluring
bewilderments are puzzles that ride on feeling rather than thought. The sudden
shifts and disjunctions of collage allow him to shift the ground from underneath
the viewer’s heart, not his or her mind.
In the marvelous “From an Italian Sketchbook,” Boghosian has torn in half
the drawing—the artist’s own? by another hand?—of a young woman seated in
a chair to reveal the naked breast and bare arm of another drawing
underneath—the same woman? someone else? On the left side of the collage, he
parts these two layers to reveal yet another one, a scrap of printed text,
partially obscured, whose fragments read “problema dei corpi basta trova
la”—roughly translated, “problems of the body enough found her.” One
envisions the artist drawing from life, enraptured by his subject, suddenly
throwing away his sketchpad as he dispenses with the problems of representing
her body and simply succumbs to her body. That the printed text is in the shape
of the female pubic triangle strengthens the impression of thought submitting to
feeling. As the artist surrenders to his subject, we surrender to the
gravitational pull of the artist’s eros.
The collages of European dada and surrealism often alienated the viewer even as
they pulled him or her into their bizarre universes. Boghosian’s imagined
worlds are no less bizarre, but they are far more wondrously inviting. He seems
to want to impart to the viewer his own creative capacity. The masterly collages
on display here share a tone of off-white or light brown, an atmosphere of
somber banality, in which Boghosian allows his dreamlike puzzles to unfold. The
artist has thus constructed a fantastical proof of art’s efficacy in the
mundane world. If my illusions can rise from such lugubrious precincts, he seems
to be saying, then your imagination can lift you from the drab worldly
environment in which you, at this very minute, stand.
“Page 88” crystallizes this moment of artistic grace. The top of the collage
is the drawing of a man lying on his stomach and peering over the edge of a
cliff. Below and underneath the drawing, Boghosian has glued another layer, an
old photograph depicting two blimps in the air and a part of one that is still
on the ground. And so just as the man looks down to see a blimp soaring above
him, the viewer looks down the page and is transported to a higher world. It is
a stunning living metaphor for the relationship between the reader and a book,
one that Boghosian openly and generously allows the viewer to help create.
Collage’s spirit, especially American collage, of utopian democracy is nowhere
as strongly represented as in this artist’s work.
With the art of Ken Kewley, American collage both returns to its European
precursors and stands them on their heads. Though Kewley, who lives in
After experimenting with papier collé and collage, Picasso and Braque used what
they had learned from those forms and turned to synthetic cubism. They painted
with the illusion of three-dimensionality, conjuring a kind of simulacrum of
collage’s pieced-together and overlapping planes. It is impossible at first
glance to make out from synthetic cubism’s most famous example, Picasso’s
“The Three Musicians” whether the picture is the product of paint or paper
cut-outs. Throughout the history of modern art, collage has impelled painting
into more advanced incarnations in just such a way.
Kewley, working at a time when painting is neither dominant nor besieged but
wandering aimlessly amid myriad possibilities, uses references to painting to
breathe fresh air into collage. “Sitting Woman” is a sly breaking down of
synthetic cubism into its origins in collage, and at the same time a breaking
up, as it were, of collage into the elementary language of painting. Though
Kewley cuts his bright squares of color with scissors, he so explicitly and
physically glues them one on top of the other that the evidence of his hand is
everywhere. This is collage that translates painterly brushstrokes into its own
idiom. Kewley has invented something new: gestural collage. It is as like Stuart
Davis meeting Jackson Pollock.
Using collage to create the illusion of painting, as well as to comment on the
grammar of painterliness, Kewley surprises the senses. By intensifying an
element, he brings out its counter-effect. His brightness, rather being fulsome,
gives his pictures a clean Nordic austerity; the chaos of colors in
“Landscape” produces a musical serenity. Kewley does not only employ collage
to retrue painting, and vice versa. He creates pictures in which retruement is
the first and last principle. In Kewley’s hands, collage both comes full
circle and it seems always to have done, cuts a new line straight into the
future.