Collages and Objects. ICA London, 1954

Catalogue designed by Lawrence Alloway and John McHale for the exhibition, Collages and Objects, which Alloway organised at the ICA London, 13 October - 20 November 1954. Checklist of 83 works. Cover illustrates Hans Arp’s “Impression of a woodcut (1920) torn and recombined (1946.)” Works by Max Ernst, E.L.T. Mesens, Nigel Henderson and John McHale also reproduced.

Alloway's importance as a writer and art critic is generally attributed to his role in identifying the emergence of pop art. Collages and Objects was among the first Independent Group (IG) exhibitions to examine the relationship between fine art and mass media (including Parallel of Life and Art at the ICA in 1953 and This is Tomorrow at Whitechapel Gallery in 1956). The exhibition traced a genealogy of collage from Cubism and Dada through Surrealism to the mid-1950s, and positioned the IG, (as well as the British Constructivists), as the next generation to be concerned with the materials of the modern environment and the disruption of hierarchies between “high” and “low”.

In September 1953 Roland Penrose had asked Lawrence Alloway to serve on the ICA exhibitions subcommittee alongside the art critic Robert Melville and Peter Wilson. Alloway’s proposal for Collages and Objects, (his first major ICA exhibition) was approved in January 1954 and John McHale was selected to design the show. McHale’s first use of advertising imagery which marked his decisive shift from abstract constructivism to the proto-pop aesthetic (and which has since become synonymous with the IG) can be traced to this year when he produced a series of collage books for Collages and Objects. Mchale’s works for Collages and Objects attempted to convey the mass of information that a person consumed on a daily basis, a tendency which was evident in the design of the exhibition itself and its catalogue, using industrial materials such as fencing mesh and perforated bricks for the exhibition design and continuing the theme of assemblage in the catalogue, where quotations from artists were collaged together in a non-hierarchical arrangements.

Title: Collages and Objects
Publisher: ICA London
Publication date: 1954
Format: Stapled pictorial wraps .
Condition: Very Good Indeed
Provenance: The Library of Dr Alastair Grieve
Stock Number: RB02157