What You Should Know About the History of Collage
Johanna Goodman, The Catalogue of Imaginary Beings, 2020
Torn newsprint, jagged lines, scraps of ephemera: The raw materials of collage seem more like a recycling bin than art supplies. Collage synthesizes fragments of found objects to crystalize a moment in time. Artist Max Ernst, a 1930s surrealist known for his bizarre images using Victorian etchings, said of the medium, “Collage is the noble conquest of the irrational, the coupling of two realities, irreconcilable in appearance, upon a plane which apparently does not suit them.” Juxtaposing existing photographs, advertising, and paper for conceptual and aesthetic analysis, collage is the perfect mashup for the modern age.
Contemporary collagist Johanna Goodman agrees, tackling topics from today’s news. “Every time I think, ‘Oh, this topic is too sensitive, I don’t want to offend anyone,’ I realize I need to process the evolving world.”
19th C Roots in Scrapbooking
The rise of mass production in the 19th century was a revolution for printed matter. Cheaper and more readily available, the printed word was no longer the exclusive provenance of the wealthy and educated. Instead, a steady stream of reading material became widely available to the masses. Gothic tales were serialized in penny dreadfuls, newspaper circulation increased tenfold, and the expansion of the magazine brought advice on etiquette, housekeeping, and domesticity to every household. These emerging print media platforms created new marketing opportunities and offered advertisers ready access to diverse audiences. For the first time, print advertisement became an influential feature of magazine content, shaping cultural standards of beauty and housekeeping. Readily-identifiable product branding and disposable printed material littered the landscape of American life.
Spurred by lower printing costs, scrapbooking became a popular household hobby intended to chronicle a family’s life and document the social and historical events of the age.
Graphic artist and author of Scrapbooks: An American History Jessica Helfand initially saw scrapbooking as an inane hobby. Upon closer examination of vintage scrapbooks, she began to see a fascinating pastiche of American culture emerge. “You see often in books by college and high school girls these bizarre juxtapositions, like a picture of Rudy Valentino next to a church prayer card, or a box of Barnum’s animal crackers pasted right next to some steamy, embraced Hollywood couple for some movie that had just come out. You could see the tension in trying to figure out who they were and what their identities were vis-à-vis these emblems of religious and popular culture.”
WWI Scarcity of Supplies
While scrapbooking relied on easy access to materials, collage in the 20th century emerged from the scarcity of art supplies. As Europe became engulfed in the turmoil of WWI, all raw materials, including paint and canvas, were rationed for the war effort. Unable to procure paint to create realistic depictions of the world, artists instead incorporated real objects, such as newspapers, cardboard, and rope, to create abstract representations. Pablo Picasso, for example, repurposed found materials to make abstract collages, called synthetic cubism. Collage, thus, exists in relief, one layer atop another forming an amalgam of complex textures and meaning.
Describing this new technique, Picasso said, “Different textures can enter into a composition to become the reality in the painting that competes with the reality in nature. We tried to get rid of ‘trompe l’oeil’ to find a ‘trompe l’espirit’… If a piece of newspaper can become a bottle, that gives us something to think about in connection with both newspapers and bottles, too. This displaced object has entered a universe for which it was not made and where it retains, in a measure, its strangeness. And this strangeness was what we wanted to make people think about because we were quite aware that the world was becoming very strange and not exactly reassuring.” (Quoted in Marjorie Perloff, Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre and the Language of Rapture, London 2003, p.44.)
Fragments of the Modern Age
Even as art materials became more widely available, collage grew increasingly relevant throughout the 20th century. Nearly a decade before the advent of Pop Art, conceptual artist Ray Johnson began pioneering a pastiche of mass advertising and celebrity idolatry in fine art. Well before Andy Warhol memorialized Campbell’s Soup and Marilyn Monroe, Detroit native Ray Johnson produced a series of collages featuring Lucky Strike cigarette labels paired with photographic images of celebrities, such as James Dean and Elvis Presley. Unlike Warhol, who elevated pop culture to fine art status, Johnson’s collages became part of the everyday. He disseminated his art through the U.S. Postal Service instead of usual galleries and museums. By using mail delivery, Johnson’s artwork evolved from static objects to performance pieces. In fact, Johnson encouraged recipients to ‘add to’ the collage and return to sender, effectively becoming an interaction between artist and audience (and the ultimate inside joke.)
Artist Louise Millmann, and friend of Ray Johnson, describes Johnson’s Lucky Strike series. “What was it about Lucky Strike cigarettes? The packaging was very iconic as American, as was James Dean. I was fortunate enough to handle 25 of them for the film about Ray, directed by John Walters, How to Draw a Bunny. They were small, no bigger than 5” x 7” and had push pin marks in them. Ray kept sending them by mail, one at a time, to filmmaker Gerry Ayres, who allowed Walters to use them in making the film.”
For Johnson, celebrity was a broad term, predating the instagram culture of self-made stars. His later work shifted to iconize lesser known names, blending minor actors with art world insiders and depicting them as cartoon-like bunnies. Shelly Duvall, Chuck Close, Cher, all stood side-by-side in Johnson rejected the spotlight himself, once even staging a mock protest outside of his own exhibition. It was this contrast between Johnson’s adoration of celebrity and his personal desire for anonymity that left many who knew him puzzled after his suicide in 1995.
Civil Rights and the Urban Landscape
While the 1960s Pop art elevated the everyday to icon, Carolina-born artist Romare Bearden became well-known for using collage to chronicle the African-American experience, fusing Harlem with the American South. Often set in urban landscapes, Bearden celebrates the vibrant culture of the black community. In an era that relegated images of people of color to news reports of unrest and upheaval, Bearden’s work tells another story. From street scenes to jazz musicians, Bearden’s collages combine fragments of photographic images of varying scale to depict inner city life as dynamic and energetic.
To commemorate a 2003 exhibition of Bearden’s work at DC’s National Gallery, NPR’s Neda Ulaby described his work on All Things Considered. “Bearden’’s primary medium was the collage, fusing painting, magazine clippings, old paper and fabric, like a jigsaw puzzle in upheaval. Unlike a puzzle, each piece of a Bearden collage has a meaning and history all its own. Shortly before he died of cancer in 1988, Bearden said working with fragments of the past brought them into the now.”
Collage Today
While artists of the past embraced collage by necessity, illustrator and artist Johanna Goodman discovered the greater possibilities in a digital platform. No longer reliant on the found object, Goodman is able to expanded her palette with a vast arsenal of visual elements.
Bridging the worlds of illustration and fine art, Johanna Goodman decided five years ago that she needed “to change it up.” Born into a family of do-it-yourself makers, she gravitated to the hands-on assemblages of paper and fabric before she shifted to the computer. “I start with a concept but I don’t end up sticking to it based on what I find in the process. There is a serendipitous nature to collage that lends itself to juxtaposition and spontaneity.”
Depicting women came easily — paper dolls, women’s fashion — so Goodman embarked on a series of over 400 depictions of women in her series The Catalogue of Imaginary Beings, their bodies serving as part of the visual narrative. “I love using elements from classical art and being able to bring something universal like the extreme drama of classical sculpture to express what I was feeling.”
Working in a digital format has the added bonus of producing work in different scales. Unlike Ray Johnson’s postcard-sized work, Goodman’s figures can be printed in sizes ranging from her standard print of 13” x 19”, all the way to a life-sized print of 6 ft tall.
In utilizing the computer, the symbiotic relationship between collage and the zeitgeist of an era continues well into the 21st century, making it feel current and relevant. Like many of her predecessors, Goodman’s work reacts to the events of the day, recently taking on a new urgency. COVID, BLM, forest fires — Goodman wondered at first if she should avoid sensitive topics, but soon discovered the importance of speaking out. “I needed to process and collage was the only real way I could deal with this — like meditation. This is the only voice I have. I make the work, and hopefully it will be seen.”
Although the materials of torn newsprint and scraps of paper may have given way to jpegs and megabytes, the aesthetics of collage coupled with its conceptual power, speaks to the fragmented realities of today’s mass media, making sense out of chaos and connection out of isolation. As Max Ernst would agree, it’s a noble endeavor.
