Collage/ Collages. From Cubism to New-Dada

Catalogue’s English Edition for the Exhibition of the same title, concept and curatorship by M.G.Messina, M. M. Lamberti, Turin, Galleria d’arte moderna e contemporanea, 9 October 2007- 6 January 2008 The exhibition aimed to present an historical look at the techniques of collage, in order to verify the richness and expressive significance of a technique that is apparently banal and fragile but in actual fact open to sophisticated diffractions of meaning. The decision to title exhibition and catalogue with the word Collage, together with its French and English plural, aimed to indicate first the unifying force beyond the processes and then the broader array of experiences involved. The first two sequences concentrated on the tautological use of collage, the direct inclusion of mimetic fragments (wall coverings, fake wood, materials, and so on) in the construction of the image. This gave rise to constant friction between art and reality, from the first experiments by Picasso, Braque and Gris to the Futurist re-workings. Attention was also given to the network of meanings built up within the collages by words cut from newspapers, extending the analysis from Picasso’s word games to the associations evoked by Soffici and Severini. The following two sections were dedicated to the different trends within Dada and Surrealist visual culture, from the political contents of works by Dix, Grosz, Hoch, through the verbal/visual puns or more constructive choices made by Schwitters and up to the Surrealists, documenting the specific disorientation effect caused by the introduction of incongruent details into traditional syntax. After showing Matisse’s “Jazz” Portfolio, the exhibition ended with a final section, centred on post WWII’s collage, where the strong appearance of material elements signalled their own expressive values, from Prampolini’s early “Interviste con la materia” up to 1950s Informal research by Burri, Novelli, Tancredi, Afro and Scialoja, or by Motherwell, Appel and Jorn, ending with the experimental proposals by Paolini or Rauschenberg. These main trends were flanked by others confirming the versatility of collage: its reverberations as a compositional device in the practice of painting, with examples by Braque up to Carol Rama; or its use in spatial constructions in the assemblies of the Russian Constructivist Ivan Puni. The exhibition comprehended 195 works coming from important museums and private collections in Italy and abroad. Introductions and essays in the meticulously drafted catalogue, written by the curators, together with relevant Italian scholars in the field of XXth century art, showed extremely useful in framing collage’s technique within an up to date perspective, both philological and critical.