Painting: Action from the Gluepot

The original idea for both Picasso’s cutouts and collages (a combination of pasting and painting on canvas) probably came from his childhood years when he watched his painter father, a professor of fine arts in Barcelona, correct his own oils by cutting out canvas pieces and gluing them on, rather than rubbing out the detail or beginning all over again. In the hands of Picasso and Georges Braque, collage became a favorite technique during the early years when they were inventing cubism together. For Boston-born Conrad Marca-Relli collage was a last resort. In 1953, while in Mexico, he ran out of oils and turned from the paintpot to the gluepot in sheer desperation.

The combination of painting and pasting suited Marca-Relli so well that he has rarely turned out any other kind of work. Last week the fruits of 15 years of dedication to the gluepot went on display at Manhattan’s Whitney Museum (see color opposite).

The 79 flat collages and reliefs and four freestanding aluminum constructions show that even his steadfast adherence to collage has not inhibited a distinct and rational progression in both style and content. In the early 1950s, Marca-Relli was concerned with semi-abstract figures of people, then moved on to swelling abstract panoramas of jostling, fluttering and flying scraps of canvas. From that period, 1958’s Night Freight, says Marca-Relli, “has a feeling of movement which could have been the rumbling of a quiet freight filled with bodies being taken away in the night.”

Interest in materials “that are in our life today” next led Marca-Relli to experiment directly with freestanding constructions and panels of aluminum, either left in silver or covered with gaudy paint. As a rule, the rivets and nails lhat hold the work together are left exposed because they make the work reminiscent of “machines that do something.” Cristobal, for instance, is built of red, white and blue vinyl and is meant to suggest “the side of a freighter” going to some distant clime.

Most recently Marca-Relli has come back to working in canvas on canvas, and to his first love: the figure, or at least an abstract, anatomical detail. The challenge, he believes, is “to see if a certain figure can live alone. To see how far you can go without having it become boring, to keep it pulsating.”