Exhibition at the museum
Collages and Photomontages of Victorian England
From October 07th, 1997 to January 04th, 1998
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Eventail avec onze portraits d'hommes, femmes et enfants, entre 1866 et 1871
Musée d'Orsay
© RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay) / Hervé Lewandowski
See the notice of the artwork
Photography, limited in general to family portraits, is secondary to the general composition, fantastical and humorous. These albums are works of raw art, for use by good society.
Following the vein of fancy and the absurd, the exhibition also displayed humoristic postcards of the turn of the century, which Paul Eluard collected with passion, and which he defended in the periodical Le Minotaure in December 1933, as well as several collages (or publications issued from collages) made by Max Ernst and, lastly, a self-portrait by Raoul Haussmann. The latter, a dadaist artist, was influenced by the technique used by Georgiana Berkeley, but his source is to be found mainly in popular art. He told himself how in 1918 he discovered this process in a hamlet in the Baltic, observing in each house the portrait of a soldier, whose head, photographed and then cut out and placed on a wooden engraving, decorated a conventional barracks background. Instantly, he expressed his enthusiasm for this process, which allowed him to express his loathing of what he called "playing the part of the artist". He then invented the term "photomontage", making it possible for him to pose as an "engineer".
Max Ernst, from 1920 onwards, would use a similar technique, but Aragon, in a famous text written in 1923, would term it "collage".
The exhibition is now over.
See the whole program