1: Untitled loose page from the Filmer Album; 2: “Mixed Pickles” (detail)
In the 1860s and 1870s, long before the embrace of collage techniques by avant-garde artists of the early 20th century, aristocratic Victorian women were experimenting with photocollage. Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage, opening at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York early February 2010, is the first exhibition to study these works.
With Photoshop still over a century away, Victorian ladies were combining watercolor drawings and cut-and-pasted photographs to create whimsical and fantastical photo collages. The approximately 50 works from public and private collections feature surreal, subversive, and humorous qualities.
3: “Diamond Shape with Nine Studio Portraits of the Palmerston Family and a Painted Cherry Blossom Surround
The exhibition explains that ‘in England in the 1850s and 1860s, photography became remarkably popular and accessible as people posed for studio portraits and exchanged these pictures on a vast scale. The craze for cartes de visite, photographic portraits the size of a visiting card, led to the widespread hobby of collecting small photographs of family, friends, acquaintances, and celebrities in scrapbooks. Rather than simply gathering such portraits in the standard albums manufactured to hold cartes de visite, the amateur women artists who made the photocollages cut up these photographic portraits and placed them in elaborate watercolour designs in their personal albums.
4: Untitled page from the Madame B Album, 1870s
‘With sharp wit and dramatic shifts of scale akin to those Alice experienced in Wonderland, Victorian photocollages stand the rather serious conventions of early photography on their heads. Often, the combination of photographs with painted settings inspired dreamlike and even bizarre results: placing human heads on animal bodies; situating people in imaginary landscapes; and morphing faces into common household objects and fashionable accessories. Such albums advertised the artistic accomplishments of the aristocratic women who made them, while also serving as a form of parlour entertainment and an opportunity for conversation and flirtation with the opposite sex.’
5: Untitled page from the Gough Album, late 1870s
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue by the curator Elizabeth Siegel, focusing on the themes and social meanings of photocollage, as well as the avant-garde character of the art form. The catalogue with 140 illustrations is published by Yale University Press for The Art Institute of Chicago and sells for $45, hardcover.
Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage runs from February 02 to May 09 2010
