Paper
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Serious paper folders, like all serious people—except writers, who are often content with pens and backs of envelopes—tend to use specialist equipment in order to practice their art. Most specialist paper used for origami is made not of wood pulp, but of other plant fibers, which haven’t been brutally chemically mashed and ground, and which don’t contain lignin, the chemical compound that usefully binds and strengthens wood cells but which tends to make paper turn yellow and brittle. Classic papers for origami include Japanese kozo and gampi, Korean hanji, lokta from Nepal and unryu from Thailand. A particular favorite among European paper folders is Zanders Elephant Hide, which weighs in at around 110 gsm (compared to the standard 70–80 gsm weight of copier paper and 120 gsm for card stock) and has a rugged, parchmentlike texture, high tensile strength, and a profound memory for creases, which means a fold will last forever. I have about a dozen sheets that at £10 (approximately $16) a pop I’m too scared to fold. When I die, I want to be wrapped in my Zanders Elephant Hide and buried in a paper coffin (an Ecopod, produced by a company in Brighton, made from recycled newspapers and finished with paper made from 100 percent mulberry pulp, each coffin equipped with carrying straps and a calico mattress; I’m going for the Indian red, screen-printed with an Aztec Sun). To create Yoshizawa-style soft creases and curves, you need to wet-fold, which requires a certain kind of paper prepared with a lot of sizing that dissolves when wet, making the paper malleable and soft but not soggy. A good cheap wet-folding paper is standard watercolor paper, which you can dampen with a cloth and then fold as you would normally. For folding intricate models, Robert Lang has a cheap DIY method for making springy, malleable paper, which requires a roll of tinfoil, some tissue paper and a can of artist’s spray adhesive. Lang calls this paper “tissue foil.” Once you go to tissue foil there’s no going back.
But there is going over. For the foolhardy and the very intrepid, extending and exploring the full possibilities of paper folding might seem logically to lead to paper cutting, though in Manichean fashion, paper cutting is also, logically, the opposite of paper folding: a fearful symmetry. Paper folding decreases area; paper cutting increases perimeter. Paper folding honors unity; paper cutting enacts separation. Just as paper folding evolved in similar forms throughout the world, so paper cutting has a global history of great variations and similarities, a global history that is yet to be written. The Japanese have kirigami. The Chinese have jian zhi. The Spanish, papel picado. In Germany, Scherenschnitte. In Poland, wycinananki. India has sanjhi, and a Jewish family traditionally has about the home both a ketubah, a paper-cut marriage contract, and a mizrach, a paper-cut wall plaque indicating the direction of prayer. These are all traditional forms and practices. One of the most accomplished contemporary paper cutters, Rob Ryan—whose work has graced Elle magazine, Vogue, book covers and Erasure’s neglected album Nightbird—explains the appeal of the form:
To me, papercutting means that everything is stripped down as much as possible. There is no tone, no variation of colour, no pencil mark, no brush strokes. There is only one piece of paper, broken into by knives; within this is the picture, the message, the story, written and traced in silhouette . . . We all really share only one story, and my work tells that story over and over.
Another artist who told one story over and over was Hans Christian Andersen. Renowned, obviously, for writing fairy tales, Andersen was also an obsessive paper cutter. About 250 of his paper cuttings have survived: unique in style and extraordinary in range, they deserve to be as well known as his writing. When Andersen was a child, his father made him a paper toy theater, with paper puppets, and in his autobiography Andersen writes that his “greatest delight” was making clothes for these puppets. In a sense, it became his life’s work: fashioning paper as he refashioned stories. Andersen—lowly born, self-obsessed, forever craving acceptance, and who never married, never had children, never even owned a house, and indeed seemed barely able to function as a normal human being—loved above all to perform his stories for an audience. As he spoke he would simultaneously cut out paper figures to illustrate what he was saying, a kind of paper performance art. One contemporary, describing such an event, recalled that “When he had finished his tale, he would spread a whole string of ballet dancers in front of us. Andersen would be delighted with the success of his work. He enjoyed our praise of it more than the impression made on us by his story.” The paper cuts were perhaps his in a way the stories could never be. Indeed, in one of his sad little poems, Andersen reflected, “In Andersen’s paper-cuts you see/His poetry!” How true! His paper cuts feature stylized swans, cinch-waisted dancers, hoop-earringed ghouls, grinning skulls, misshapen hearts, gibbets and palaces, the very stuff of his folk-tales, but made entirely, vividly his own.
Andersen always used white paper for his cutouts: it’s what gives them their ghostly quality, like intimations, or photographic negatives of the other world, or of the world of hidden emotions; paper again providing an important bridge into the human interior and our endless unwritten hinterlands. In his methods and in his fantastic style Andersen was, in effect, an antisilhouettist. Silhouettes, or shadow portraits, as they were sometimes known—or shadow pictures, shades, profile miniatures, shadowgraphs, skiagrams, scissortypes, black shades or, simply, likenesses—were the most popular form of portraiture in the eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. The word “silhouette” derives from the name of the ill-fated minister of finance under Louis XV, Étienne de Silhouette, who attempted to levy taxes on the rich and even to curb royal spending: he lasted all of eight months in his post in 1759. The use of the word “silhouette” to describe black profile portraits may derive from the idea of Monsieur Silhouette as a skinflint, and thus a silhouette as a cheap form of portraiture—à la silhouette, on the cheap—or it may refer to M. Silhouette’s fleeting tenure as minister, or perhaps to the fact that he liked to cut profiles himself. Whatever the etymology of the word, the art of the silhouette can in fact be traced back long before poor Silhouette, to the black profiles on Greek pottery (the very first silhouette was often said to have been made by Dibutade, the “Maid of Corinth,” the daughter of a Corinthian potter who, according to Pliny the Elder, traced her profile as it was cast by candlelight on a wall).
The physiognomist Johann Kaspar Lavater was a great enthusiast for silhouettes, as he was a great enthusiast for many other things, describing them in his bestselling Physiognomische Fragmente zur Beförderung der Menschenkenntnis und Menschenliebe (1775–78) (Essays on Physiognomy; Designed to Promote the Knowledge and the Lore of Mankind) as the “truest representation that can be given of man.” As well as being a great enthusiast—or perhaps because of it—Lavater was also a terrible exaggerator. Despite his meticulous instructions and recommendations for the creation of perfect machine-cut paper profiles, using a pantograph and particular paper (“the shade should be taken on post paper, or rather on thin oil paper, well-dried”), the silhouette soon became a cheap and cheerful sideshow entertainment, a vulgar art form knocked off in a couple of minutes by hawkers and hucksters. Indeed, the art of paper-cut silhouettes eventually became so lowly regarded that the collector Desmond Coke, in his book The Art of Silhouette (1913), was at great pains to point out—in strained italics—that “The best silhouettists never touched a pair of scissors.” Coke notes that the “quartette supreme” of eighteenth-century silhouettists—John Miers, Isabella Robinson Beetham, Charles Rosenberg and A. Charles of the Strand—all painted their portraits on card, glass or plaster, though even Coke has to admit that the most famous silhouettist of all time, Auguste Amant Constance Fidèle Edouart, did indeed work with lowly scissors and paper.
Edouart was the Johnny Cash of paper cutters, a wayfaring stranger who called himself the “black shade man.” “The beauty of those Likenesses,” he wrote, “consists in preserving the dead black, of which the paper is composed.” (Research at the National Portrait Gallery on Edouart’s work shows that he used paper treated with bone black and
Prussian blue, the blue to make the black seem blacker.) Edouart arrived in England from France in 1814, and after more than a decade perfecting his art and sharpening his wits—his portrait of William Buckland and his wife and son examining Buckland’s natural history collection (c. 1828) is typically whimsical—he traveled on to the United States. Edouart’s method was consistent and simple: he would fold his paper once, with the black side in, so that two copies would be produced, one of which he would keep for reference in an album, and then he would make a quick sketch, pick up his embroidery scissors—small, sharp and with long handles—and begin to cut. On completion he would sometimes touch up the edges of the paper to accentuate the contrast between the black and the white mount, or paste the silhouettes onto an appropriate lithographed background (images of drawing rooms, battlefields, seascapes). To his great delight—he was not a modest man—Edouart made it in America. He was a silhouettist superstar. But as he was returning to England in 1849, tragedy struck. The ship he was traveling on, the Oneida, hit a fierce storm off the coast of Guernsey, and although Edouart was saved, almost all of his precious albums were lost: tens of thousands of silhouettes drowned in the depths of Vazon Bay, black on black. It’s said that he never cut silhouettes again. With the invention of photography the industry would anyway soon come to an end, though of course as silhouettes disappeared, the paper remained: William Henry Fox Talbot’s early “photogenic” method of producing photographic images was effectively a form of paper photography.
Both before and after photography there are many other paper arts and crafts, some of them half forgotten, many of them regarded merely as quaint, that combine folding and cutting and yet are neither: decoupage, embossing, quilling and paper cast as bas-relief. The patron saint of paper craft in all its bastard forms is, or certainly should be, the wonderful Mary Granville Pendarves Delany, friend of Handel, friend of Swift, and, one suspects, someone who would have been a very good friend of Lillian Oppenheimer. The story of Mrs. Delany’s discovery, and her self-discovery, are well known. In 1772, elderly, widowed, but still lively as a grig, she was staying at Bulstrode, in Buckinghamshire, the estate of her friend the Dowager Duchess of Portland. One morning, so the story goes, Mrs. Delany noticed the similarity in color between a piece of discarded paper and a geranium petal, whereupon she took up a pair of scissors and began to make a paper flower, which she then pasted and mounted onto black paper. Instantly, she had invented a new art form. She was seventy-two years old, but not unaware of her accomplishment: “I have invented a new way of imitating flowers,” she wrote excitedly to her niece. She called it “paper-mosaick.” Over the next sixteen years Mrs. Delany continued to work with scissors and tweezers and bodkin to make more and more of her paper flowers, almost a thousand of them, collecting them alphabetically in albums, which she named her Flora Delanica. The images—“intense and vaginal,” according to one of her recent biographers, full of “precision and truth,” according to Horace Walpole—are painstakingly composed from tiny pieces of rag paper painted with watercolor and pasted onto pitch-black paper using flour and water. As a child Mrs. Delany had been taught the art and craft of making paper shades, or silhouettes, but with her paper flowers she transformed shades into color, and turned man-made paper back into the botanical.
Mrs. Delany’s flowers have long outlived her. Her work can be seen today at the British Museum, and is periodically rediscovered by artists, writers and feminists, though Germaine Greer dismisses them entirely as “yet more evidence that, for centuries, women have been kept busy wasting their time.” Greer hits the nail on the head but entirely misses the point. Paper, which derives of course from the word “papyrus,” the Latinized Greek name of a plant called by the Egyptians bublos, which gives us the Greek biblion, and which in turn gives us the Bible, is forever reminding us that we live in the land of darkness and the shadow of death, and that we shall all be changed, for this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality. Is paper art a waste of time? Yes, absolutely. Of course. What isn’t?
11
LEGITIMATIONSPAPIERE
Here are my papers [Legitimationspapiere], now show me yours.
FRANZ KAFKA, The Trial (1925)
Deckle-edged handmade paper, the deckle in a contrasting color
World War II poster for paper salvage /recycling © IWM (Art.IWM PST 14657)
It is a single sheet of paper, with a British government crest at its head, containing three short, typewritten paragraphs, two handwritten signatures, and beneath the signatures a date, “September 30, 1938.” It is probably the most famous piece of paper in twentieth-century history. It reads:
We, the German Führer and Chancellor, and the British Prime Minister, have had a further meeting today and are agreed in recognising that the question of Anglo-German relations is of the first importance for our two countries and for Europe.
We regard the agreement signed last night and the Anglo-German Naval Agreement as symbolic of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another again.
We are resolved that the method of consultation shall be the method adopted to deal with any other questions that may concern our two countries, and we are determined to continue our efforts to remove possible sources of difference, and thus to contribute to assure the peace of Europe.
Neville Chamberlain arrived back from Munich at Heston Aerodrome in west London, on British Airways Lockheed 14 G-AFGN, just before 6 p.m. on Friday, September 30, 1938. It had been his third trip to Germany in just over two weeks. Europe was in crisis and war looked imminent. After the Anschluss of March 1938, Hitler’s territorial claims had only increased: he had set a deadline of September 28 for the Czech government to secede the Sudetenland, its border territories, and his widely reported speech at the Berlin Sportspalast on September 26, according to his biographer Alan Bullock, was “a masterpiece of invective which even he never surpassed.” In Britain, the Home Office had already posted to every household a handbook on protection against air raids. Gas masks had been issued. Trenches were being dug, and air raid shelters constructed. According to one historian, R.A.C. Parker, “On the morning of 28 September the inhabitants of British cities expected to endure German bombing within days or even hours.” The Munich Agreement, signed in the early hours of September 30 by Germany, France, Italy and the United Kingdom, granting Germany the right to occupy the Sudetenland, in return for agreeing to allow an international commission to oversee future territorial claims, appeared the best possible outcome. It looked as though war had been averted.
So, Chamberlain alighted from the plane. Sixty-nine years old, smart, sprightly and clearly exhilarated. The large crowd gathered to meet him gave him three cheers. He shook hands with his cabinet colleagues, was welcomed by the lord mayor of London and then made a short statement. First of all he thanked the British people for their letters—”letters of support, and approval, and gratitude; I cannot tell you what an encouragement that has been to me.” Then he went on:
Next I want to say that the settlement of the Czechoslovakian problem, which has now been achieved is, in my view, only the prelude to a larger settlement in which all Europe may find peace. This morning I had another talk with the German Chancellor, Herr Hitler, and here is the paper which bears his name upon it as well as mine. Some of you, perhaps, have already heard what it contains but I would just like to read it to you.
He brandished the piece of paper, and read it aloud. There were more cheers. Indeed, crowds cheered him all the way on his journey to Buckingham Palace, in heavy rain, where he met King George VI, before finally returning to Downing Street, where he was persuaded to lean out of a first-floor window and declare to the many gathered well-wishers, “My good friends: this is the second time in our history that there has come back to Downing Street from Germany peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time.” Letters of thanks and telegrams came flooding in from all over the world—tens of thousands of them in jus
t a few days. “Good man,” cabled President Franklin D. Roosevelt. There were plans for statues to be erected in his honor. Streets were renamed after him, scholarships endowed in his name: he was a hero. “No conqueror returning from a victory on the battlefield,” declared The Times on October 1, “has come home adorned with nobler laurels.” By 1940 all the laurels had turned to barbs: Chamberlain was regarded by many as a guilty man, an appeaser.
He had been betrayed by a piece of paper; he had trusted in words, and words had run away with him. In the debate on the Munich Agreement on October 6 in the House of Commons he was already seeking to excuse himself, explaining that he had spoken from the Downing Street window “in a moment of some emotion, after a long and exhausting day, after I had driven through miles of excited, enthusiastic cheering people,” and that people should “not read into those words more than they were intended to convey.” Too late, because Hitler already knew exactly what such words conveyed, and how much they were worth: absolutely nothing.
Chamberlain’s piece of paper had been signed after the official meetings in Munich in the early hours of the morning on September 30, at Hitler’s private flat in Prinzregentenplatz. Chamberlain had foreseen the importance of returning to England with something more tangible than a mere verbal promise about Germany’s territorial ambitions, and had taken the precaution of bringing a typewritten statement with him. He later recalled that when he presented the piece of paper to Hitler, the Führer “frequently ejaculated ‘ja, ja’, and at the end he said, ‘yes, I will certainly sign it; when shall we do it?’ I said ‘now,’ and we went at once to the writing-table, and put our signatures to the two copies which I had brought with me.” Chamberlain was so delighted to have secured the signature that according to one observer, he patted his breast pocket and exclaimed, “I’ve got it!” He’d had it. Chamberlain was—in the words of a recent biographer, Robert Self, “the quintessential rationalist.” Hitler, alas, was not. Hitler was the Künstlerpolitiker, the artist politician, a rhetorician, someone for whom words could mean what he wanted, when he wanted. “For him,” writes his biographer Ian Kershaw, “the document was meaningless.” Indeed, when the German foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, complained to Hitler about signing the paper, the Führer told him not to worry about it: “That piece of paper is of no further significance whatever.” It is of further significance, but not of the significance that Chamberlain might have hoped. It remains a sign of betrayal, a symbol of the moment at which the covenant is broken, and a piece of paper is revealed as exactly what it is, just a piece of paper. Duff Cooper, First Lord of the Admiralty, and one of Chamberlain’s fiercest critics, resigned the day after the Munich Agreement, and later famously referred to Chamberlain’s document as “that miserable scrap of paper.” During the course of the Second World War, paper was to become more miserable still.