Exhibition Ended

Cut and Paste | 400 Years of Collage

From Sat 29 Jun 2019 - Sun 27 Oct 2019

This exhibition has now ended!

About

★★★★★
"You'll be stuck on this inspiring handiwork" 
Charlotte Runcie, The Daily Telegraph

"It’s my exhibition of the year so far. Rarely have I left a show so inspired."
Laura Freeman, The Sunday Times

★★★★★
"It’s hard not to be awestruck by the artists in this collection; Cut and Paste is undoubtedly the name-dropper of the summer."
Eilidh Wilson, The Skinny

Cut and Paste: 400 Years of Collage was the first survey exhibition of collage ever to take place anywhere in the world. Collage is often described as a twentieth-century invention, but this show spanned a period of more than 400 years and included more than 250 works.

A huge range of approaches were on show, from sixteenth-century anatomical ‘flap prints’, to computer-based images; work by amateur, professional and unknown artists; collages by children and revolutionary cubist masterpieces by Pablo Picasso and Juan Gris; from nineteenth century do-it-yourself collage kits to collage films of the 1960s. Highlights included a three-metre-long folding collage screen, purportedly made in part by Charles Dickens; a major group of Dada and Surrealist collages, by artists such as Kurt Schwitters, Joan Miró, Hannah Höch and Max Ernst; and major postwar works by Henri Matisse, Robert Rauschenberg, and Peter Blake, including the only surviving original source photographs for Blake’s and Jann Haworth's iconic, collaged cover for the Beatles’ album Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Find out more about the onsite collage created especially for us by Coldwar Steve.

The importance of collage as a form of protest in the 1960s and 70s was shown in the work of feminist artists such as Carolee Schneemann, Linder and Hannah Wilke; Punk artists, such as Jamie Reid, whose original collages for the Sex Pistols' album and posters featured; and the famously subversive collages of Monty Python founder Terry Gilliam. The exhibition also featured the legendary library book covers which the playwright Joe Orton and his lover Kenneth Halliwell doctored with collages, and put back on Islington Library’s shelves – a move which landed them in prison for six months. In addition, the exhibition also demonstrated how collage remains important for the practice of many artists working today. Owing to the fragility of much of the work, the exhibition did not tour: it could only be seen at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh.

Natalia Goncharova, Costume Design for One of the Three Kings in 'La Liturgie' (detail), 1915. Collection: National Galleries of Scotland. Photography: Antonia Reeve. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2018.

Part of Edinburgh Art Festival.

#NGSCutPaste

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