Matisse: The Old Master's Paper Cut Outs

 Henri Matisse "Painting With Scissors"

Late in his life one of the great masters of 20th century painting, Henri Matisse, turned to collage for his final burst of expression and the crowning glory of his career. Having suffered a grave illness he found that he could cut out paper even while laying in bed. For the remainder of his life he relied on the method of cutting shapes out of paper. With the help of his assistant, Lydia Delectorskaya, he would pin them to the white walls of his room where he would study, and rearrange, modifying the shapes until the design was just right, a process that sometimes went on for months. When the design met his satisfaction the pieces would be glued to paper, board or canvas.

Inside the Chapel du Rosaire

Matisee used this technique for what he considered his great masterpiece and the apex of his career, the design of the Chapelle du Rosaire, a project inspired by a young woman who nursed him through his illness and then became a Dominican nun. Matisse designed the entire chapel including the furniture and vestments. His method of cutting out paper was used to design the chapel's stained glass windows.

The Wider World of Collage

Through a comment on this blog I've discovered another great collage web site, Kohlage. You can upload your own collage to this site as well as check out the many resources including a wealth of Photoshop tutorials. One tutorial even shows how to create "torn paper" effects.

The possibilities are vast.  This cool stop-motion video collage is from the Kohlage blog.

LoFi Bohème - Was Soll Aus Uns Werden

Three Collage Artists

Da Dandy, Hannah Hoch, Collage, Photomontage, 1919

Hannah Hoch was the lone woman associated with the Berlin Dada artists who after World War I called for an art "which has been visibly shattered by the explosions of last week, which is forever trying to collect its limbs after yesterday's crash" (Dada Manifesto, Berlin 1918). These artists created social commentary by dissecting images from mass media and recombining them in photomontage.

Hoch addressed racial and gender issues with humor, in the image Da Dandy (above), she fills out a man's profile with images taken from popular women's magazines. Hoch's Dadaists colleagues gave lip service to gender equality but few lived up to it. One who did was the artist Kurt Schwitters.

Mz 26, 41 okola, Kurt Schwitters, Collage-paper on board, 1926

Kurt Schwitters, like Hoch, had a formal aesthetic that was sometimes at odds with the more political focus of some of the Dada artists of their time. Also at odds with the Dada movement was Schwitters romantic belief in transcendent nature. He incorporated bits of refuse that he found on the streets into his collages as a way of creating a fledgling new world out of the ruins of Post World War I Germany. Schwitters fled Germany during the rise of the Nazis and lived in London until his death in 1948. The artist Anne Ryan became, late in her career, a convert to the medium of collage after seeing a New York exhibition of Schwitters work following his death.

 

Collage #538, Anne Ryan, Collage - paper and fabric on paperboard, 1953

Of Schwitters work Ryan said, "What he could do in such a small space... How he transformed bits of paper and scraps of cloth!". She was 58 years old then and lived only six more years but produced over 400 collages before she died. In her earliest collages, like Schwitters, she incorporated pieces of printed mater and found materials but her later work reflected a softer more formal and intimate aesthetic. Ryan's work is showing through September 6th at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Prismatic Eye: Collages by Anne Ryan, 1948-54.

The Wide World of Collage

I have a pile of paintings that need to be worked on yet find myself in the midst of a late summer malaise. When my friend Thirnley offered a workshop, Ordinary Life/Extraordinary Images: Using the dynamic art form of collage to explore ideas making the unseen visible, I said "sign me up!" Maybe it is a distraction from the work at hand but I hope it will be just the fresh perspective and artist's camaraderie to bring a new spark to my work.

St. Virgin by Dick Allowatt, collage

Exploring collage on the Internet brings forth a wealth of riches. I only got as far as the A's of the alphabetically listed collage artists on the Collage Art website before I found collage artist Dick Allowatt. I love his work. I followed one of his links to Notpaper, a blog that showcases collage art and where, asked to describe himself in 10 words or less, Allowatt says, "Renaissance influence with modern day attitude". I like the textures and patina in his work suggestive of lost treasures or relics and the uncluttered spaciousness of his compositions.
  
Link to: Notpaper

Link to: Collage Art

Link to: National Collage Society

Link to: Northwest Collage Society

A Tale of Two Cubisms

The technique of collage was pivotal to the evolution of cubism. To understand this it helps to start at the beginning. The term cubism was originally coined by the art critic Louis Vauxcelles in 1908 when he reviewed an exhibition of Georges Braque's paintings using terms like cubes, and Bizarreries cubiques' intended as ridicule. But the name stuck and the rest, as they say, is history, or at least art history. These early cubist paintings began to break down the picture plane into geometric shapes or "cubes".

The formal elements or composition of analytic cubism began to take precedence over its subject matter. The work became increasingly geometric, abstract and analytical so was called analytic cubism. Braque and Picasso both returned to subject matter without returning to representational naturalism by bringing divergent elements together into motifs thus synthesizing them, into the work. Hence, synthetic cubism. They began doing this by actually bringing bits of wallpaper, newsprint, oilcloth and even wood paneling into these paintings making collage a pivotal technique in the development of cubism. 

Sources: Art History Vol II, Marilyn Stokstad, 1995; Oxford Companion to Art, ed Harold Osborn, 1970; Collage, Clement Greenberg, 1958.

Paul Horiuchi - Master of Collage

 

Dormant Blue by Paul Horiuchi, Casin rice paper collage on canvas, 1981 

 

As abstract expressionism was storming New York City, modern painters in the Pacific Northwest gained a reputation as "Northwest Mystics."  The term, coined by Life Magazine, described a subdued palette, a sensitivity to the natural environment and the Asian influence on modern painting in the Pacific Northwest. Asian art and artists had a profound influence on the mid-century Northwest aesthetic. Mark Tobey, the learned elder of the Northwest painters developed "white writing" after traveling in China and Japan saying, "The Orient has been the greatest influence of my life." When Tobey became interested in Sumi Painting he was given a large sumi brush and sumi ink by his friend Paul Horiuchi. Seattle artist Paul Horiuchi learned sumi painting as a youth in Japan  winning a national prize for his work when he was just 13 years old.

 

 Paul Horiuchi, 1930

courtesy Paul M. Horiochi: Washington State History Link

Following his father and brother Horiochi left Japan for the United States in 1920 where he worked for the Union Pacific Railroad in Wyoming. His fathers death and the great depression followed by deep prejudice toward the Japanese during WWII made life in America challenging for Horiuchi but then in 1944 he moved his young family to Seattle. At first he ran a business, Horiuchi's Body and Fender Shop but he never ceased painting eventually winning prizes and showing in the Seattle Art Museum.

  Color Floating in Time by Paul Horiuchi

When Horiuchi married he also converted to Catholicism, his wife's religion, and changed his name from Chikamasa to Paul taking the name Paul in honor of Paul Cezanne and Pablo Picasso. It was Picasso and Georges Braque, who through their cubist experiments with collage inspired Horiuchi to reflect on the Japanese art of collage going back to the 12th century when poets and calligraphers arranged torn paper into landscapes. One of Horiuchi's first great collages was inspired by seeing rain blown shredded layers of notices on a wall in Seattle's Chinatown. After a career that produced over 2,000 paintings in 1999 Paul Horiuchi died. Printed on the program for his memorial service were the words, "I have always wanted to create something serene, the peace and serenity, the quality needed to balance the sensationalism in our surroundings today. Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I'm seeking beauty and truth in nature. This philosophy of mine hasn't changed for the last 50 years."