Jean-Michel Wicker

Jean Michael Wicker 'Novolino'

Jean-Michel Wicker Novolino 2003-5

One of the most recent scrapbooks – or excerpts from such – to feature in this blog, Novolino is also one of the most enigmatic.  There is little contextual information about it online, and not much about its artist, though this interview goes some way to evoking the artist’s practice.  Like a number of other scrapbooks cited in this blog, Novolino featured in Paperwork: A Brief History of Artist’s Scrapbooks.  The spread shown here usefully flags the overlap between scrapbook and sketchbook.   And despite the prevalence of monochrome, it also comprises a range of materials.

Isa Genzken

spread from Isa Genzken's scrapbook / Mach dich hubüsch! 2015

Isa Genzken – a spread from Mach dich hübsch! 2015

Art in America has described Genzken’s work as ‘anarchic’, and the term well describes the materiality of her scrapbooks.  Riotous and raucous, they burst at the seams, and seem to speak of an urban magpie’s eye for two-dimensional finds.  Like other more recent scrapbooks, the means-of-sticking-the-production is pronounced, and even, in Genzken’s hands becomes first-order material – witness the black gaffer-tape X among other forms.

Richard Hawkins

Richard Hawkins Curious Yellow

Richard Hawkins Curious Yellow 1995

Included in Paperwork: A Brief History of Artists’ Scrapbooks at the ICA, London in 2014 (see: https://archive.ica.art/whats-on/paperwork-brief-history-artists-scrapbooks), Richard Hawkins’ Curious Yellow could be seen, among much else, to represent a compression of the scrapbook-production process.  Here are selected raw materials, some of which have been demonstrably stuck to a ground (the sticky tape shows), while others are stacked up as if awaiting a suitable base.  Nevertheless: the whole arrangement is very carefully composed, and we might be forgiven for thinking that were this ever to have been hidden between covers, this would be the artist’s favourite spread.  Curious Yellow is curiously at once a scrapbook and not a scrapbook.  Materially, it belongs with Hannah Höchs Album in its use of mass-media, printed imagery, while making a feature of the means of joining surfaces to together, which the latter conceals.

Ray Yoshida

In contrast to many artists’ scrapbook work, and especially Edwin Morgan’s and Isa Genzken’s, Ray Yoshida’s is steadfastly mono-material.  Yoshida, who was making art and teaching in Chicago throughout the latter half of the last century and beyond, ‘encouraged his students to collect images, as one might collect stamps, in order to develop patterns of “looking”’ (https://www.mmoca.org/artist/ray-yoshida).  Not surprisingly, Yoshida was an avid, eclectic collector.  In the scrapbook, however, and many related works on paper, he focusses exclusively on comic-book imagery.

spread from Ray Yoshida's scrapbook

Ray Yoshida – spread from scrapbook 196-?

And at times, this work crystalises further as an anatomy of comic-book tropes:

first page from Ray Yoshida's scrapbook

Ray Yoshida – first page from scrapbook 196-?

The connections to Pop Art are palpable, and indeed, Yoshida acknowledged Lichtenstein’s recourse to ‘non-traditional’ sources for art-materials (https://vaaam.tome.press/chapter/ray-yoshida/).

The Smithsonian’s digitised version of Yoshida’s scrapbook can be found here: https://www.si.edu/object/AAADCD_item_15546

Edwin Morgan

The images that follow are taken from the University of Glasgow’s ‘Digistising the Edwin Morgan Scrapbooks’ project.

from Edwin Morgan's Scrapbook number 12 (pages 2239c - 2240)

from Edwin Morgan’s scrapbook Number 12 (1954 – 1960)

Perhaps the most visually intense scrapbooks that will be included in this blog are those by Edwin Morgan.   There is a certain irony in this, when Morgan (1920 – 2010) was first and foremost a poet and translator.   The scrapbooks’ dense visuality seems to emerge as the combination of several factors: first, the quality of the component parts, which are often busy with imagery; second, the determination to make the most of any given ground, so that there are few dead spots between the pasted elements; and third, the use of layering in a way that realises the second principle for any underlying image.

from Edwin Morgan's Scrapbook number 12 (pages 2243 - 2244)

from Edwin Morgan’s scrapbook Number 12 (1954 – 1960)

from Edwin Morgan's Scrapbook number 12 (pages 2247 - 2248)

from Edwin Morgan’s scrapbook Number 12 (1954 – 1960)

from Edwin Morgan's Scrapbook number 12 (pages 2249 - 2250)

from Edwin Morgan’s scrapbook Number 12 (1954 – 1960)

In the images that follow – which are taken from the University of Glasgow’s site (details as above) – the blue shapes denote redactions of material which might be problematic to reproduce for copyright reasons. While copyright applies to the reproduction of a scrapbook as a design (within the usual application of copyright law), it also applies to components where authored by others.  For this reason, the process of securing clearance for the reproduction of scrapbooks can be very involved.  The University of Glasgow project offers sample spreads taken from Edwin Morgan’s 12th scrapbook with an interactive ‘risk filter’ which shows, in graphic form, for different levels of ‘risk appetite’ what might be problematic in reproducing any given component(s).  The first image shows the ‘high risk’ outcome, the second, for ‘low’.

from Edwin Morgan's Scrapbook number 12 (pages 2241 - 2242)

from Edwin Morgan’s scrapbook Number 12 (1954 – 1960)

from Edwin Morgan's Scrapbook number 12 (pages 2221 - 2222)

from Edwin Morgan’s scrapbook Number 12 (1954 – 1960)

Eddie Squires

spread from one of Eddie Squires' scrapbooks
spread from one of Eddie Squires’ scrapbooks

There is a telling overlap of imagery in the scrapbooks of Eddie Squires, and William Burroughs and Brion Gysin.  Both collections share, among other preoccupations, a fascination with the icons of the Space Age as manifest in mass print media.

Eduardo Paolozzi

Pages from one of Eduardo Paolozzi's scrapbooks

Eduardo Paolozzi – scrapbook spread

‘Eduardo Paolozzi started collecting images from popular American publications and pasting them into scrapbooks when he was a child and continued to do so as an adult. During 1946 and 1947, his last year at the Slade School of Art, he began using such images in a series of collages which, according to Paolozzi, were heavily indebted to Pablo Picasso’s (1881-1973) synthetic Cubism of c.1912-18′ – from Tate website https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/paolozzi-dr-pepper-t06935

Some pages from Julian Trevelyan’s scrapbooks

A page from one of Julian Trevelyan's scrapbooks

Julian Trevelyan – pages from a Scrapbook

A page from one of Julian Trevelyan's scrapbooksJulian Trevelyan – pages from a Scrapbook

spread from one of Julian Trevelyan's scrapbooksJulian Trevelyan – pages from a scrapbook

As much as Trevelyan’s many scrapbooks from the 1930s comprise a huge range of materials – everything from etchings to mass-produced prints – they also revel in typically Surreal juxtapositions of content as demonstrated here: on one page, an advertisement for furnishing fabrics; on the next an image of Noah’s Ark.   A signed-up Surrealist, Trevelyan was a prolific scrapbooker.  The volumes can be viewed in their entirety by appointment at the Tate Archives.  Some have also been digitised, and are available at: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/archive/tga-898-1/trevelyan-scrapbooks.

Jimmy de Sana

Jimmy de Sana Portraits 1975

Portraits appears to consist of collaged inserts in a plastic pocket presentation folder; this spread shows various photographic media plus lined and plain paper.  The use of the plastic pocket folder offers the potential for contents to be swapped around.

William Burroughs and Brion Gysin

William Burroughs and Brion Gysin page from a scrapbook

William Burroughs and Brion Gysin – spread from a scrapbook

Note the range of media: paint, photography (of various kinds including sepia postcards), typewritten text, and found text.  The ‘ground’ of the book – which some kind of ledger – also features in the design.

page from one of William Burroughs and Brion Gysin's scrapbooks titled 'All God's Children Got Space'William Burroughs and Brion Gysin – spread from scrapbook

Here media (with the exception of the inscription which acts as a title for these pages), media and subject-matter are, in parallel, homogeneous save for the colour / monotone distinction.