Page 85 - Expanded Photography

Expanded Photography Bob Cotton 85/146
Brandon Taylor, in his brilliant book Collage - The Making of Modern Art (2004), points out that in 1911, Picasso left Paris and the close association of Braque and the other Cubists for a summer in Cerét - a small town between the Pyrenees and the Mediterranean. In this period of separation, Picas- so was able to develop his use of bricolage - found objects and materials - that he incorporated into his drawings and paintings. Brandon Taylor on Guitar, Sheet Music and Glass: “Semantic units and musical notes lend voice and sound to an already tactile collage composition - compounding the complex interplay of drawn, pasted and simulated surfaces present in the picture.” By 1912, back in Paris and inspired by Braque’s Fruit Dish and Glass (1912), Picasso is already pinning his papiers collés and paper-sculptures on his studio wall. The innovation by Braque and Picasso of the Papiers collés marks the invention and introduction of collage into Modernist art, paving the way for the use of collage and photo-montage by artists of the Futurists, Dadaists, Bauhaus artists, and Russian Constructivists later in the century.
So, Brandon Taylor also points out that in the Paris of the early 20th century: “ everyday material cul- ture was rich in pieces of paper, and their comparative juxtaposition; hence it was primarily through collage that the artist could maintain a relationship to commercial modernity that was both philosoph- ical and social...” (Taylor op cit). He (Taylor) also makes the point about the ‘privacy’ of the collage - they are usually small-scale, quick to make and serve as ideal experimental platforms for artists. Of course in the coeval papier collés of Picasso and Braque (c 1911-1912) mark a breakthrough of col- lage into post-cubist neo-abstraction - they are thoroughly modern. The mix now of faded newsprint, sheet music, brown paper, wall-paper, wrapping paper, receipts - other paintings cut or cropped, some with the structural charcoal marks and representations (above centre) - age - the cheaper paper fading to sepia in sunlight - gives them perhaps more homogeneity appropriate to their cultural status as the first modernist collages.
George Braque: Papiers collés - Fruit Dish and Glass 1912 + La clarinette – Tenora 1913 + Nature Morte 1913.
George Braque invented the collage form known as Papiers collés: Brandon Taylor: “Braque was alone in Sorges, Picasso having returned to Paris to change studios. In an Avignon wallpaper store Braque spotted some wood-grain wallpaper, and immediately went in to buy it. Returning to the stu- dio, he pasted rectangular patches onto the surfaces of several large charcoal drawings, in such a way that the drawing and the paper defined each other in a series of procedural and semantic order- ings that would have massive implications for what was to follow. The work on paper known as Fruit Dish and Glass, for example [see upper left), has three unequal patches at left, and right, and lower down, probably attached after some initial drawing defined the main curve of the fruit dish but be- fore the drawing was continued over the wood-grain patches or completed in recognition of the pa- per’s rectangular edges. The relationship of this novel format to Cubist painting is immediately chal- lenging to the most radical degree. For not only are these new drawings larger than some Cubist paintings, but they also carve out a wholly new metier whose seriousness and ingenuity is the equal of any painting, even if for the moment that quality was less easy to recognise.” (Brandon Taylor: Collage - The Making of Modern Art (2004) p17).Braque’s collaged drawings of this period are some- how formally more ‘pure’ than Picasso’s Papiers collés.