Cutouts, Collages, and Inkblot Poems in German Romanticism

FAIN: FT-229733-15

Catriona MacLeod
University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, PA 19104-6205)

Summer research and writing on Art History and Criticism, German Literature and Interdisciplinary Studies.

Romantic authors and visual artists cut, glue, stain, and recycle paper. They generate papercuts, collages, and inkblot poems in profusion, and combine these in innovative hybrid forms such as the picture books of fairy tale author Hans Christian Andersen. My book project studies the role of fragmentary, shadowy, and ephemeral scraps, which have until now been neglected by comparison with philosophical discussions of the fragment during the first half of the nineteenth century in Germany. I investigate related works such as the paper cutouts of Adele Schopenhauer, Luise Duttenhofer, Hans Christian Andersen, and Philipp Otto Runge; the collage practice and theory of Clemens Brentano; and the inkblot poetry of Justinus Kerner, considered a forerunner of the modern Rorschach test. These works foreshadow, I argue, avant-garde art such as Picasso's collages and Matisse's papercuts, and contemporary, room-size, silhouette installations by US artist Kara Walker.