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Collage/Not Collage
4/2/1997 - 7/6/1997
Collage/Not Collage is an exhibition organized by the Norton
Museum of Art, and drawn primarily from its collections. The genesis
of the exhibition was the presence of three other exhibitions in the
museum, all containing collages or related works. These exhibitions
are Joseph Cornell: Box Constructions and Collages,AlexKatz:
Under the Stars American Landscapes (including examples of the
artist's early collages), and In the Eye of the Storm: An Art of
Conscience: American Social Commentary from the Philip J and Suzanne
Schiller Collection (including two stunning collages by African
American artist Romare Bearden). The exhibition in this room brings
together important twentieth century works from the Norton's
collection which help to illustrate the history of collage and other
related genres.
Collage - from the French word 'colle' (glue) - is the gluing or
attaching of pieces of paper, or other material, onto a support,
thus making a pleasing design or pattern. The roots of collage go
back at least to the nineteenth century. Many people will be
familiar with the elaborate screens of Victorian times decorated
with colorful glued-on cutouts. Similar effects were achieved in
scrapbooks or on other odd household items which in somebody's eyes,
required beautification. Such pieces, often highly sought after
today, were essentially functional.
Collage as a serious art form had its beginnings in the first decade
of the twentieth century, when the Cubists were investigating the
flattening of pictorial space as a compositional device. Georges
Braque, Pablo Picasso and Juan Gris made paintings incorporating
headlines from newspapers, and other two-dimensional material. It is
generally accepted that Georges Braque made the first such work of
art in 1909. In 1912, Picasso, Braque and Gino Severini made works
which were totally composed of cut out pieces of paper and other
materials. They found that by making pictures using scraps of
two-dimensional materials, some of which were printed with letters
or decorated with patterns, they could not only do away with
traditional perspective completely, but they could also suggest
situations or things without using formal a representational
language. Later, Dada artists such as Max Ernst, Kurt Schwitters and
Jean Arp also used the technique widely, because it allowed them to
make fantastic juxtapositions of images, or simply because it defied
traditional concepts of making art.
At the same time that pure collage became popular, artists simulated
the look of the technique in painting. As collage had allowed them
to use papers with wood grains and printed emphemera in flat,
evocative compositions, now they imitated the look of those same
materials to achieve similar effects in painting. Sometimes it
became very difficult to tell the difference between real collage,
and simulated collage, as is evinced by a comparison of Gino
Severini's Playing Cards and Flask, 1912, and Juan Gris' Journal,
1916. Cubist artists loved to evoke the feeling of collage in their
paintings to heighten the viewer's sense of disorientation, to tease
him or her, and to further blur the distinctions between trompe
l'oeil trickery and traditional artistic 'reality'. Interestingly,
such trompe l'oeil Cubism also harks back to the work of late
nineteenth century American artists such as John Frederick Peto,
William Michael Harnett, and John Haberle, whose deceiving and
"flat" portrayals of dollar bills, stamps letters, and other
printed and inscribed paper items were themselves influenced by
seventeenth century Dutch and eighteenth century English examples.
Associated with collage are other art forms, in which everyday
objects were pieced together in a composition. The first
construction - Guitar, 1912, made out of sheet metal and wire was
produced by Picasso in 1912. From the 1920s through the 1950s, the
surrealist Jean Arp made spectacular, biomorphic 'reliefs'
constructed first from cardboard, then from wood, and finally from
metal. His Reflection, 1959-60, can be seen in this room.
Throughout the century, constructions made of found objects have
continued to be one of the most highly popular artistic formats,
used by artists such as Man Ray, Marcel Duchamps, Joseph Cornell
and Arman.
Today, artists are making collages and constructions as much as at
any time during the twentieth century. Varujan Boghosian's highly
original constructions use found objects in a singularly inventive
way, to evoke mythological and childhood associations. Red Grooms Charlie's Pirate Ship reminds us in an extremely witty fashion how
two-dimensional paper collage can develop into three-dimensional
construction. Bruce Helander's lyrical collages evoke nineteenth
century papiers colles, as well as the work of twentieth century
practitioners such as Max Ernst and Joseph Cornell, but give the art
form a contemporary twist. In the last decade of the twentieth
century, there are as many different approaches to collage and
construction as there are artistic practitioners of these art forms.
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The Norton Museum
of Art is a major cultural attraction in Florida.
The Museum is internationally known for its distinguished permanent
collection featuring
19th and 20th century European and American art, Chinese, contemporary art and photography.
From its founding the Norton has been famous for its masterpieces
of 19th century and 20th century painting
and sculpture by European artists such as Brancusi, Gauguin, Matisse,
Miró, Monet, Picasso
and by Americans such as Davis, Hassam, Hopper, Manship, O'Keeffe,
Pollock and Sheeler.
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