Paste Art

In the modern art the collage plays an important part. The word itself stands for a two-dimensional composition, made of parts of paper that are pasted together. The prerequisite for the collage is the paper, which was taken into use in the western world around the year 1400. A line of related art do exists. Textile bits can be pieced together for applications. If three-dimensional parts are added, the result will be that, which is called assemblage.

An early master of paste art was Hans Christian Andersen. He could sit surrounded by children as well as adults, with a pair of large scissors in his hand, he would cut one composition after the other in paper of various color and then piece them together into calculated compositions and all this while he was telling fairy-tales. By the year 1912 the Cubists, Braque and Picasso showed their collages publicly. The Dadaists continued a short time later, within this new tradition. Otte Sköld displayed compositions of this kind at The Salon at Liljevalchs, Stockholm in the year 1919. During the First World War, in Copenhagen, he had studied the works of cubists and futurists at the large collection of Tetzen-Lund, which was open for Nordic Artists. The most famous collage of Otte Sköld is the Comte Kostia that in parts consisted of the fragmented cover of a novel, a picture of the archduke of Austria, a seascape, labels, and a still life.

Otte Sköld’s work of art was subjected to great ignominy. August Brunius, wrote in the Gothenburg Trade and Shipping newspaper ( Göteborgs Handels och Sjöfarts Tidning), about this, - silly jargon – ideas of pasted on book-covers – jar labels – up till this point in time, we here in Sweden have been spared such modernism. Columnists made fun when they had seen Otte Skölds work of art. Ivar Starkenberg wrote in Folkets Dagblad Politiken wondering: Why not just hang a flat- iron, by means of an iron thread attached to the frame? Herman Selderer wondered some more over Otte Sköld in a spread in Nya Dagligt Allehanda, and envisioned a painting of a bit of- a carrot, an empty can of tinned sprats, the label from a cigarette case, as well as the skin of an earlier deceased herring.

This was the beginning of a new genre in the Swedish pictorial art. Outside the Swedish borders, Schwitters created his own Merz-compositions (the word was taken from a cutout piece of an advertising for the German Kommerz-Bank). The drawback that such a paste art can afford: How long shall the paste last until it dries out? The quality of the common newspaper has during the nineteen hundred become of lesser quality. Wood pulp materials decompose readily. Many collages have been lost over the years, but the more the artists work with paste art, the more they become aware and selective with the choices of paper material.

Uppsala, August 2009
Teddy Brunius
Prof. emeritus

Translated by Anette Lindegaard