This is fascinating! From the New York Times…
(View a slideshow of this exhibit HERE)
“Breakthroughs aren’t always all they’re cracked up to be. Collage, one of riverheads of modernism, is usually thought to have been introduced around 1912, when Braque and Picasso began gluing pieces of newsprint and wallpaper to their Cubist drawings.
But what if it turns out that at least one form of collage was practiced decades earlier, not in Paris in the teens but in Victorian England in the 1860s and ’70s? And not by ambitious your-body-my-art macho geniuses but by women at the highest reaches of society, including the royal family? This rejiggering of history is fundamental to “Playing With Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage,” a seemingly modest, almost scattered, yet strangely reverberant exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
In all fairness, “Playing With Pictures” includes the work of one man and also a French woman, but in the main it demonstrates how upper-class English women — some of whom knew one another — introduced cutout photographs into the albums of watercolors, sketches and writing that had long been an approved female leisure activity.
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Using their new vernacular the photocollagists developed a series of shared conventions, though individual styles come through. Recurring motifs range from polite, vividly colored drawing-room tableaus to fantastical creatures that merge human heads with animal bodies. The tiny faces of friends and family are added to painted images of fans, cameo necklaces, umbrellas and playing cards and, most mysteriously, to the tail feathers of a turkey, still attached. Or they serve in place of stamps or wax seals on carefully drawn and addressed trompe l’oeil envelopes. The most over-the-top feat of trompe l’oeil occurs in an album by Frances Elizabeth Bree, who outfitted a painted image of a photo album with actual photographs and, quite a bit more surprising, pages that actually can be turned…”
(Read the full article HERE)
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