Art review: Cut and Paste - 400 Years of Collage, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

We are usually told the art of collage began in Paris in 1912 when Georges Braque stuck a bit of woodgrain paper onto a painting. The timeline in the catalogue for the exhibition Cut and Paste: Four Hundred Years of Collage, however, does not begin in 1912, nor even 400 years ago as the title suggests, but in c.105 AD, the approximate date of the invention of paper in China. It is as though college followed inevitably from that invention. It was more than 1,000 years before paper reached Europe, however and a few more again before, with the advent of printing, it became a familiar material in the west, but thereafter cutting and pasting took off pretty quickly. A 16th-century anatomical illustration of a man has a flap to lift and show his intestines. More daringly, the catalogue illustrates a print from a similar date of a Venetian courtesan whose skirt lifts to show her elaborate underwear and stacked shoes – a pioneering smutty postcard?

Unpublished collage for 'Une Semaine de Bonté' by Max Ernst PIC: National Galleries of Scotland © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2018.

Art review: Cut and Paste - 400 Years of Collage ****

Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

In the 17th and 18th centuries there were variations on these methods. Landscape designer, Humphry Repton, for instance, published landscapes to which his proposed improvements could be added with folded cutouts. The artist Philip Otto Runge anticipated Matisse exploiting the sweeping lines of scissor-cuts to draw. But the whole business really begins with the mass production of paper. Women especially adopted it, too. Agnes and Mary Berry produced elaborate stage designs with cut out figures, while Mary Watson anticipated the self-important artists of the 20th century with a remarkable diary composed of images and strips of cutout text. Kate Gough substituted the faces of her family for the monkeys in a tree in a spoof of Darwin’s Descent of Man. The History of Miss Polly, a story told in collaged cutouts, is anonymous. Henry Shore combined non-matching heads, bodies and legs to comic effect, while in the catalogue but not in the show, What a Life by EV Lucas and George Morrow cuts and recombines images in an anarchic way that looks forward to Monty Python.

The photomontage began early too. A striking example, The Two Ways of Life by Henry Peach Robinson, is an essay in the “artistic” nude, always female, that the Victorians loved. He couldn’t get a dozen naked girls and as many clothed men to hold their poses long enough, so he took separate pictures and cleverly merged them into one. Another remarkable photo-montage was marketed as a souvenir of the collapse of the Tay Bridge in 1879. It combined train tickets evidently collected from the doomed passengers at the last station before the bridge with photos of the train crew who died in the tragedy.

In the Victorian era, as Patrick Eliot remarks in the catalogue, nothing was safe from scissors. Cutting and pasting became an industry. Lacy Valentine cards incorporated literally hundreds of paper elements. Material, not always paper, was sold specifically for dressing paper cutouts of actors and celebrities. Covering folding screens with cut-outs was a social activity. On display here is a screen decorated by Charles Dickens and his friend the actor William McReady. Beautiful scraps were printed and marketed in huge quantities for just this kind of purpose.

It is all fascinating and in some ways more so than the more familiar “artistic” part of the show, but also because collage has become such a universal medium, the show inevitably does become a bit of a miscellany later on.

One exhibition label sums up the main point: “Many of the ‘innovations’ found in modern art were in fact in common use throughout the 19th century.” Clearly the Cubists didn’t invent collage in 1912, though they did give it its familiar name which has served to dignify it as art and separate it from its more lowly antecedents. Sadly its inventor, Braque, is not here, his early collages too fragile to be borrowed. However, as Picasso remarked, trained as a painter-decorator, Braque knew all about gluing paper, so maybe that’s why he started it. Picasso and the other Cubists quickly followed suit and there are four early Picasso collages here along with works by Juan Gris and Henry Laurens. The most impressive is Picasso’s Bottle and Glass from 1912, a beautiful, spare drawing in which a single piece of newspaper stands in for part of the bottle. At this point, whatever happened later and for all the foregoing, the Cubists really are using collage in a new way. The glued elements serve both pictorially and, brought into the picture from the outside world, are part of the complex dialogue that true cubism conducted with our perceived “reality”. This is also true of Nikolai Suetin’s beautiful White Square and, with less subtlety, of Futurist Carlo Carra’s Bursting Shell where stencilled and collaged letters suggest the sounds of the explosion.

After the First World War, collage’s potential anarchy appealed to the Dadaists and Surrealists. It was the juxtaposition of images that appealed especially to the latter and they deployed it to make topsy-turvy narratives. Max Ernst was the master of this, creating a dream world where the rules of ordinary life are subverted. He really was anticipated by some of the 19th-century amateurs however, a fact emphasised by his use of old-fashioned imagery. Nevertheless, many followed his example and the random conjunctions of collage became a favourite vehicle for the Surrealists and their disciples. Eileen Agar stands out here. At much the same time, however, the satirical potential of this power of association was demonstrated by John Heartfield in his ferocious anti-Nazi images.

Postwar, the medium of cut and paste was given new energy by Paolozzi, Richard Hamilton and the Independent Group. Paolozzi was so important and he turned collage into such a powerful medium, he could have been better represented here, though one of his early collages does give a sense of his power. John McHale from Glasgow, also associated with the Independent Group, was another distinguished practitioner. Beside artists like these, Peter Blake’s Pop Art looks a bit whimsical, though the cover of Sergeant Pepper was undoubtedly a great achievement. Jake and Dinos Chapman, on the other hand, arrogantly defacing Goya’s Disasters of War with collage, are merely wanton.

The early feminists were much more serious. They saw collage as free of painting’s machismo, but perhaps, too, unconsciously they recognised its early association with women. Certainly there are some powerful feminist works here. Carolee Schneemann, for instance, made herself into a collage by pasting herself then rolling in paper. Cindy Sherman films herself as a dress-up doll with cutout clothes. It is economical and brilliant.

There is much more and no story of collage would be complete without Matisse. In his old age, scissors and paste gave his art a new freedom and that is celebrated here with pages from his marvellous album, Jazz. It is a great shame, however, that the late Philip Reeves, father of modern Scottish printmaking and maker of exquisite collages, is not in the show. It is after all the National Gallery of Scotland. He might be no match for Matisse, but he was much more of an artist than some of those who are included here. - Duncan Macmillan

Until 27 October 2019