Where I Hope to Be Monday Afternoon: MOMA

Special Exhibitions: Metropolitan Museum of Art

Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage
February 2, 2010–May 9, 2010
The Howard Gilman Gallery

From the website: Sixty years before the embrace of collage techniques by avant-garde artists of the early twentieth century, aristocratic Victorian women were already experimenting with photocollage. The compositions they made with photographs and watercolors are whimsical and fantastical, combining human heads and animal bodies, placing people into imaginary landscapes, and morphing faces into common household objects. Such images, often made for albums, reveal the educated minds as well as the accomplished hands of their makers. With sharp wit and dramatic shifts of scale akin to those Alice experienced in Wonderland, these images stand the rather serious conventions of early photography on their heads. The exhibition features forty-eight works from the 1860s and 1870s, from public and private collections.

Aren't they fascinating? I'm completely captivated. Part Darger, part 20th Century surrealism, part Pop Art . . . I simply MUST get to this show in the four or so hours I'll be in town. We'll probably be there just after lunch if you want to go with.

What fun! What revisionist thinking! What a good use of one's time!