ART REVIEW
November 17, 1991|By John Dorsey | John Dorsey, Baltimore Sun Art Critic
http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1991-11-17/features/1991321172_1_photomontage-bauhaus-van-der-zee
Among the objects -- telephone, perfume bottle, purse, flowers -- in James Van Der Zee's "Her Cigarette" (about 1935) is the burning tobacco of the title, from which smoke rises to encircle an image from the unseen smoker's thoughts -- a lover, perhaps, or husband. In the companion piece "His Pipe" the objects are a man's, and the smoke from the pipe rises to encircle . . . her.
These are photomontages, because the images of "him" and "her" are superimposed upon the photographs of objects.
Will Connell's "Ginger Rogers" (1932) is a photomontage, too; Connell superimposed a photograph of the young star full-face on another of her in profile.
What is photomontage, anyway?
In her show on the subject at the University of Maryland, Cynthia Wayne defines it as "the composition or joining of photographs from disparate sources, brought together to create a single image."
Van Der Zee's and Connell's images easily fit this definition. But, as the show makes evident, it's not always that simple. A photomontage doesn't have to be all photographs, but can include other elements.
In Herbert Matter's untitled advertisement for Saarinen chairs (about 1948), for instance, photographs of parts of chairs float across the page, all connected by a semi-abstract form in red, while a string of words forms a thin diagonal line at the bottom of the image. This is a photomontage that involves photographs, independent color and text.
Like the Supreme Court on pornography, it's easier to know photomontage by seeing it than by attempting to define it. And see it you certainly can in the 122 works of "Dreams, Lies, and Exaggerations: Photomontage in America."
Imperfect but challenging, this is the first exhibition devoted to the history of American photomontage. Organized and with a wordy but informative catalog by Wayne, acting co-director of the College Park art gallery, it is a credit to both the curator and her institution.
As she points out in her catalog essay, photomontage was developed in Europe in the early part of the century. It was employed by artists of dada, surrealism, constructivism and the members of the German Bauhaus, for purposes ranging from attacking the established order to searching for ideal form to reflecting states of mind.
Like so much of modern art in America, photomontage was given impetus in this country by practitioners fleeing the Nazis in the 1930s, including the Hungarian-born artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, who had been a member of the German Bauhaus and became a member of the New Bauhaus, a school of art and design in Chicago.
To make the subject of American photomontage understandable, in both catalog and show Wayne divides it into six categories. Working with limited means, she uses one or two artists in each category as examples of the work done, rather than trying to include all the relevant artists. We begin with followers of Moholy-Nagy in Chicago.
Gyorgy Kepes (another Hungarian) shared Moholy-Nagy's ideals of uniting art and technology to create a new order; his experimental photomontages, such as "Bread and Light" are often at once beautiful and difficult to interpret. Another Moholy protege was Harry Callahan, but his images are far less esoteric than Kepes'. In such photographs as "Detroit" (1943) with its multiple exposures of cars, and "Collage, Chicago" (about 1957) with its many fragmented faces, Callahan explores the everyday to present an image of life in the modern city.
American artists used photomontage less than their European counterparts for propaganda purposes, but there were some instances of its use to convey a public message such as Alexander Alland's "Four Freedoms" posters (about 1941). Another "public" use of photography was in the murals popular in the 1930s, though many of them have deteriorated or been destroyed over the years.
Wayne's other category is "Outsider" photomontage, by those considered outside the mainstreams of modern photography. Here she includes two very different figures. One is Van Der Zee, a black photographer in New York who may have been outside the mainstream but who had a long career in professional photography in the first half of the century and whose fame is now national. The other is Eugene von Bruenchenhein, an obsessive visionary and true outsider artist who made photomontages of his wife in the 1940s.
This bracketing of Van Der Zee with von Bruenchenhein is somewhat questionable, as are some of Wayne's other decisions. If Van Der Zee is not a true outsider, the inclusion of outsider photomontage at all may be questionable, since von Bruenchenhein's work is not particularly compelling.
