Met's "Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage"

[Janice McDonald]

Excerpt from New York Times article by Roberta Smith, February 4, 2010: "Breakthroughs aren’t always all they’re cracked up to be. Collage, one of riverheads of modernism, is usually thought to have been introduced around 1912, when Braque and Picasso began gluing pieces of newsprint and wallpaper to their Cubist drawings.

But what if it turns out that at least one form of collage was practiced decades earlier, not in Paris in the teens but in Victorian England in the 1860s and ’70s? And not by ambitious your-body-my-art macho geniuses but by women at the highest reaches of society, including the royal family?

This rejiggering of history is fundamental to “Playing With Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage,” a seemingly modest, almost scattered, yet strangely reverberant exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art."

I was intrigued by this -- if anyone gets to see it and would like to share their views, I'd love to hear impressions, opinions, etc. Exhibition runs through May 9, 2010.

Slide show of images from the exhibition

[Janice McDonald]

Thanks, Nikki -- I'll definitely check the books out!

[Nikki Soppelsa]

Get the book...you won't be disappointed! And there is also a companion book
"The Marvelous Album of Madame B: Being the Handiwork of a Victorian Lady of Considerable Talent" (the cover is die-cut ... reminds me of E. Gorey)