Cut Up/Cut Out: Photomontage and Collage at the Norton Museum of Art

Barbara Kruger, Surveillance.

By ANTHONY HADEN-GUEST December 9, 2024

Cut Up/Cut Out: Photomontage and Collage, the show up at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, explores some of the remarkable uses to which artists have put that visual staple, the photograph. Specifically the technique of cutting out, reshuffling and layering multiple photographs to create photomontages, a term that came into use at the beginning of World War I among Berlin Dada artists, such as Raoul Hausmann and his partner, Hannah Hoch, John Heartfield and George Grosz.

Grosz wrote about its actual beginnings thus.  “In 1916, when Johnny Heartfield and I invented photo-montage in my studio at the south end of the town at five o’clock one May morning, we had no idea of the immense possibilities, or of the thorny but successful career, that awaited the new invention”. Both he and Heartfield were caricatural artists of feral brilliance, both had anglicized their surnames to sever themselves from increasingly extreme German nationalism so photo-montage was a perfect fit. Grosz wrote that the pasting together of cut-out ads, photographs from the picture papers and miscellaneous merch promo was done “in such a way as to say, in pictures, what would have been banned by the censors if we had said it in words.”

That though was just one capability of photo-montage. There are plenty of others. Images may be so positioned that they confront or complement each other,  inflame, titillate or decorate, and in the work of the dozen plus artists in Cut Up/Cut Out: Photomontage and Collage, the excellent show at the Norton Museum in West Palm Beach, we see single works by a group of outstanding collage artists, each of whom has used the practice in very different ways. As, for instance, the following.

Romare Bearden, Pittsburgh Memory.

With Romare Bearden the process is a growth. “You have to begin somewhere,” Bearden, an African-American artist who started making collages in the 1950s, has said. “So, you put something down. Then you put something else with it, and then you see how that works, and maybe you try something else and so on, and the picture grows in that way.”

Bearden began working fairly small but then decided to go big. So, he had black-and-white photographs of his pieces taken and blew them up, some into six by eight footers. Which had a highly positive critical response. When Bearden died in 1988, he was described in his New York Times obit as "the nation's foremost collagist".

Barbara Kruger worked at Conde Nast, became head designer for Mademoiselle in her early twenties. She then moved on into a life of making art full-time and made use of the visual messaging skills she had acquired at magazines for this purpose. Thus, it is that her collages combine strong coloration – blacks, whites, Danger Alert reds – with the typefaces, Futura Bold and Helvetica Extra Bold, which she used, yes, boldly.

It’s more than just the looks though. Again as with well put together magazines, the wordage is an essential element in the work and Kruger has been a dab hand at coming up with slogans, charged with alert social observations and the war cries of gender politics. These have included: You are a captive audience, I shop therefore I am, We will no longer be seen and not heard and Make my day, the image which partnered the last being a big-eyed jungle cat savoring a hefty mouthful of raw flesh.  

So to the collage work of Wangechi Mutu, a Kenya-born American artist, who creates pastings that are at once as broodily in your face as primitive art and seductive eye candy, an imagistic rococo. The work is also remarkably various. And, yes, beautiful. On this subject I can do no better, I think, than quote the artist herself from an interview she gave to Bordercrossings in 2008 when her work was in a show of collage art at the New Museum. She was referencing her memories of schooldays at Cooper Union, mostly idyllic, an exception reads: But we would have discussions about art and one of the worst words you could say in class was “beautiful.” I remember thinking what in heaven’s name is wrong with this word? And why do people get a rash every time they hear ‘beauty’ or ‘beautiful?” Mutu mines her raw materials from magazines – fashion mags, motorbiker mags, porno mags, whatever – and the work she puts together is visually striking and purposefully demanding. She was in her early 30s when she put together the Histology of the Different Classes of Uterine Tumors, a tough subject she turned into a handsome piece and a dozen sets of inkjet prints, two of which are now in American museums.

Collage by Bruce Helander

Bruce Helander is a romantic, joyful, wholly absorbed by the physical makings of collage, a form within which he is a fun-loving maestro. He starts a collage by rummaging through the space-grabbing collection of vintage magazines, many acquired on successive trips to Paris to visit the flea markets. “At the turn of the century the printing was all basically lithography, so the paper had a built-in patina to it,” Helander says. “I knew I would be cutting up the magazine pages, trying to reposition it like a puzzle where you are fitting paper together extemporaneously with no plan, fitting paper together that looks like it has a companionship with the next piece of paper.”

These vintage magazines are catalogued in Helander’s studio, along with huge mounds of vintage paper. Macintosh Moda, his piece at the Norton, combines this obsession with paper, with his inclination towards the impishly surreal. Thus, Bruce Helander builds his own coherent worlds from retrieved, often waste materials by way of the collage.

Other artists in Cut Up/Cut Out include Jay DeFeo, Florence Henri, Oliver Herring, Juan Logan, Lorna Simpson and Sara VanDerBeek. The Cubists invented collage, yes. Berlin Dada unleashed it onto a wider, wilder world. WM