Scissors & Paste

Why slave all day trying to paint an apple that turns out more like a tomato? There is a much easier way to make pictures: just cut and paste.

Last week 100 pasted pictures went on exhibition in Manhattan's wide-windowed Museum of Modern Art. The museum had fancy frames and a fancy French name for them, collages (rhymes with garage), which was the word Picasso, Braque and Juan Gris had used when they first tried the trick back in 1912.

Picasso & Co. had already invented cubism (painting guitars and fruits as if they had been smashed and reassembled in jagged geometrical patterns) and they found that cutting and pasting scraps of newspaper, wallpaper, wine labels and calling cards was a short-order way of cooking up cubist effects. Also it was an easy way to shock the fuddy-duddies.

Collages did not last as long as ordinary painted pictures, and their very impermanence was bound to appeal to George Grosz and other German Dadaists (who pretended to despise art) of post-World War I. One Grosz number: a brutish-looking portrait with a cut-out of a mechanical pump where the heart should be. Max Ernst (who has since gravitated logically to surrealism) attached a lady's legs to a bit of lace, pasted both on a cloudy sky and called his faintly sinister porridge Above the Clouds Walks the Midnight.

The fad spread to the U.S. in the '20s. The most artlessly forthright paste-up in last week's show was made by Arthur Dove in 1925. Entitled Grandmother, it consisted of a needlepoint embroidery, a few shingles, a page from the Bible, a pressed flower and fern. But, except among commercial artists (who have found it useful), the trick never caught on in the U.S. as it did in Europe.

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