Cut and Paste: 400 Years of Collage

by Patrick Elliott, Freya Gowrley, Yuval Etgar

Collage is one of the most popular and pervasive of all art forms, and yet this is the first historical survey book ever published on the subject.

Featuring nearly 200 works, ranging from the 1500s to the present day, it offers an entirely new approach. In the past, collage has been presented as a twentieth-century phenomenon, linked in particular to Pablo Picasso and Cubism in the years just before the First World War. Here, the story of collage is traced back to books and prints of the 1500s, on to the boom in popularity of scrapbooks and do-it-yourself collage during the Victorian period, and then through Cubism, Futurism, Dada and Surrealism.

Collage became the technique of choice in the 1960s and 1970s for anti-establishment protest and, in the present day, it is used by millions of us through digital devices. The definition of collage employed here is a broad one, encompassing cut-and-pasted paper, photography, patchwork, film and digital technology and ranging from work by professionals to unknown makers, amateurs and children.

Includes three essays:
Collage over the Centuries by Patrick Elliott;
Collage Before Modernism by Freya Gowrley;
On Edge: Exploring Collage Tactics and Terminology by Yuval Etgar

Published to accompany an exhibition at the National Gallery of Scotland, June-November 2019.

Genres: Art, Nonfiction

184 pages, Paperback

First published July 17, 2019

About the author

Patrick Elliott is Chief Curator at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh. He has written extensively on modern and contemporary art.

Reviews

[Chris Browning · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s slightly let down by trying to write something approximating a linear history of an artform that really doesn’t suit such a thing, but I don’t really fault them for trying to nudge the history of collage back by a few decades or more to incorporate some of the forerunners of the form. The essays are fine, if a little repetitive, but the art itself is stunning with some lovely surprises (and, handily, kind of proving that Hannah Höch really is the greatest collage maker of them all)

[Cflack · Rating 4 out of 5]

As someone who has started collaging in the past two years (can you say pandemic activity?) this book was a gift and I loved it. It’s puts into broad historical context the art of collage and the men and women who have been participating not only since the late 19th century but years before that.

Amazing images and background. I wish I could have seen the exhibit in person.

[Hella · Rating 4 out of 5]

Een prachtige, inspirerende catalogus. Ik schreef een uitgebreide recensie, mét afbeeldingen, op mijn blog.
http://heldenreis.nl/2019/08/cut-and-...

[Yellowoasis · Rating 5 out of 5]

I picked this up from the library thinking it would be one of those gorgeous pictorial books you could flick through at whim. As soon as I opened the first chapter I realised this was a book to devote some serious time to. Mindblowing in its scope, I just wanted to devour every line and study every image. How I would have loved to have seen the exhibition of this catalogue.