A Collage Master

“I paint because painting is a private Utopia." - Erró

If you can afford a trip to Iceland before August 28, you can catch what must be an astonishing display of Erró's collages at the Reykjavík Art Museum. The 130 collages, which Erró began donating to the museum in 1989, span his creative career ever since he first experimented with the media at the Icelandic School of Arts and Crafts in Reykjavík in the early 1950s. Eventually, Erró began to transform his pictures into paintings, and thus his collages "gained a dual status." They also seem to embody both a Surrealist and Pop Art aesthetic, with subversive, political overtones. I'd love to see these in person...but I don't think a trip to Iceland is in the works for me. 

Album Art...literally.

To be perfectly honest, I have not yet listened to Bow Wow Wow's 1981 album, See Jungle! See Jungle! Go Join Your Gang, Yeah. City All Over! Go Ape Crazy (yes that is actually the name), but the cover art continues to intrigue me.

Banned in the UK and the US, and instigating a Scotland yard investigation due to the age of the woman posing here in the nude, the photograph was shot by Andy Earl and is the band's take on an Édouard Manet painting, Le déjeuner sur l'herbe (or "The Luncheon on the Grass") from 1863. The original was considered shocking and controversial due to its depiction of a naked woman "casually lunching with two fully dressed men," which just goes to show that, over one-hundred years later, the world still wasn't quite comfortable with such a situation.

I just love how the band took this strange and somehow erotic scene and fused it with their own 1980s style, proving that art mimics life just as life mimics art, and that sometimes we must look backwards and borrow from the past in order to create something "new."