Photoshop and Facebook, Victorian-style
It鈥檚 not often art with a capital 鈥淎鈥� can be called charming. And rarely do we see artworks so little known that their appearance seems a novel discovery. But the 鈥檚 exhibition 鈥淧laying with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage鈥� is both charming and new. 鈥淚t鈥檚 art,鈥� says Malcolm Daniel, curator of photography, 鈥渂ut it鈥檚 OK to smile and laugh.鈥�
About 50 works from 13 photomontage albums created mainly by aristocratic Victorian women are on display through May 9. 鈥淵ou may think of [the exhibition] as a very un-Metropolitan-like show,鈥� Mr. Daniel admits. 鈥淏ut it鈥檚 part of the full picture of the part played by photography in the 1860s and 鈥�70s.鈥�
In these albums upper-crust British ladies pasted cutout photographs on watercolor scenes they created themselves, often to hilarious effect. In one, Kate Edith Gough glued her head and that of her twin sister on torsos of two ducks placidly paddling on a pond surrounded by cattails. The sisters鈥� grave faces, crowned with impressive millinery, betray no awareness of the incongruity of their situation.
IN PHOTOS: Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage
Most shows of early British photography, Daniel says, feature 鈥渓arge, ambitious pictures by great masters of the medium 鈥� almost always a man.鈥� In contrast, these works 鈥渁re made by women for personal pleasure, not public consumption.鈥�
William Henry Fox Talbot introduced photography to England in 1839. Due to the cumbersome equipment and time and expense required, photographs were the exclusive purview of the wealthy. In the 1850s, however, commercial cartes-de-visite with photographic portraits (the size of business cards today) became, as Daniel says, 鈥渨ildly, wildly popular 鈥� a worldwide phenomenon.鈥� Collecting and displaying these pictures fueled a fad called 鈥渃artomania.鈥� When Queen Victoria had her portrait made in the 1860s, 3 million to 4 million copies were made and sold. 鈥淚t was the Facebook of the 1860s,鈥� according to Daniel.
This accessibility and democratizing effect posed a problem for the 鈥渦pper ten thousand鈥� of high-society England. Wishing to re-establish the display of photographs as an elite activity, amateur artists adopted a cut-and-paste technique that required ample leisure not available to the masses. The female album creators collaged images of family, friends, and celebrities, mixing fact (photographs) and fancy (the sometimes irreverent settings they drew).
Standard art history credits Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque with inventing the collage in 1912. Not so. These amateur artists were more 鈥渁vant鈥� than the 20th-century avant-gardists. Some of their bizarre juxtapositions also anticipate the antic scenarios of the Surrealists.
鈥淭he most creative part,鈥� Daniel says, 鈥渋s not the photographs but how they were combined.鈥� Just one generation after the birth of photography and long before Photoshop and digital manipulation of images 鈥� the current craze in contemporary art 鈥� these ladies were cropping and splicing with giddy abandon.
One of the most subversive collagists 鈥� clearly a cutup herself 鈥� was Georgina Berkeley. She drew a street scene in London populated by shills wearing sandwich boards. On each advertisement she pasted a head shot and penned slogans like 鈥淕o and see the clever woman鈥� or 鈥淕reat croquet match.鈥� On another page, she painted a boy with fairy wings blowing bubbles. In each floating circle is the face of a member of her social set. Most daring would have been the head of an upper-crust gentleman pasted on a drawing of a leotard-clad acrobat plunging through a hoop.
Even Princess Alexandra, married to Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, got into the act. Her album celebrates her five children, their images placed inside petals of vividly colored flowers. One tot鈥檚 picture lounges in a purple morning glory, while another鈥檚 head blooms at the center of a pansy.
Speaking of Prince Edward, in his salad days before ascending to the throne, he was known as quite a playboy. One society beauty used her album as a means of advancement in the blue-blood hierarchy. Lady Filmer, who was spotted canoodling with the prince at Ascot, attending the opera, and even fox-hunting with him sans her husband, exchanged calling cards with His Highness almost daily. A page from her album shows Lady Filmer standing proudly near her gluepot and album as the prince in his boater leans jauntily on the table. Her husband, half the size of the prince, sits downstage near the family dog. These albums, the curators point out, were effective tools of flirtation, belying the notion of the Victorians as irredeemably stuffy.
Many of the pages have a fantastic, fairy-tale aura, influenced by popular illustrated books by Hans 海角大神 Andersen, the Brothers Grimm, and Lewis Carroll, author of 鈥淎lice鈥檚 Adventures in Wonderland.鈥� Berkeley plopped an austere, petticoat-clad dowager astride a flamingo, as a pixie-ish tot perches on a turtle. In the Pleydell-Bouverie album, a cherubic toddler sits on a red toadstool near a little boy riding a frog.
The Viscountess Jocelyn (bridesmaid to Queen Victoria) placed her sailor-suited children comfortably on the branches of a tree, with two babes snuggling in a nest. A page from the Countess of Yarborough鈥檚 album (labeled 鈥淢ixed Pickles鈥�) was likely the work of her niece Eva Macdonald. It shows Lord Yarborough brandishing a fork to spear figures floating in a pickle jar, including the notorious coquette Lady Filmer as well as Lady Yarborough and her brother-in-law.
One of the most skilled artists was Marie-Blanche Fournier, whose watercolor of a peacock butterfly features four bewhiskered gentlemen鈥檚 faces in spots on the wings. In a show of self-deprecation she placed her own face, and those of her husband, and daughter on the tail feathers of a turkey.
A common motif in these albums 鈥� long before the World Wide Web existed 鈥� is a spider web inhabited by pasted faces to show off one鈥檚 connections. Social media indeed. Just like 鈥渟wagger portraits,鈥� or oil paintings of venerable ancestors hanging on the walls of country estates, these are swagger albums. By making visual the web of one鈥檚 friends, the multitasking albummakers could brag about their social standing, advertise their artistic skill and imagination, flirt with higher-ups, and amuse their guests.
It鈥檚 no insult to call them charming.
The exhibition travels to the Art Gallery of Ontario, in Toronto, June 5 through Sept. 5.
