Collage before Modernism.
Collage before Modernism: Craft, Identity & the History of Art
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Studies of collage have occupied a central place within scholarship on modernist cultural production, yet collage made before 1912 has consistently been overlooked by histories of art and design. This project sheds light on this unwritten history of collage by examining its diverse manifestations in Britain, North America, and the British Empire from 1680-1912. Though the term ‘collage’ (from the French verb coller, ‘to glue’) is most often associated with paper collage or papier collé, the centuries before modernism saw a diverse proliferation of composite forms. With visual, material, and literary manifestations, the period witnessed the production of a wide variety of collaged objects, including decoupage, assembled furniture, pieced quilts, mosaics, scrapbooks, and photomontage, demonstrating the need for a more complex and nuanced history of collage than currently exists.
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The project approaches collage from two angles: firstly, it explores the connection between the making of collage and the making of the self, asking how its production and consumption functioned to express the identities and emotions of those who made, owned, and viewed it. Secondly, by deploying perspectives from fields such as design history and material culture studies in combination with traditional art historical methodologies, it asks broader questions about the nature of ‘Art’ itself. Using the ways in which collage has been defined, discussed, and dismissed, it examines and problematizes fundamental art historical ideas such as ‘hierarchy’, ‘genre’, and ‘canon’. As such, the project complements and complicates existing work on collage, providing both a timely examination of an enduring form of cultural production, and a revealing historiographical study.
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The project has already received international recognition, as evidenced by the multiple short-term research fellowships and travel grants awarded to undertake its primary research. Exploring collage’s various forms across history, medium, and discipline, the project illuminates forgotten historical narratives, overlooked relationships and identities, and critically neglected forms of cultural production.