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This book examines the many functions of paper in the fine art and aesthetics of the early twentieth-century modernist or historic avant-garde (Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Constructivism and many more).
With its many collages and photomontages, the historic avant-garde is generally considered to have transformed paper from a mere support into an artistic medium and to have assisted in art on paper gaining a firm autonomy. Bringing together an international team of scholars, this book shows that the story of paper in the avant-garde has thereby hardly been told. The first section looks at a selection of canonized individual avant-gardists' work on paper to demonstrate that the material and formal analysis of paper in the avant-garde's artistic production still holds much in store. In the second section, chapters zoom in on forms and formats of collective artistic production that deployed paper to move around reproductions of fine art works, to facilitate the dialogue between avant-gardists, to better promote their work among patrons, and to make their work available to a wider audience. Chapters in the third section lay bare how certain groups within the avant-garde began to massively create monochrome works, because these could be easily reproduced when transferred to, or reproduced as, linocuts. In the last section of the book, chapters explore how the avant-garde's attentiveness to paper almost always also implied a critique of the ways in which paper, and all that it stood for, was treated and labored in European culture and society more broadly.
The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, modernism, and design.
List of contents
Part 1 Paper Matters 1. Painting White Paper White: Whiteness in Pablo Picasso's
Papiers Collés 2. From Tearing to Infra-Thin: Paper, Materiality and Metaphor in Arp, Picabia and Duchamp 3. Joan Miró's Collages: "A Tribute to Bad Taste?"
Part 2 Paper Community 4. Medium, Platform, Art Form: Avant-Garde Experiments with Paper in the Original Print Portfolio 5. Avant-Garde by Mail 6. Paper Exhibitions: The Magazine as Exhibition Catalogue
Part 3 Paper Transfer 7. Monochrome Harmony: Black-and-White Work on Paper in Belgian Constructivism 8. Making Strange: Hirschfeld-Mack, Klee, the Monoprint, and the Avant-Garde Diaspora 9."The most burning question for contemporary thinking about art:" Art Competitions and the Discourse on Painting in Reproduction in Weimar Germany 10. Transparency on Paper: Imagining Glass Architecture from Taut to Eisenstein
Part 4 Paper Critique 11. Protean Papers: Material Transformations in German Paper and Kurt Schwitters's Merz Drawings and Prints 12. Steadfast Matter: Paper's Affects 13. The Treason of the Clerks: Accounting for Paris Dada Paperwork 14. Parade Albums and Censorship in the Soviet Union
About the author
Sascha Bru is a professor at the Faculty of Arts at the University of Leuven, Belgium.
