Cut and Paste Abstraction: Politics, Form, and Identity in Abstract Expressionist Collage
Open Access
- Author:
- Haxall, Daniel Louis
- Graduate Program:
- Art History
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- May 07, 2009
- Committee Members:
- Sarah K Rich, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Sarah K Rich, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Leo G Mazow, Committee Member
Joyce Henri Robinson, Committee Member
Adam Rome, Committee Member - Keywords:
- Anne Ryan
Robert Motherwell
Lee Krasner
Abstract Expressionism
collage
Esteban Vicente
John Cage - Abstract:
- In 1943, Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery staged the first large-scale exhibition of collage in the United States. This show was notable for acquainting the New York School with the medium as its artists would go on to embrace collage, creating objects that ranged from small compositions of handmade paper to mural-sized works of torn and reassembled canvas. Despite the significance of this development, art historians consistently overlook collage during the era of Abstract Expressionism. This project examines four artists who based significant portions of their oeuvre on papier collé during this period (i.e. the late 1940s and early 1950s): Lee Krasner, Robert Motherwell, Anne Ryan, and Esteban Vicente. Working primarily with fine art materials in an abstract manner, these artists challenged many of the characteristics that supposedly typified collage: its appropriative tactics, disjointed aesthetics, and abandonment of “high” culture. Although many of their contemporaries focused on the formal attributes of the cut and paste, Krasner, Motherwell, Ryan, and Vicente explored the semiotic potential and metaphoric implications of the medium. Their approach to collage overlapped in several ways—for example their nonobjective styles, autobiographical mapping of identity, political resonance, and preference for papier collé—yet a great variety defines their work. Anne Ryan juxtaposed traditional formats with recycled materials, eschewing the conventions of consumerism and femininity available in the postwar years. The hybrid nature of collage appealed to Esteban Vicente, a Spanish-American artist who mined the duality of his cultural inheritance for syncretic constructions. The critical language of the pastoral affords an opportunity to reconsider Lee Krasner’s work in collage because it features many rhetorical devices of the bucolic tradition, including irony and dialectics, in addition to the contingency, naturalism, and escapist reverie that characterize the genre. And finally, Robert Motherwell executed an abstract tribute to composer John Cage on a large scale, conflating music with collage while testing notions of composition and historicism. Hardly the apolitical or clichéd medium that critics deemphasized at mid-century, collage offered unlimited possibilities in the era of Abstract Expressionism, ranging from the formal and the aesthetic to the social and the political.