Modern Collage, Victorian Engravings & Nostalgia
Max Bucaille, Bruce Conner, Joseph Cornell, Max Ernst, Otto Hofmann, Jess,Ray Johnson, Gerome Kamrowski, Franz Roh, Jindˇrich Štyrský
Curated by Meredith Harper
October 30, 2009 – January 30, 2010
Ubu Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of 20th Century collages all united in their focus on the transformation of Victorian engravings.
Max Ernst (1891–1976), with such work as his shocking and seminal illustrated collage-novel, La Femme 100 têtes (1929), influenced an entire wave of artists who looked towards the Surrealist and his use of 19th Century engravings as a point of departure within their own work in this medium. The first generation of artists were Ernst’s contemporaries, who worked primarily in the 1930s with significant connection to the Surrealists: Joseph Cornell (1903–1972), Jindˇrich Štyrský (1899–1942), Otto Hofmann (1907–1994), Franz Roh (1890–1965), Max Bucaille (1906–1992) and Gerome Kamrowski (1914–2004). Those a generation later, including Ray Johnson (1927–1995),
Bruce Conner (1933–2008), and Jess (1923–2004), each separately rediscovered Ernst, specifically choosing to use this type of collage as a jumping off point towards other conceptual ends.
What remains a common thread throughout, however, is a sense of nostalgia very specifically conveyed through the use and alteration of Victorian engravings—a visual counterpoint which allowed the creation of fantastic, and oftentimes disturbing, visions. These collage elements were often excerpted from magazines and picture books and, despite their incongruous juxtapositions, retain elements of their original Victorian melodrama. The sense of sublimation already inherent in these images in their original form, strengthened with the feeling of looking backwards in time, creates a powerful sense of longing—a lens of nostalgia through which the artists’ grotesque and eccentric creations become somewhat less threatening or remote.
Irrespective of each artist’s unique vision, common themes seem to solidify around and find their most natural expression in these collages, including erotica, science, and literature. Sexual subversion is an obvious theme—figures of prim, bustled and corseted women appear to float randomly in and out of many images, including those of Cornell, Hofmann and Roh. Conversely, Štyrský created strikingly overt, erotic images, and yet the graphic nature of the sexuality becomes poetic, as translated through a prism of Victorian imagery.
Naturalism, too, runs strongly as a theme through many of these works, as does celestial imagery.
Natural history, parlor games and scientific experiments form a basis for Cornell’s collages that would develop shortly thereafter into his notable shadow boxes (a sculptural idiom similarly embraced by Kamrowski). Cornell had made his first engraving-based collages in 1931, and like Roh, prior to being exposed to those of Ernst (for Cornell, it was at Julien Levy’s 1932 Surréalisme exhibition). The discovery validated and influenced both artists’ continuation in the medium.
Jess and Conner each discovered Ernst through his collage-novels. Jess received Une Semaine de bonté (1934) as a gift in the 1950s and went on to use engravings to create “paste-ups” that addressed literary and highly personal themes, with a hallucinogenic intensity that seem to express wistful desire for a purer moment. Conner, after first using wood engravings in his 1950s assemblages, focused on collage over two separate decades: the 1960s, which saw the wildly inventive and Beat inspired, THE DENNIS HOPPER ONE MAN SHOW, and then again in the 1980s. Ray Johnson was as much influenced by Cornell as by Ernst, if not more so, and his use of engravings took on a decidedly more “Pop” approach, investigating “seriality,” as well as often focusing on the linguistic content of the images.
Please visit our partner, Galerie Berinson, in Berlin, at www.berinson.de
Ubu Gallery - Metamorphosis Victorianus
