Find an event
"Playing with Pictures"
We’re not sure which is more shocking: the discovery that upper-class Englishwomen combined images of babies and flowers more than a century before Anne Geddes began her career, or the fact that “Playing with Pictures” makes us care about their collages rather than want to vomit.
Subtitled “The Art of Victorian Photocollage,” this exhibition doesn’t focus on professional artists. With a few exceptions, it showcases the work of 19th-century female aristocrats who—presumably when they grew bored with dancing, china painting and other socially acceptable pastimes—turned their photo albums into a pioneering form of social networking.
Photography was still a new and expensive technology when the first of these albums were made in the early 1860s. Even those known in England as “the Upper Ten Thousand” would have balked at slicing up photos of their families and friends if not for the invention of cartes de visite, photos that were small and cheap enough to be produced in sets and used as calling cards. Collage makers such as Georgina Berkeley, whose 1866/71 album is a highlight here, clipped people’s figures from the staid, artificial settings of the cartes de visite and arranged them in scenes they painted themselves. In various witty collages, Berkeley sends three men, a woman and two dogs soaring above the countryside in a hot air balloon, incorporates her friends’ faces into advertisements in a cityscape and grafts an elegant man’s head to a trapeze artist’s body.
These photocollages demonstrate their makers’ artistic talents—which are often considerable—while showing off the size and status of their social circles. Why should Mary Georgiana Caroline, Lady Filmer, care that you have more than 200 Facebook friends, given that she can place the Prince of Wales in her drawing room (pictured above) forever? The ability to poke fun at your subjects was proof of your intimacy: Filmer, who had a flirtatious and likely adulterous relationship with the prince, uses her scissors to trim his expanding waistline.
“Playing with Pictures” is full of more radical alterations. Its collage makers graft their friends’ heads onto ducks’ and monkeys’ bodies, insert their children into John Tenniel’s Alice in Wonderland illustrations and cover them with greenery. Curator Elizabeth Siegel convincingly argues that practices we associate with modern art—appropriation, questioning the truthfulness of photography, surrealism and collage itself—were mastered decades before the 20th century by these ladies of leisure. Thanks to an ingenious exhibition design, visitors can appreciate those practices up close: Computers throughout the gallery enable you to flip through high-res scans of 11 albums, page by page, and zoom in on key details.
While they had no formal occupations, many collage makers engaged in the serious business of advancing their husbands’ careers. This frequently involved organizing parties and country-house visits, where their albums would have been on display. At such moments, collages served as reminders of family wealth and power. Pasting photos into geometric designs or painted pieces of jewelry emphasizes the relationships among one’s distinguished acquaintances. Setting up a painted game of croquet for photographic figures, as a contributor to the Sackville-West Album (1867/73) does, indicates that you possess enough land for a croquet field.
In her catalog essay, Siegel explains that photocollages restored some exclusivity to a medium that was slipping within the middle class’s reach. “Playing with Pictures” doesn’t explain precisely why or when its albums fell out of fashion, but it couldn’t have been long after Agnes Caroline Chamberlayne Johnstone stopped working on her 1868/84 album, which has—shudder—preprinted designs.
Art historian Douglas Nickel speaks about “Playing with Pictures” Thursday 29 at the Art Institute.
