COLLAGE: PERSONALITIES, CONCEPTS, TECHNIQUES.
By Harriet Janisand Rudi Blesh ’21. Philadelphia: ChiltonBooks, 1961. 302 pp. $10.00.
If to many a critic the spectacle of artist quarreling with fellow artist and both with the public is only a temptation to behave like a prize-fight promoter, we are lucky that there are some true mediators.
In their new book. Collage, Harriet Janis and Rudi Blesh have done far more than write an historical description of the gluing of extraneous materials to canvas. They have produced a sensitive exposition of the whole modern movement in all the arts, gathering in with warm and hospitable understanding the many diverse strands. Holding their own light high enough to illumine early origins, they have shown relationships between the great feuding family of twentieth-century artists from Braque through Ernst and Du- buffet to Cesar, Rauschenberg, and Kaprow. Their exposition makes inspiring reading for artist and man-in-the-gallery alike.
As knowledgeable as anyone about this century’s schools of art, they offer us a deeper challenge than armchair scholasti- cism. They have taken immense pains to talk to or correspond with the artists of whom they write, where this was possible. Where it was not possible, then to interview people who knew the artists well. They have an extraordinary ability to select from these interviews material that is significant.
What have the great collagists, construc- tivists, assemblagists produced in the last fifty years in America, in Europe, in Japan? Four hundred and twenty-seven illustrations, carefully chosen, give us rich opportunity to see for ourselves. How did they achieve their effects? Here are eye-witness accounts of Kurt Schwitters at work crumbling bits of paper into flour paste, Cesar directing a giant compressor, Yves Klein exposing his canvases, to scourge of wind and rain, Robert Mallary drenching the “horrible magma” of Manhattan streets with resins, Matisse “cutting to the quick in color,” Burri “healing” his wounded burlap with his surgeon’s needle. VI 71- _ .1 . it- _ _ . O TT 1 , t
What do these men mean? How do they feel? How do they want us. to feel about the plaster-soaked rag, the compressed car, the gigantic, gilded rabbit-warren? Are we hav- ing our leg pulled? Sometimes. But more often we are being invited to share a joke on our civilization. More often still we are witnessing an appeal to involve ourselves in the tragedies and needs of this desperate moment in human history by prophets who no longer find in the symbols of earlier ages any language to communicate today’s prob- lems of waste, uncertainty, and foundation- shaking change. Letters from the artists themselves confirm this appeal as the aim of their work.
Any attempt at reconciliation between artist and artist or artist and public deserves respect. When the attempt is successful it deserves gratitude and admiration. Harriet Janis and Rudi Blesh have managed the rec- onciliation less by argument than by per- suasive illustration, and with a devotion only possible in people deeply committed to their subject. Their book is for everybody; and by everybody I mean everyone who creates art, tries to create art or is interested in looking at it. Who else is there?
