Paper, Scissors, Glue: Collage in Edinburgh

Collage: Now there's an art form anyone can have a go at.

For some of us, it brings back memories of primary school, using those scissors with the rounded ends and that glue that smelt of fish. Or for something a little more tactile, what about Fuzzy-Felt?

Art history has given us the view that it was the Cubists like Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso and those daring Dadaists who first started cutting up pieces of paper and sticking them down together to form pictures in the early years of the 20th century. But as the excellently titled Cut and Paste: 400 Years of Collage at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh makes clear, they really weren't breaking new ground at all. People were a-cutting and a-pasting long before Picasso, but then they weren't calling it high art.

So our story of collage takes us back to the days before anyone had even coined the term, back to the Victorian era and long before, when lots of amateur artists found amusement in creating pictures with scissors and paste -- and a few professionals found it worth their while too.

There's some fascinating social history in all this, from George Smart, a tailor from Frant, near Tunbridge Wells, who made pictures from offcuts of material and sold them in his shop, to Thomas Rodger of St Andrews, creator in 1857 of one of the earliest photomontages, depicting Four Generations of his family. You'll see plenty of other interesting examples of Victorian composite photos in this show as well. 

Someone who made a living from cutting out bits of paper was Augustin Edouart, a French silhouette artist who lived in Edinburgh from 1829 to 1832, during which time he is said to have depicted 5,000 sitters, cut freehand from black paper. He could reportedly create a silhouette from scratch in just three minutes. This family group are placed onto a watercolour background, and the male figure on the left holds a folded letter, collaged on.

A couple of decades later, Ingres used a collage technique to create a group portrait of the family of his friend Edouard Gatteaux. including his now dead parents, using three old engravings of drawings he had made at different times. He stuck them down, drew in the bodies, and added in a fourth, younger relative and a background.  

But much collage was done as a hobby, sticking published engravings and the like together. Charles Dickens is reputed to have created this screen with his friend, the Shakespearean actor Charles Macready, and it's covered with about 400 images, including actors and actresses, and a portrait of Dickens himself. 

This look back at collage before collage is one of the most fun parts of what turns out to be a surprisingly extensive exhibition. Fast forward to the first few years of the 20th century, and things get a bit more arty, and, it has to be said, a bit more po-faced, for a while. It's time for the Cubists to invent collage, and here's Picasso with one of his earliest attempts, Bottle and Glass on a Table. The bottle is formed from a newspaper page, and there's an advert for cherry brandy at the bottom. Some letters are stencilled on to represent the brand of drink.

One of the more innovative of the Cubist collagists was Juan Gris, who seems to have planned his pictures very precisely. The Sunblind, made on the Mediterranean coast, contains a printed reproduction of a sunblind.

Soon everyone was at it: the Dadaists, the Futurists, the Surrealists, and even the Bloomsbury set. Duncan Grant cut out shapes and then painted over them to create a Still Life with Fruit and Coffee Pot. Given that the collaged bits aren't really visible, we weren't sure we actually saw the point of it.

Now, there's also a fair amount of Surrealist collage in this show, by the likes of Max Ernst, and frankly we found it largely pretty tedious. Don't spend too much time on this stuff, because there are far more interesting things to look at, such as the anti-Nazi photomontages of John Heartfield (born Helmut Herzfeld), including Adolf the Superman, swallowing gold and spouting rubbish.

There are early British collages too, from the likes of Edward Burra and John Piper, who travelled the country with a bag full of materials like marbled papers and music scores to produce collage landscapes like one of Avebury in Wiltshire, made up on a board on his knees in the open air.

The show really springs back into life with Pop Art. Nothing po-faced here, as we see how Eduardo Paolozzi, Peter Blake and others appropriated the visual language of advertising and the excitement of the American-led consumer boom into their work in the 1950s and 60s.

Many of the works in this show are small, fragile things, but Blake went large with the rather wonderful Toy Shop, built to store his collection of toys and folk art.

Meanwhile, Richard Hamilton's Desk from 1964 recreates a publicity still for a film, references Mondriaan and Pollock, collages in a photo of a telephone and reproduces the wood grain on the office furniture using sticky-backed plastic. He must have been watching Blue Peter.

The final room takes us on to collage today, and there's some enjoyable things in here too: Who's that girl behind the flowers in this picture by Jim Lambie, we wondered.

We should have looked at the title: Sticky Fingers. Mick Jagger is one of a number of music icons depicted by Lambie in images that include layers of flowers taken from oil paintings.

That great Scottish first, the photomontage, is back too, given new life by digital technology. There's an amazing example of Jean-François Rauzier's hyperphotos, giving a view of 3000 works in London's National Gallery in one picture. A well-placed seat allows you to browse the collection for your favourites.

And we liked Lucy Williams's Crescent House, as well, a 3D view of an inner-London block of flats combining painting and low-relief sculpture. That would have worked nicely in the Architecture of London show at the Guildhall Art Gallery....

All this, and we haven't even mentioned Matisse and Warhol, the library-book covers doctored by Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell, Sgt Pepper and the Sex Pistols.... There's a lot to enjoy in this intriguing exhibition, even if those Surrealists are, for once, a bit of a bore.

But what happened to the Fuzzy-Felt? It gets its own dedicated display, and then we searched in the museum shop and couldn't find any! Someone in Edinburgh is missing a trick....

Practicalities

Cut and Paste: 400 Years of Collage is on at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern Two) in Edinburgh until October 27. It's open daily from 1000 to 1700 and full-price admission costs £11 Monday to Friday, £13 at the weekends. Tickets can be bought online here. The gallery is on Belford Rd to the west of the city centre. It's 15 minutes' walk from Haymarket station, or there are buses from Waverley station and Princes St.

Images

Augustin Edouart, The Wardlaw Ramsay Family, 1831, National Galleries of Scotland
William Macready and Charles Dickens, Folding Scrap-Work Screen, about 1860, Friends of Sherborne House, Dorset

Pablo Picasso, Bouteille et Verre sur un Table (Bottle and Glass on a Table), 1912, National Galleries of Scotland. © Succession Picasso/DACS, London 2018

Juan Gris, The Sunblind, 1914, Tate

Eduardo Paolozzi, Collage, 1950, National Galleries of Scotland

Peter Blake, The Toy Shop, 1962, Tate

Jim Lambie, Sticky Fingers, 2010, Private collection

Lucy Williams, Crescent House, 2015, Private collection, London