In the hands of Picasso and Braque—the first to employ it as artistic technique—collage was a formal means of exploring and testing the limits of two-dimensionality in painting. For the Surrealists, it was, in the words of T. G. Nguyen, “a creative strategy” like the cadavre exquis, a key to unlocking the subconscious and a method of frustrating rational meaning. Because their interests were primarily epistemological—what the clash of disparate elements might mean—the Surrealists’ use of collage tended to result in jangling narrative pictures enlivened by visual puns and jokes. They came to collage by way of Dada rather than Cubism. To formalist Moderns of the Greenbergian stripe, this emphasis on narrative was a heresy, a retrograde revival of academic illusionism. Of course, we now know that, with notable exceptions, the artistic mindset of the latter half of the twentieth century was dominated not by Greenberg but by Duchamp, and, it must be admitted, Surrealist collage had, and continues to have, an enormous impact on the practice of artists.

What surprises in the Zabriskie Gallery’s delightful exhibition of almost forty collages by sixteen different artists is the presence of both a number of poets—Jacques Prévert, Georges Hugnet, and Valentine Penrose among them—and quite a few artists of whom gallery-goers might not have heard.[1]Virginia Zabriskie suggests that poets might be attracted to collage by its compressed, narrative aspect, which is in some sense analogous to poetry, and by the fact that one need not have any