Cut it out

How do you make a work of art? One method is to cut things up and stick them back together in a different order. That is, roughly speaking, the recipe for collage. Thus in 1934 Max Ernst snipped away at a pile of illustrations to 19th-century novels, reassembled them in an altered fashion, and came up with Une semaine de bonté — or A Week of Kindness — a surrealist novel in pictures.

Some of its pages are displayed in The Ends of Collage, at Luxembourg & Dayan, 2 Savile Row, W1. In one a woman reclines on an ornate, neo-baroque bed, while all around the waves of the sea are rippling over her coverlet; in another a male leaps astonishingly high in a moonlit street,
his head transformed into that of an enormous bird.

For my money, Ernst never did anything better (his paintings are generally much less powerful). In the right hands — wielding scissors and glue — collage can produce marvellous results. This exhibition looks at two points in its history: the early 20th century, the era of surrealism and dada, and the post-modernism of the 1970s and later. It raises the question of whether collage is the natural idiom for a cut-and-paste culture such as the one we live in today, surrounded by digitally altered and edited imagery.

That’s an intriguing question. But the actual works on show tend to suggest that collage has had its moment. The most compelling are mostly the older examples by Ernst, Miró, Arp and their contemporaries. The later ones tend to look weaker. Perhaps the conclusion is that collage works best when it is used in an idiom — such as surrealism — that positively benefits from the jerky discontinuity that comes from gluing images together.