The House That Collage Built

There I stood-dumbstruck and greedy in front of fourteen Victorian collages. It was opening night at the 1991 Fall Antiques Show on New York's Pier, where the easel-sized pictures dominated the booth of two dealers prominent in the contemporary folk art world. What the dealers knew about the collages amounted to little. The complete contents of a Victorian album found more than thirty years ago by the former owner in a secondhand store in Maine. Probably made by a woman because of the domestic, fashion-plate, and paper-doll imagery. Each page cut out of an album and matted and framed especially for the antiques show. Documentation or no documentation, the collages had cast their spell. Their array of domestic and decorative detail was dizzying, while their flirtation with scale, space, texture, and pattern was disarmingly picturesque. And their unity as an ensemble was not only assured but tantalizing in its intimation of a goal, a context, or an audience. Combined, these features pointed to a scissor-happy, scissor-sure marriage between hand and imagination. Here, in a nutshell, was the classic scenario in the fine arts-driven version of the folk art world. Shorn of their origin, maker, and function, old objects have been granted the mantle of folk art on purely visual grounds since the 1920s. Form-beautiful, strong, or eccentric-has usually prevailed over meaning-absent, elusive, or speculative. And now these orphaned collages were making their bid for validation at the antiques show that had been founded in 1978 to feature American folk art, old and new, rather than traditional furniture and accessories. Frankly, that evening and during the discussions that led to the museum's acquisition of all fourteen pictures, their designation as folk art was not the issue. No, from the outset, their allure lay in their identity as collage and the degree to which their aesthetic ambition seemed to reach beyond that commonly associated with this medium's origins as a popular art.