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Fragmentary Forms: A New History of Collage
A beautifully illustrated global history of collage from the origins of paper to today
While the emergence of collage is frequently placed in the twentieth century when it was a favored medium of modern artists, its earliest beginnings are tied to the invention of paper in China around 200 BCE. Subsequent forms occurred in twelfth-century Japan with illuminated manuscripts that combined calligraphic poetry with torn colored papers. In early modern Europe, collage was used to document and organize herbaria, plant specimens, and other systems of knowledge. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, collage became firmly associated with the expression of intimate relations and familial affections. Fragmentary Forms offers a new, global perspective on one of the world’s oldest and most enduring means of cultural expression, tracing the rich history of collage from its ancient origins to its uses today as a powerful tool for storytelling and explorations of identity.
Presenting an expansive approach to collage and the history of art, Freya Gowrley explores what happens when overlapping fragmentary forms are in conversation with one another. She looks at everything from volumes of pilgrims’ religious relics and Victorian seaweed albums to modernist papiers collés by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque and quilts by Faith Ringgold exploring African-American identity. Gowrley examines the work of anonymous and unknown artists whose names have been lost to history, either by accident or through exclusion.
Featuring hundreds of beautiful images, Fragmentary Forms demonstrates how the use of found objects is an important characteristic of this unique art form and shows how collage is an inclusive medium that has given voice to marginalized communities and artists across centuries and cultures.
While the emergence of collage is frequently placed in the twentieth century when it was a favored medium of modern artists, its earliest beginnings are tied to the invention of paper in China around 200 BCE. Subsequent forms occurred in twelfth-century Japan with illuminated manuscripts that combined calligraphic poetry with torn colored papers. In early modern Europe, collage was used to document and organize herbaria, plant specimens, and other systems of knowledge. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, collage became firmly associated with the expression of intimate relations and familial affections. Fragmentary Forms offers a new, global perspective on one of the world’s oldest and most enduring means of cultural expression, tracing the rich history of collage from its ancient origins to its uses today as a powerful tool for storytelling and explorations of identity.
Presenting an expansive approach to collage and the history of art, Freya Gowrley explores what happens when overlapping fragmentary forms are in conversation with one another. She looks at everything from volumes of pilgrims’ religious relics and Victorian seaweed albums to modernist papiers collés by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque and quilts by Faith Ringgold exploring African-American identity. Gowrley examines the work of anonymous and unknown artists whose names have been lost to history, either by accident or through exclusion.
Featuring hundreds of beautiful images, Fragmentary Forms demonstrates how the use of found objects is an important characteristic of this unique art form and shows how collage is an inclusive medium that has given voice to marginalized communities and artists across centuries and cultures.
- GenresArt
400 pages, Hardcover
Published November 12, 2024
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July 19, 2025
Having read other collage history books that often feel narrow in both perspective and diversity, Fragmentary Forms by Freya Gowrley was a refreshing and much more expansive take on the art form. Gowrley delivers on much of her promise from the introduction to "pull together a more global, more female, and more queer history of collage, one that is varied in both the time periods it covers, and the types of objects [this book] examines.” And for the most part, she does so with clarity, care, and critical insight.
One of the book’s greatest strengths is its intersectional analysis. Gowrley doesn't just name-drop BIPOC, queer, and female artists—she digs into how their identities shaped their access to, and approach toward, the medium of collage. She interrogates how gender, sexuality, economics, and class influence artistic production, and in doing so, opens up a richer and more inclusive understanding of the form.
Some of my favorite artists for me included:
Mary Delany, with her intricate "paper mosaicks" (as she called them), turned colored cut-paper into a form of collage that was both scientific and an outward expression of her love of botany. Did I mention she started this immensely detailed and finely cut series at the age of 71? Amazing.
Joe Orton & Kenneth Halliwell, whose altered library book covers satirized and subverted the racial and heteronormative assumptions embedded in literature. Their version of Othello is particularly striking.
Keiichi Tanaami, whose vivid-pop collage work reflects on his childhood in wartime Japan, postwar trauma, and cultural transformation. All of his collages are, for lack of a better term, loaded, visual complex and arresting.
Overall, reading this book greatly expanded my definition of collage—not just as a cut-and-paste medium, but also featherwork, reliquaries, prayer cards, valentine cards, curiosity cabinets, commonplace/scrap books, and quilts.
That said, my one critique (or perhaps disappointment) is that the book’s claim to global perspective feels uneven. Gowrley is upfront in her introduction, acknowledging that much of collage’s historical trajectory is rooted in Western art-making traditions, but the inclusion of artists from China, Japan, Iran, India, Jamaica, Samoa, and the African continent felt more like sparse nodes than integrated threads. It wasn’t until Chapter 8, “Radical Possibilities,” that the book truly began to resemble the global, inclusive history it aspired to be.Still, if I had to choose between Freya Gowrley’s Fragmentary Forms and Eddie Wolfram’s History of Collage, which is limited in both vision and scope, Gowrley’s book wins by a landslide. 5/5 ⭐.
One of the book’s greatest strengths is its intersectional analysis. Gowrley doesn't just name-drop BIPOC, queer, and female artists—she digs into how their identities shaped their access to, and approach toward, the medium of collage. She interrogates how gender, sexuality, economics, and class influence artistic production, and in doing so, opens up a richer and more inclusive understanding of the form.
Some of my favorite artists for me included:
Mary Delany, with her intricate "paper mosaicks" (as she called them), turned colored cut-paper into a form of collage that was both scientific and an outward expression of her love of botany. Did I mention she started this immensely detailed and finely cut series at the age of 71? Amazing.
Joe Orton & Kenneth Halliwell, whose altered library book covers satirized and subverted the racial and heteronormative assumptions embedded in literature. Their version of Othello is particularly striking.
Keiichi Tanaami, whose vivid-pop collage work reflects on his childhood in wartime Japan, postwar trauma, and cultural transformation. All of his collages are, for lack of a better term, loaded, visual complex and arresting.
Overall, reading this book greatly expanded my definition of collage—not just as a cut-and-paste medium, but also featherwork, reliquaries, prayer cards, valentine cards, curiosity cabinets, commonplace/scrap books, and quilts.
That said, my one critique (or perhaps disappointment) is that the book’s claim to global perspective feels uneven. Gowrley is upfront in her introduction, acknowledging that much of collage’s historical trajectory is rooted in Western art-making traditions, but the inclusion of artists from China, Japan, Iran, India, Jamaica, Samoa, and the African continent felt more like sparse nodes than integrated threads. It wasn’t until Chapter 8, “Radical Possibilities,” that the book truly began to resemble the global, inclusive history it aspired to be.Still, if I had to choose between Freya Gowrley’s Fragmentary Forms and Eddie Wolfram’s History of Collage, which is limited in both vision and scope, Gowrley’s book wins by a landslide. 5/5 ⭐.
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