A juxtaposition of signifiers: radical collage in children’s literature

Collage is a form found in many classic and popular picturebooks for children, and contemporary picturebook artists have increasingly used the cross-med6iality of the form, but its more radical use is perhaps less well known. This paper explores collage as a particularly interdisciplinary artistic expression, pointing to plural readings and understandings across its intermedial form, drawing on a number of ‘cutting-edge’ artists’ picturebooks for children that have posed radical political questions through collage design, including Hannah Höch’s Picturebook (1945), Umberto Eco & Eugenio Carmi’s The Bomb and the General (1989), Davide Cali & Serge Bloch’s The Enemy (2009) and André Leblanc & Barroux’s The Red Piano (2009).Now recognised as a major turning point in the evolution of modernist art—a form that always seeks change—collage is a developing element of children’s literature. Many of the images in anti-establishment or anti-war picturebooks act as riposte to political rhetoric. Such questions are posed as a fundamental part of the urgent artistic expression of collage, where absurdist and paradoxical images expose truths and ridicule fictions, created to surprise and shock the reader or viewer. The special relationship of collage as anti-war activism and ‘avant-guerre’ art is explored, viewing collage as a form which can challenge the seeming realities of a point in history, present political critique and point to possibilities for change, using as its material ripped-out, torn, cut, stuck and pasted visual refuse of its time. Thus war becomes literally war-torn.Key words: Collage, Politics, Picturebook, Avant-garde, War. ResumenEl collage es una técnica que se utiliza en muchos álbumes ilustrados infantiles clásicos y populares; los artistas de álbumes ilustrados contemporáneos han utilizado cada vez más la mediación cruzada de la forma, pero su uso más radical es quizás menos conocido. Este trabajo explora el collage como una expresión artística particularmente interdisciplinaria, apuntando a interpretaciones y lecturas plurales a través de su forma intermedia, recurriendo a una serie de álbumes ilustrados infantiles de ‘vanguardia’ que han planteado cuestiones políticas radicales a través de sus diseños de collage, incluyendo Picturebook (1945), de Hannah Höch, The Bomb and the General (1989), de Umberto Eco y Eugenio Carmi, The Enemy (2009), de Davide Cali y Serge Bloch, y The Red Piano (2009), de André Leblanc y Barroux.Siendo ahora reconocido