Before the photograph came into acceptance as the predominant means of illustrating the day's news, there was a fashion in periodical publications when newspaper artists staged mock-up scenes of famous events. An example would be the death of Rudolph Valentino in 1926. Naturally, few people saw the actual demise or its circumstances, but many thought they had, though it was only by means of a collage, or photo-montage, in the daily paper.

A photo composition technique was used to create a tableau posed by actors in costume as the parties attending Valentino's deathbed. The newspaper artist would paste in Rudolph Valentino's visage on the face of an actor pretending to be "the Sheik," and the resulting image would be presented to a rather gullible reading public as "How it looked, How it happened." The collage technique allowed the tabloid journalist of the 1920s to bring the reader of a newspaper into the very death chamber of the world's most famous movie idol. This same mock-up method has been used widely, from unintentionally surreal Spanish language "fotonovelas" to luridly exploitative tabloid "scandal sheets."

The growth of photography as a component of newspapers superseded this fashion. There was a brief golden age when collage, as a means of showing the multitudes events they might otherwise only have heard of or read about, was as current and accessible as the local newsstand.

It is in this tradition that we find Max Ernst (1891-1976) and those who followed thereafter in his Dada footsteps by experimenting with collage as an art form. He began his most famous series of collages by lifting entire full page illustrations from periodicals then available to him, and then pasting upon them additional visual elements cut from other sources. The main illustrations were then executed by engravers working from the artist's conceptions of scenes.

One of the hallmarks of this style is the use of parallel shading, an engraving technique which renders images in the same way that portraits of the Presidents appear on U. S. paper currency. Ernst selected images printed from engravers plates in everyday periodicals, each rendered in parallel shading and minute crosshatch. Thus his images agreed in their graphic form -- all of the images he uses have been engraved by another hand, and he combines them in a new way to create a surreal montage which looks every bit as official as any other image printed to memorialize and communicate an occasion of newsworthy import.

Because it matters greatly for visual clarity that collage elements agree in their graphic texture, as do the images given us under the engraver's hand, combining reproduced photographs gives rise to special problems. One of the first obstacles is that all modern lithographed photographs which have been reproduced for printing have first been broken down into dot screens, and if one is combining different collage elements which have been screened at different rates of coarseness (e.g., 80 dot image juxtaposed with a 300 dot image) -- the result can be difficult to clearly reproduce in clear resolution.

This is why Andy Warhol tended to rely upon tracing of images, and to avoid the use of dot in his silkscreen work. If one looks carefully, one sees that Warhol's 1983 portrait of Ingrid Bergman (from the film "Casablanca"), executed in silkscreen in seven colors on 36 inch square museum board, uses a still photograph of her reproduced in dot as a template. Warhol then traces over her face, hair and hat, neck and shoulders, suit and lapels with a felt tip pen, and then divides the several color areas using coated plastic incised by knife where each color should be printed to create the color separation. In this way Warhol was able to accomplish several aims - he got a clean image that would reproduce well by tracing out a line drawing and dividing the entire image into seven colors, he escaped the copyright infringement case he might have incurred with the original photographer or cinematographer who had captured the original image, and he was able to abstract the color of his finished image (for the source photograph was either black and white or a print of a frame of Technicolor stock) and then enlarge the entire image, and finally to print it as his own original work of art to which he could sign his own name, and therefore sell in a gallery as an original Warhol. He was employing the collage technique upon a single iconic image, which he then refined using the photomechanical tools of commercial screenprinting. While others combined many images in a single composition, Warhol, who specialized in single images, nonetheless ranks among the most innovative of collagists. When he accomplished his 1983 serigraph of Ingrid Bergman dressed as a praying nun (from the film "The Bells of St. Mary's"), Warhol was carrying on a long tradition of artists working with the techniques of collage, photomechanical reproduction, and commercial printmaking.

Maxfield Parrish created collaged compositions using photographs in posed tableaus which he then copied into oil paint. Parrish dressed and photographed models and superimposed them over a photographed landscape that Parrish them made ethereal by polarizing its color. He then painted the entire pastiche in his own signature technique of multiple layered glazes over individually brushed in color areas. A Maxfield Parrish painting was thus a collage rendered in oil paint and glaze...

In another realm, the optical printer was developed for use in the film industry to allow filmmakers to do with film stock what the collage artist had previously done with paper. In the motion picture "The Wizard of Oz" (1938) the optical printer superimposes a small model Kansas farmhouse upon the black and white photography of sky in a tornado. The model house is separately photographed spinning on unseen strings, and the optical printer prints the house upon the separately filmed footage of the storm. The result is that the combined film footage makes us believe that Dorothy has indeed been blown all the way to Oz. The optical printer itself won an Oscar of its very own for putting the cut and paste aesthetics of collage at the fingertips of the motion picture industry.

It is probably safe to say, "Max Ernst was there first" in his surrealistic handling of juxtaposed images. The techniques commercial artists employ to create tight board work for photographic reproduction means, simply, that the artist skillfully commands rubber cement, paper and illustration board to do clean paste up work which can be easily and accurately photographically reproduced using a commercial process camera. Ernst brought the techniques of a commercial paste up advertising artist together with the poetic ethos of the Dadaist and the surrealist. By combining different elements, the artist can say something specific about our culture and consciousness -- the resulting collage being more eloquent than the sum of its parts, more than we might have been able to convey by starting from scratch with a blank canvas and pulling imagery from our memory or imagination.

Pablo Picasso made extensive use of collage during his Cubist period early in the 20th Century, and indeed all through his life, as did his colleague Juan Gris, who like Picasso started with Le Journal -- the daily Parisian newspaper of that day full of printed text and engraved pictures and photographs as the source of pictorial element and inspiration. Max Ernst's principal source of inspiration may well have been Goya's "Los Caprichos" -- The Horrors of War -- in which Goya portrayed the evils of the war in Spain during his lifetime with imagery that would convey the magnitude and depth of horror. In so doing reached toward what we now call the Surreal. Goya was to his day what a Wartime photographer is to the present time -- he showed Europe and the world how ghastly and cruel the conflict in Spain really was.

When Wilfred Sätty, a San Francisco collage artist working in the 1960s and 1970s (he perished in 1982 after a fall from a ladder at age 42) took up the gluepot, he had at hand great archives in bookstores, magazines stores and junk shops. For a handful of change he could amass reproduced engravings from prior publications, photographs in black and white and color, and employ a vast vocabulary of images which he could then mix and match.

In recent years it has become increasingly obvious to more artists that quoting from prior works, or sampling phrases of music and recombining them, and generally using the collage technique in any form of music or art, is among the most evocative ways to work. The thrust of this technique is that even though the artist cannot draw like Escher or engrave printing plates, (lacking even dextrous skill and requisite patience), the artist can use what exists in the vast stream of published imagery, and combine and juxtapose in an ever surprising array.

What we see in Sätty's work is very much like what we see in the collages of Max Ernst: an infinite horizon upon which elements are juxtaposed, and because they are all engraved, there is no loss of resolution when the resulting collage is photographed and reproduced. Upon the infinite horizon, the surrealist pastes image upon background and image upon image. If we compare Ernst's oil paintings with his own collages, the infinite horizon, which roughly bisects the picture plane, is all that they have in common. That the collages speak as eloquently as do the paintings is to appreciate what his surrealistic vision really is, for both are given us under the hand of Max Ernst, but only the paintings are wholly, in all of their elements, his original images.

Collage as a visual language is now our world lingua franca. Modern digital technologies that dispense with the screened dot matrix of past photographic reproduction offer us the new world of the square pixel, which itself has drawbacks in terms of the fineness of its resolution by comparison with the much higher precision available through serigraphic techniques. Microchips, for example, are printed in gold leaf using photochromolithography -- a technique which combines the precision of the silkscreen with the efficiencies of the lithographer's art. Robert Rauschenberg supered the technical problems of photo-reproduction by using solvents on his collage elements, and working with the afterimage created by the solvents as they melted the ink on the paper of his chosen images. Then he enhanced the images using standard retouching techniques and other innovations, and the result was that Rauschenberg images are uniquely original, and reproduce splendidly by lithography, photography, or digital techniques. Indeed, he combines lithography and silkscreen together with images bled by acetone from newspapers and magazines, and with this adds easel-style oil painting. Yet the dominant theme of all of his work is collage.

Collage in sculpture in small calls to mind the earlier work of Joseph Cornell, who, along with 3-Desque flat work, created tiny boxes full of totems of personal meaning and remembrance . They are private memory boxes spoken in the languages of memento and the surreal, small parcels of jewelbox identity presented for public introspection.

Digital photography and the machinery by which digital images can be altered have created a new world in which the photographic can no longer be accepted as legal proof in court. When we see a photograph, we look not for the telltale knifelines (as we do for the flaws in Time/Life's infamous collage of Lee Harvey Oswald holding a rifle, which was simulated to imply Oswald's guilt), but we look to see if the entire image has not been digitally enhanced or altered or changed in such a way that the unschooled eye would consider that the entire image had been faithfully taken from life by a camera's shutter, though it is wholly fictional. This is the new frontier in the visual arts. In photography, in motion pictures, in television, in printed matter of every kind -- the digital matrix of fine screens of square pixels has become ubiquitous. Digital visual technology is ruled by the very same graphic principles which ruled Max Ernst's collage output, yet digital technology allows artists to combine images in such a way that the impossible looks real and the fictional looks believable.

If there are to be new luminaries of the digital matrix who marry disparate photographic, lithographic, serigraphic or other elements into a seamless delight that fools the eye as do the filmic special effects of George Lucas' Industrial Light & Magic (but with the production aesthetic of Max Ernst or say, Hannah Hoch), time alone will disclose such stars to us.

 

© Brien D. Coleman, bdc@phantimage.net Phantasmagoric Image 2001  All Rights Reserved