National Galleries invites Scots to help create giant mural

National Galleries Scotland is inviting all who are interested to join a team of artists, volunteers and groups of young people in creating the large-scale collage using images from the national collection, pop culture, landmarks, wallpapers and newspapers.

Artists Emer Tumilty, Fraser Gray and Catherine Mary O’Brien will each facilitate the creation of the huge collective art work, which will evolve over the course of a week, beginning from today.

Cut and Paste: Live is a celebration of the first survey exhibition of collage ever to take place anywhere in the world.

Taking up the entire gallery space at Modern Two, Cut and Paste : 400 Years of Collage features more than 250 works, from masterpieces by Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse to works by unknown amateurs, Victorian hobbyists and children.

Due to the fragile nature of some of the works on display, the historic exhibition will not tour.

Highlights include influential dada and surrealist works by Kurt Schwitters, Joan Miro, Max Ernst and Hannah Hoch, a collage said to have been partly made by Charles Dickens, the only surviving original source photographs for Peter Blake’s and Jann Haworth’s cover of The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Jamie Reid’s original art work for Sex Pistols’ Never Mind The Bollocks album.

With Cut and Paste, Patrick Elliott, senior curator at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, sets out to expand our understanding of collage, both in visual art and as a practice which has influenced modern politics and cultural forms from literature to music.

Elliot, author of the book which accompanies the exhibition, says it’s often thought that collage originated in the early 20th century with cubist works by Picasso and Georges Braque.

However, this is simply when the cut and paste technique became formalised as a distinctive development in Western art history.

“Collage has a 1000-year history before then,” says Elliot. “When Picasso and Braque gave a name to what they were doing in 1912 they called it papier colle – pasted paper. The word collage only comes into use in English in the 1930s.”

The earliest works on show are flap prints, a technique first used in anatomical books of the mid-16th century. In order to accurately represent the human body, artists would stick flaps to anatomical drawings. These strips of paper “skin” could be lifted to the reveal muscles, organs and bones below.

Items from the mid-19th century show how cheaper materials and the mass production of printed images opened up collage-making to wider groups of people.

Children played with treasured scrap collections, middle-class ladies assembled tributes to saints and actors from ready-made kits and hobbyists spent hours decorating large folding screens, like that which Dickens is said to have had a hand in.

“Everyone is doing it in the 1850s onwards,” says Elliot. “Factories are pumping out printed images and it becomes quite affordable. Even if you didn’t have money for a kit, you could easily get hold of some pictures.”

Eileen Agar's Fish Circus

Whereas the industrial revolution democratised collage, the counter-cultural revolution of the post-war era went further, using collage to shake up establishment values.

On display are the library book covers which playwright Joe Orton and his partner Kenneth Halliwell doctored with homoerotic images and sarcastic blurbs.

Among their modifications was a John Betjeman volume returned to the shelves of Islington Library with a new cover featuring an almost naked middle-aged man resplendent with tattoos. The prank landed them each a six-month prison sentence.

“These are fabulous things,” says Elliot. “They didn’t steal them, it was more that they more wanted a reaction, wanted a laugh.”

It wasn’t a laugh for the library, who sent Orton a letter about an illegally-parked vehicle. When Orton, who didn’t have a car, wrote back, librarians matched his letter’s type to the caustic blurbs and called the police.

The officers who visited Orton and Halliwell’s home found it pasted floor to ceiling with around 16,000 art prints, photographs and other images – all pages taken from library books. The small central London flat was an impressive – and very stolen collage.

Orton and Halliwell’s books are part of Collage in Practise, a section of Cut and Paste which documents how punk and feminist artists of the 1960s and 1970s such as Linder, Penny Slinger and Reid used collage to poke fun at traditional ideas – often in a way similar to how the meme functions today.

In Doll Clothes, a playful collage film by Cindy Sherman from 1975, the US artist – whose early photographs are currently on show at Edinburgh’s Stills – looks back to the doll kits of the 19th century, while in Body Collage from 1967 Carolee Schneemann leaps around in shredded paper and wallpaper paste.

The taboo-breaking artist died in March this year at the age of 79.

“She sent us a lovely email saying we could use her film and died the following week,” notes Elliot.

As well as films and contemporary electronic collages, the exhibition features photographic works such as the multi-exposure composite – beloved by Victorians looking for “proof” of ghosts, and montages where multiple images, often of different people, are spliced together.

The latter was often used by organisations wanting a group portrait of their far-flung members – a 19th century version of “fake news” later used by the tyrannical regimes of the 20th.

Something else entirely are the famous Cottingley Fairy photographs. It wasn’t until the 1980s that the technique behind the charming 1917 images was revealed.

Though they enchanted generations, the pictures actually show cousins Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths with illustrations copied from books. The girls added wings and attached the fairies to their clothes with hat pins.

“There isn’t a neat circle around the definition of collage, sometimes we’ve gone to the edges and beyond a bit,” says Elliot. “Here, it is the girls who are the collage. They did it for a joke, and their dad, an amateur photographer, took the pictures.”

Work from Andre Breton

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle somehow got hold of them to illustrate an article for the Christmas 1920 edition of the popular Strand Magazine. A keen spiritualist, the Sherlock Homes creator took them as proof of supernatural phenomena.

Though not everyone was convinced, many were. But the girls kept their secret until the 1980s, when the now elderly women admitted how the images really were created.

Still, Frances, just nine at the time the images were made, maintained even then how the fifth image depicted genuine fairy beings.

Maybe she believed we’d do well to retain a little wonder about the world. As well as the big names, Cut and Paste includes by forgotten figures, anonymous amateurs and children - unheard of for a major exhibition.

Covered with stickers, a child’s bedroom door will be familiar to anyone who’s ever decorated a folder with pop stars or spent whole weekends rearranging and updating posters.

“We’ve all done that, and my daughter’s generation did it too,” says Elliot. “Do people still do it? As well as having a really good time, hopefully the exhibition will inspire people to think about collage, why it’s different from painting, and also to think about the collages they made when they were younger.”

He adds: “My greatest ambition for the exhibition is that people go home and start doing it again.”

Cut and Paste – Live: Today until July 13, St Andrew Square, Edinburgh, noon to 4pm, free.

Cut and Paste – 400 Years of Collage: Until October 27, Scottish National Gallery Of Modern Art (Modern Two), Edinburgh, 10am to 5pm daily, £11 and £13, £9 and £12 concs, £7.50 and £8.50 under 26s. Tel: 0131 624 6200. www.nationalgalleries.org