This review of Fragmentary: A New History of Collage by Freya Gowrley (Princeton University Press) appears in the December 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
‘The human mind,’ wrote Benedetto Croce in 1902, ‘can destroy expression, that is, the thought of the individual, by thinking of the universal. It can gather up expressive facts into logical relations.’ These words have come to be recognised as one of the earliest instances of the rejection of genres as a tool for thinking about art. It’s among the most crucial tenets of modernism, that through the fragmentation of traditional genres – or modes, or kinds, or categories, or whatever other labels society had previously sought to prescribe – lay the path to greater autonomy of expression. And it is in this fragmentary light that the decision by Picasso and Braque in around 1912 to begin cutting up bits of old newspaper, sticking them to other pieces of paper and calling the result ‘art’ is most usually understood.
There are a great many expressive facts – not to mention a magnificent collection of illustrations – gathered up in Freya Gowrley’s expansive new history of collage. Gowrley sets out to offer a more inclusive account of the ways that human cultures have always made use of cut-and-paste tactics – one which extends backwards from cubist papier collé to the invention of paper in ancient China, forwards to the age of artificial intelligence, and outwards to encompass assemblage sculptures in Benin, pre-Columbian featherwork and Heian-era poetry manuscripts in Japan.
The book picks up and expands on Miriam Schapiro and Melissa Meyer’s feminist redefinition of collage in 1978 – and it is at its strongest when calling attention to forms of craft that anticipate papier collé but have been historically overlooked as ‘women’s work’. The cut-paper floral illustrations of Mary Delany in the late 18th century were admired as ‘elegant’ by contemporaries including Erasmus Darwin, and inspired numerous followers – but in the realm of amateur botanism rather than art. A century later, a girl known only as Helen produced an exquisite collage album, imagining her ideal home and zooming in, sequentially, from the idyllic town in which the Romantic residence is set to its interiors, the walls decked out in embossed silver paper and the floors decorated with a range of motifs; it’s a triumphantly Victorian fusion of the exotic and the domestic. Gowrley is good on the ways in which women artists in the 20th century, most notably Hannah Höch, drew on amateur craft traditions like these in constructing their own forms of modernist montage.
The discussion of Höch is the closest Gowrley comes to positioning her definition of collage in relation to modernism: ‘Namely, that the earliest examples of collage that emerged under the auspices of “modern art” occupied a field that corresponded with collage’s historic forms.’ That this does not come until deep in the sixth chapter, however, is indicative of a missed opportunity here.
Page from a collage album (1880–1900) by a young woman named Helen. Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library
The book seems to be organised according to a curious syllogism. Modernist artists sought through collage to find a new way of actualising ‘fragmentary forms’. People from other epochs and in other places have similarly sought to take things from one place and put them into another. Therefore, these acts of taking and of putting must somehow also be ‘collagic’. As a result, the modernist distrust of ‘genre’ in favour of the ‘fragment’ is effectively transformed into a genre in its own right. Gowrley shies from the word ‘genre’ itself, preferring ‘mode’, but the distinction between these two has always been fugitive and in any case there’s little effort to ground the choice historically here. Instead, Fragmentary Forms sets off in its early chapters on a kind of scenic bus tour through the history of civilisation, with all of the sights duly signposted as revelations of some primordial ‘collagic’ impulse. What does it really mean, for instance, to consider in relation to collage the acts of placing supposed pieces of the true cross in reliquary boxes, of binding wooden West African fetish sculptures with rope, or of keeping commonplace books like Robert Southey’s?
We are given potted histories of ‘the daily experience of belief’ in the medieval era, or ‘the Enlightenment emphasis on creating a rational order in things’ – but before there is any time to do more than scratch the surface of these vast fields of inquiry, we’re shown instead how they can be squashed into the box of ‘collage’. At moments, the relevance of the examples chosen hits home – for instance, the medieval practice developed after the invention of the printing press of cutting ‘silhouette images’ from prints with a scalpel and interpolating them in manuscripts. But the fact that these instances are submerged beneath so much that is more tenuous means that the definition of collage becomes disappointingly non-specific. It is ‘the thing produced from many things’, Gowrley writes, which leaves you wondering where it might end. Are museums collages? What about the practice of grinding minerals sourced from diverse geographical locations into fine pigments, mixing these with oils, and applying the resultant paste to canvas with a brush?
A Cabinet of Curiosities (1619), Frans Francken the Younger. Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp
Fragmentary Forms asks us whether art history as a discipline may not have a serious problem with talking productively about genre. From the 1970s, literary theorists sought to move beyond Croce and rehabilitate genre as something more generative – something that artists or critics can become fluent in, before bending and blurring them however they like. But even though art history has traditionally been even more strictly defined than literature by notions of genre – just think of the Salon’s old hierarchy – the discipline has strangely never properly included itself in these conversations. Fragmentary Forms could have been a productive contribution to this scant discourse, considering what it means to define and trace the trajectory of an alternative visual genre, previously hidden from Western art history due to its associations with craft. But gathering fragments is only half the job of making a collage – the next stage is to give them new order.
Fragmentary Forms: A New History of Collage by Freya Gowrley is published by Princeton University Press.
From the December 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.