Fragmentary Forms - by Freya Gowrley (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

A beautifully illustrated global history of collage from the origins of paper to today

While the emergence of collage is frequently placed in the twentieth century when it was a favored medium of modern artists, its earliest beginnings are tied to the invention of paper in China around 200 BCE. Subsequent forms occurred in twelfth-century Japan with illuminated manuscripts that combined calligraphic poetry with torn colored papers. In early modern Europe, collage was used to document and organize herbaria, plant specimens, and other systems of knowledge. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, collage became firmly associated with the expression of intimate relations and familial affections. Fragmentary Forms offers a new, global perspective on one of the world's oldest and most enduring means of cultural expression, tracing the rich history of collage from its ancient origins to its uses today as a powerful tool for storytelling and explorations of identity.

Presenting an expansive approach to collage and the history of art, Freya Gowrley explores what happens when overlapping fragmentary forms are in conversation with one another. She looks at everything from volumes of pilgrims' religious relics and Victorian seaweed albums to modernist papiers collés by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque and quilts by Faith Ringgold exploring African-American identity. Gowrley examines the work of anonymous and unknown artists whose names have been lost to history, either by accident or through exclusion.

Featuring hundreds of beautiful images, Fragmentary Forms demonstrates how the use of found objects is an important characteristic of this unique art form and shows how collage is an inclusive medium that has given voice to marginalized communities and artists across centuries and cultures.

Review Quotes

"A thoughtful, scholarly, playful, expansive, highly original and beautifully produced book that requires how we think about collage in all its forms."-- "Dan Hicks on Instagram"

"[Across] this book's richly illustrated pages, [Gowrley] radically widens collage's historical and geographical scope, beginning with 12th-century Japanese paper cut-outs and ending with AIDS memorial quilts. She also expands the definition of collage to include all sorts of 'juxtapositionary practices'. . . . For Gowrley, collage is not a medium or a genre but rather a 'mode', a 'means of processing the world."---James Waddell, Literary Review

"Wonderful. . . . Fragmentary Forms is not anti- or counter-art history, but art history as it should be today. . . . A must read."---Jan Baetens, Leonardo

"A magnificent collection of illustrations . . . . [An] expansive new history of collage."---Samuel Reilly, Apollo Magazine

"Excitement is an apt response to . . . Fragmentary Forms. It is new and deep in its exploration of the "mode". . . . Throughout the text [Gowrley] explores its range from religious to folk to avant garde approaches--from anonymous Victorians to Faith Ringgold's African American quilts--and a bit of DIY."---Steven Heller, Print Magazine

"I've always wanted a good text on the history and theory of collage and I think this might be the one I've been waiting for."---Jarrett Fuller, Scratching the Surface newsletter

"I cannot say enough how beautiful this book is. It is a breathtakingly beautiful and encyclopedic history of collage from its earliest beginnings."---Kendall Dinniene, New Books Network

About the Author

Freya Gowrley is a leading scholar of the cultural lives of images and objects. She is based at the University of Bristol, where she writes about the relationship between art and identity from the early modern period to the present day. She is the author of Domestic Space in Britain, 1750-1840: Materiality, Sociability, and Emotion.