COLLAGE
Herta Wescher
Herta Wescher: COLLAGE. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1968. First American edition [translated by Robert E. Wolf]. Large quarto. Yellow cloth decorated in black. Photo illustrated dust jacket. Photo illustrated endpapers. 418 pp. 40 tipped in color plates. 356 black and white illustrations. Multiple paper stocks. Jacket lightly age toned. Interior unmarked and very clean. Out-of-print. A very good copy in a very good dust jacket.
8.5 x 12 hard cover book with 418 pages and 396 illustrations including 40 hand-tipped plates in full color. Fine West Germany press production and tipped-in plates make this quite the production – they truly don’t make them like this anymore. From the publisher: “Behind modern collage lies a long history of Oriental pasted papers for calligraphic picture-poems, of folk art and primitive mimetic magic, and of amateur handicrafts. Since before World War I, however, collage has been linked with innovative art and social movements—the witty and lyrical Cubist collages of Braque, Picasso, and Gris, for example; or the Futurist ‘representations’ of time, motion, and sound of Balla, Boccioni, and Carra; the moralizing obscenities of Grosz, leveled at postwar corruption in Germany; the psychological probing of Ernst and Schwitters in Dada and Surrealist context; the mockery of Marcel Duchmap.”
- The Forerunners
- Cubism
- Futurism
- The German Expressionist Period
- Russian Collage and Related Mediums
- Dada
- Surrealism
- Constructivism and Propaganda
- A Glance at Recent Trends in Collage
- List of Plates
- Index
Artists include Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris, Henri Laurens, Sonia Delaunay, Marthe Donas, Vilhelm Lundstrøm, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Gino Severini, Carlo Carra, Giacomo Balla, Enrico Prampolini, Mario Sironi, Emilio Pettoruti, Kasimir Malevich, Ivan Puni, Olga Rosanova, Yury Annekov, Man Ray, Jean Arp, Raoul Hausmann, Kurt Schwitters, Max Ernst, Joseph Stella, Arthur Dove, Joan Miro, William Freddie, Ben Nicholson, John Piper, Joseph Cornell, Ella Bergman-Michel, Lászlo Moholy-Nagy, Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart, Ad Reinhardt, Robert Motherwell, Alberto Magnelli, Mimmo Rotella, Robert Rauschenberg, Georges Braque, Diego Rivera, Alexander Archipenko, Otto Gutfreund, GAN, Ardengo Soffici, Ottone Rosai, Primo Conti, El Lissitzky, Paul Citroen, Hans Bellmer, William Freddie, Karel Teige, Walter Peterhans, Hans Hoffmann, John Heartfield, William Baziotes, Hans Richter, Robert Motherwell, and many many more.
Manipulation of the photograph is as old as photography itself. Yet it was only with the impact of World War I that photomontage became an art form. The term was coined by the anti-art, anti-bourgeois Berlin Dadaists, whose members included John Heartfield, Hanna Höch, Raoul Hausmann, and George Grosz.
By breaking up images and using odd juxtapositions of fragmented photographs and other materials - the stuff of today's and yesterday's news - they created a bold new art of agitation for posters, book jackets, magazine covers, and stage sets. The idea of photomontage was as revolutionary as its content: it emphasized the links between politics and the technological age to expose the disorder of bourgeois society. What started as an inflammatory political joke soon became a conscious artistic technique.
The use of bizarre images to render reality enigmatic was seized upon by the successors of Dadaism, the Surrealists. Artists such as Max Ernst, Moholy-Nagy, and Man Ray combined images of poetic power to form hallucinatory landscapes, pursuing a systematic derangement of the senses to express the internal chaos of the individual as well as the external chaos of the world.