Blurring the boundaries between painting and sculpture, high and low, collectivity and originality, collage emerged as a recognized art form at the beginning of the twentieth century. Under the banner of “synthetic cubism,” Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque transformed the pure medium of painting by adding found objects such as wallpaper, postage stamps, rope, newspaper clippings, and sheet music to the canvas, thereby inviting everyday reality and popular culture into the salons of Paris in 1912. Springing from this genre, assemblage, photomontage, readymade sculpture, and mail art found their way into the oeuvres of many important twentieth-century artists. The modernist spirit lives on in Collage, a new exhibition in the museum's Theater Gallery. Drawn from the BAMPFA collections, the exhibition includes an early American collage of inked envelopes that pre-dates Picasso and anticipates mail art. Jean Dubuffet's Cloudy Weather (Temps nuageux), 1953, represents what the artist called “an assemblage in ink.” Jess, Wallace Berman, Bruce Conner, and George Herms display Beat Generation sensibilities that resonate with the work of Fluxus artists George Brecht, Alice Hutchins, and Geoffrey Hendricks. The beat goes on with Romare Bearden, in a work from 1969, and Pop princes Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, and Joe Brainard, while Christine Eudoxie's Call Waiting, 1999, and an untitled 1995 work by Vincent Fecteau provide contemporary examples of this versatile art form. These and other artists in Collage share the ability to take bits and pieces from random sources and create a synecdoche, a visual harmony, and a transformation of the familiar into art. As a companion to the gallery exhibition, PFA presents Loose Ends: Collage Films on two Tuesdays, November 9 and 16, at 7:30 p.m. in the PFA Theater.
