Paper

by Ian Sansom

  And what is true of Leonardo is true—eventually, and to much a lesser extent—of us all. Ann Bermingham, in her magisterial study Learning to Draw: Studies in the Cultural History of a Polite and Useful Art (2000), argues that paper was the crucial medium that allowed for the development not only of great art, but also of amateur art, and of DIY subjectivity: “The construction of the modern subject cannot be considered apart from the privatization and standardization of information initiated by the introduction of paper. Paper helped to create a new enunciative space in which modes of individuality could be formed and expressed.” Have hardback, spiral-bound Daler-Rowney sketchbook, or a nice sheaf of sized papers, will express myself; it’s a story that has been repeated again and again throughout the history of modern art.

  In the French town of St. Quentin, for example, in 1890 a young man, twenty years old, a lawyer’s clerk, was admitted to the hospital with suspected appendicitis. He had been rather drifting through life, unfocused and unsatisfied. He particularly resented his dull daily work in a lawyer’s office, where he filled endless pointless pages with endless pointless writing. In the bed next to him was a patient who was amusing himself by copying a picture of a Swiss chalet. Painting was relaxing, this other patient told the young man, he should give it a go; also, he enthused, “You end up with something to hang on the wall.” Intrigued, the young man decided to try his hand with a sketchbook and paints. “From the moment I held the box of colours in my hand, I knew this was my life . . . It was a tremendous attraction, a sort of Paradise Found in which I was completely free, alone, at peace . . .” The work the young man later proudly called “Mon premier tableau” was a still life with books placed on a sheet of torn newspaper. He dated and signed it in the corner, “Juin 90 essitam, H.”—his signature in reverse. Henri Matisse’s love affair with art had begun.

  Fast forward fifty years and Matisse is again recovering from a serious illness. He is now a semi-invalid, often confined to bed or to a wheelchair. What’s remarkable is that this second bout of illness and convalescence leads to possibly an even greater outpouring of creativity than the first. The first illness led Matisse to paint. The second led him to paper.

  Matisse had first used paper cutouts for his costume designs for a ballet by Diaghilev in 1920, and had returned to experimenting with the medium in the early 1930s, when he had used them as models for his work on murals and magazine covers; but he didn’t start working seriously with paper until 1943–44. He completed his last sculpture in 1950, and his last painting in 1951: the remaining few years of his life he devoted entirely to cutting paper. “The cut-out paper,” he explained in a letter in 1948, “allows me to draw in colour. It is a simplification.” Paper allowed Matisse to get back to basics, to return to what mattered: this was “une seconde vie,” his second life. “I have needed all that time to reach the stage where I can say what I want to say,” he wrote, and he could only say it through paper.

  The process Matisse described as “drawing with scissors” worked like this: first, he had his paper colored with gouache, in colors so bright that his doctor advised him to wear dark glasses. He would then take up his scissors and create his motifs and figures, as well as the negative shapes from the paper discards. He would then arrange, or rather direct the arrangement of, the cutouts on a wall: he liked to surround himself with them, to be with them and even to sleep among them. “You see as I am obliged to remain often in bed because of the state of my health, I have made a little garden all around me where I can walk . . . There are leaves, fruits, a bird.” Photographs of Matisse’s paper-hung house at Vence, the Villa le Rêve, and at the Hôtel Régina in Nice, look like paintings by Henri Rousseau.

  Matisse’s first major work in paper as a medium was, appropriately, a book, Jazz (1947). (The history of artists’ books—among which we might include the works of William Blake and Ed Ruscha and Sol LeWitt, and the magazine Poor. Old. Tired. Horse, and, for the sake of argument, the philosopher Jacques Derrida’s Glas (1974)—is another neglected area of study that we too shall have to neglect.) Jazz contained color plates of the cutouts, along with Matisse’s handwritten thoughts on his subject matter and his new method: “Cutting into living colour reminds me of the sculptor’s carving into stone.” In his final years, the paper cutouts were also used as the basis for his work in other media—stained glass, ceramics, textiles, printing. Even the various designs for the Chapel of the Rosary of the Dominican nuns at Vence, which Matisse regarded as his masterpiece, started out with the paper and scissors. But it is in the large cutouts themselves, the gouaches découpés, that Matisse really found full expression for what the art critic Robert Hughes in a memorable phrase described as his “flat-out chromatic intensity”: paper cutouts allowed him to be both flat-out, and intense. The famous L’Escargot, the four seated blue nudes (Nu Bleu I, II, III and IV), and the fifty-four-foot-long La Piscine: in these works, through the medium of paper, Matisse achieves an extraordinary effect of both complete density and total light. “When I am doing the cut-outs,” he remarked in an interview in 1952, “you cannot imagine to what degree the sensation of flight which comes to me helps me better to adjust my hand as it guides the path of my scissors.” The tensions and anxieties and struggles that are apparent in all of his earlier work as a painter (most obviously in La Conversation, a painting as good as a divorce) are finally overcome in Matisse’s obvious, physical pleasure in contact with paper. “I have attained,” he wrote, “a form filtered to its essentials.” Critics, of course, were snippy. They found the work infantile: “Need we even concern ourselves with these cut-outs?” asked a reviewer in Cahiers d’art, after an exhibition in 1949.

  Escaping from the demands of paint and canvas, artists have often found themselves fleeing into the welcoming arms of paper (as Matisse himself eventually fled from his wife Amélie, turning toward both his work and his model and assistant, Lydia Delectorskaya). Indeed, it’s possible to argue that the development of modern art and sculpture derives entirely from what the critic Clement Greenberg called the “pasted-paper revolution.” The use of paper collage in the early twentieth century, according to Greenberg, liberated art from being merely decorative, an illustration of reality. Take, for example—as Greenberg does not, but we shall—Joan Miró, who decided in the 1920s that his aim was to “assassinate painting.” Miró’s first, rather halfhearted act of rebellion was to stick postcards on canvas, but then in 1933 he began cutting images of machines and tools from catalogues and sticking them to large sheets of Ingres paper. He then began to use the outline shapes formed by these cutouts as models for his paintings: this was his revelation, his big breakthrough. Released from the constraints of self-expression and spontaneity, Miró had found an unexpected route to the vague symbolic language that characterizes his later work, with its unique constellations of shapes, signs and lines. In order to find the true language and expression of his art, Miró, like Matisse, had to start with scissors and paper. Indeed, famously taciturn with visitors, it’s said that Miró would become suddenly animated when speaking of his collection of fine papers—pastel paper, sandpaper, tar paper, deckle-edged paper. Paper brought him alive.

  But before Miró’s weird symbols, and before Matisse and his massive color bursts, there was of course Picasso: he went through his paper phase earlier than anyone. (And returned to it later. His bent and folded metal sculptures of the early 1960s—Woman, Standing Woman and Standing Nude (Bather)—not only resemble Matisse’s paper cutouts, but might even be regarded as a kind of homage to them, and to Matisse’s techniques.) Picasso’s friend Georges Braque—who had trained as a painter and decorator—had started making cardboard models sometime around 1912, though these are all now lost or destroyed. Picasso, who had early mastered the art of one-upmanship, went one further than Braque. He made his own cardboard model—of a guitar—and then made a model of the model from pieces of sheet metal and wire, and thereby, according to the art historian Tim Hilton, “effected a sculptural r
evolution . . . that at one stroke changed the nature of sculpture for ever.” The Guitar (1913) is revolutionary because it’s assembled rather than having been carved or crafted. This principle of assembly became standard practice in twentieth-century art—and so, arguably, from a couple of cardboard models, we get readymades, unmade beds and pickled sharks. (The role of cardboard in the development of modern art is, alas, another subject that we cannot pursue at any great length, though it is worth noting at least in passing that at his nightclub, the Cabaret Voltaire, in Zurich around 1916, Hugo Ball used to recite his poems in a cardboard suit made for him by fellow Dadaist Tristan Tzara; that Robert Rauschenberg in the 1970s, in his Cardboard series, confined himself entirely to working with used cardboard boxes; and that for the now legendary “Freeze” exhibition in 1988, the exhibition that inaugurated Britart, the best that Damien Hirst could manage was a few small cardboard boxes mounted on the wall.)

  Picasso and Braque further destroyed the illusionistic and handmade appeal of art—and “challenged the whole bourgeois concept of art as something precious, valuable, and to be prized like jewellery,” according to John Berger—by doing nothing more complicated than pasting paper onto paper. Picasso’s Man with a Hat (1912), for example, is made of three pieces of rectangular paper, two from a newspaper, strategically placed on a larger sheet of paper, with a few charcoal marks to suggest a face—a kind of amateur Arcimboldo—and between 1912 and 1914 he pasted sheet music, wood-grained paper, colored paper, wallpaper, visiting cards, packs of cigarettes, playing cards and a box of matches onto his canvases. The illusion of painting’s privileged surfaces and space was over. “We tried to get rid of trompe l’oeil to find a trompe-l’esprit,” explained Picasso. For a show of Cubist pasted-paper work at the Galerie Goemans in Paris in 1930 Louis Aragon published a little book on collage, La peinture au défi (In Defiance of Painting), in which he writes of Picasso, “And it was his pleasure to paste a piece of old newspaper, to add a few lines in charcoal, and that was that: that was painting.” Paper was being used to expose itself and its own illusions. In this sense, papier collé (pasted paper) is a form of écorché, like one of those illustrations by Vesalius, with the skin stripped off to show the workings of the muscles.

  The techniques of Cubist paper collage caught on and were adopted by, among others, German Surrealist Max Ernst, who also invented the technique known as frottage (which involves rubbing through paper onto surfaces beneath); Spanish Surrealist Óscar Domínguez, who developed the technique of decalco-mania (which involves painting gouache onto paper and pressing it onto other surfaces); and just about every other self-respecting twentieth-century avant-gardist of any kind, including Dadaists, Lettrists and Situationists; but perhaps most remarkably by the German artist and poet Kurt Schwitters, who went beyond any “-ist” and whose all-encompassing work Merz was a combination of “all conceivable materials,” manifesting itself eventually in his Merzbau, or Kathedrale des erotischen Elends (Cathedral of Erotic Misery), a paper-collage and found-materials sculpture incorporating sliding doors, passageways and grottoes that took over his entire studio in his house in Hannover and which was abandoned only when he had to flee the Nazis in 1937. The obvious appeal of paper as a material for artists of a conceptual inclination is that it is cheap, widely available, comes in multiple forms, and is easy to reproduce. Among the Britartists of the late 1980s and 1990s, Sarah Lucas, for example, produced work using newspaper clippings, including Sod You Gits (1990), which consists of a photocopied enlargement of a page from the Sunday Sport. And among Joseph Beuys’s many “multiples”—works of identical objects produced in limited editions—one finds lists, letters, boxes, photocopies, postcards, writing paper, envelopes, tissue paper, catalogues, photographic proofs, magazine covers, LP record sleeves, flyers, wills, menus, packing paper, customer survey cards, newspapers, forms, maps, ballot papers and various paper bags (“dimensions vary”). Beuys speaks of the “vehicle” quality of his multiples, referring to their capacity to carry meanings and ideas, the main idea presumably being that everybody is an artist and everything is potentially art, particularly paper.

  Surprisingly perhaps, paper remains the medium of choice for many of the most radical and politicized of contemporary artists. “I choose paper because of its accessibility,” says German sculptor Thomas Demand. “It’s an ‘open’ material. We all have the same memories of paper, and I can use your experience to make you understand what I am saying.” One might easily construct not only a history of modern art but also a history of modern politics from artists’ works on paper—prints, posters and drawings—all the way from Goya to Otto Dix and George Grosz, to Aleksandr Rodchenko and the Soviet poster makers of the 1920s and 1930s, to the revolutionary art of Mexico and China, and the work of printmakers today (see, for example, www.streetartworkers.org). When the French painter and printmaker Honoré Daumier made lithographs denouncing the corruption of the court of King Louis Philippe in the 1830s, he was thrown into jail. When the artist Shepard Fairey used—without permission—a photograph of Barack Obama as the basis for his much-reproduced stenciled “Hope” poster during the 2008 American presidential election campaign, the photographer took him to court. The Obama poster, initially printed by hand in a small batch by Fairey, and eventually reproduced everywhere on signs, flyers, stickers and badges, has an immediate, low-tech, anachronistic appeal: it suggests the workmanlike pull of ink through a screen with a squeegee, and thus the human scale of the Obama project. Paper, somehow, despite all the odds, remains radical. The contemporary political printmaker Mathew Curran says that “When I’m cutting out stencils I’m resisting the machine. It’s me, a blade, and a sheet of paper.” The artist Daniel Alcalá: “I use cut paper—a demanding and obsessive technique—to underscore the craft of making and the direct involvement of the artist in the work.” And to go back to Thomas Demand: “Paper is the material of temporary notation. It doesn’t make a big difference whether this is in writing or is three-dimensional . . . It’s a strange anything-material that can be anything, but is rarely itself . . . Basically it’s the ‘Zelig’ of all materials.”

  9

  THE SQUIGGLE GAME

  This game that I like playing has no rules. I just take my pencil and go like that . . .

  D.W.WINNICOTT, “The Squiggle Game” (1968)

  Handmade paper incorporating flower petals

  The story goes that Bodhidharma, the big-bearded, mad-eyed monk who brought Zen Buddhism from India to China, and who taught martial arts to the Shaolin monks, once spent nine years meditating, facing a wall. Nine years. He spent so long meditating, in fact, that his image became engraved on the wall and his legs fell off: tales of Bodhidharma make Butler’s Lives of the Saints seem like a walk in the park. In another story, Bodhidharma is said to have nodded off while meditating: on waking, he promptly cut off his eyelids in self-disgust. According to the story, when his eyelids hit the ground, tea plants sprang miraculously from it, which is why tea is used as a stimulant to keep students of meditation awake. In yet another story, Bodhidharma is said to have refused to teach a student until the student had cut off his arm in order to demonstrate his sincerity, a teaching method that, like many teachers, I am sorely tempted to employ. And in yet another tale, the Emperor Wu is said to have asked Bodhidharma what was the meaning of truth, to which he winningly replied that there was no truth, only the eternal void. But to return to the nine-years-meditating-and-legs-withering-away story: this explains why the Japanese papier-mâché dolls known as Dharma or Daruma dolls, which are representations of Bodhidharma, have no legs. They are round and hollow, and weighted at the bottom—like Weebles they wobble, but they don’t fall down, wherein lies their moral—and each spring, fairs are held in Japan at which the dolls are sold and blessed, to act as good-luck charms for the coming year. The previous year’s dolls are ceremonially burned. So it goes: the great Buddhist holy man becomes first a legend, and then a papier-mâché doll destined for the flames.


  Toys are not only an expression of culture, they are a fundamental means of acculturation, the means by which and through which we teach ourselves about ourselves. The cultural theorist Walter Benjamin—who collected not only toys and word games, and puzzles and brainteasers, and nice stationery, but also the odd and amusing remarks of his young son, Stefan—asks in one of his several essays on toys, “For who gives the child his toys if not adults? And even if he retains a certain power to accept or reject them, a not insignificant proportion of the oldest toys . . . are in a certain sense imposed on him as cult implements that became toys only afterward, partly through the child’s powers of imagination” (“Toys and Play,” 1928). Paper has played a central role in this two-way system of imposition and emancipation: infinitely scriptable and flexible, paper is the cult implement to beat all cult implements. Paper playthings, and playthings made of paper, abound and surround us from childhood to old age, from pin the tail on the donkey and pass the parcel at children’s parties, to London Times and Daily Telegraph cryptic crosswords, and from board games to card games, to puzzles to Pokémon cards, and from dress-’em-up paper dolls to knock-’em-down piñatas. If toys represent a primitive form of expression and self-expression, a form of consolation and representation—a miniaturization and schematization of life itself, no less—then paper has often been the means by which that expression takes place. In Japan a game called Fukuwarai (Lucky Laugh) requires blindfolded players to pin a nose, eyes, ears and a mouth onto an image of a blank face—a game that epitomizes creative paper play. So, let’s play Fukuwarai.