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 – 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 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.

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.

Ray Yoshida – spread from scrapbook 196-?

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

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

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 – 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

Julian Trevelyan – pages from a Scrapbook

Julian Trevelyan – pages from a Scrapbook

Julian 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 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 – 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.

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.

sheet from Gerhard Richter’s Atlas 1989

While not, strictly speaking, an artist’s scrapbook, Richter’s monumental Atlas nevertheless borrows many of the form’s tropes.

For a start, as seen in this excerpt, it features cuttings in a way that formally recalls Höch’s Album, though Richter, who is working with a much longer twentieth century, is able to mobilise narrative rhymes and juxtapositions for very different ends.  And again, in the wake of Hoch, Richter draws upon everyday print-media, with faded newspaper contrasting with more starkly black and white images, as Höch contrasted the latter with sepia ones.   Then again, the spread is organised around a centre-fold (breached by the image of the stag), which references the scrapbook form, though this breach also speaks of the single-page form that each of Atlas’s ‘sheets’ (the official term for them) takes.