One of my first subversive art experiences was watching Terry Gilliam’s animated collage title sequences for Monty Python. The Pythons loved to poke fun at the vestiges of stuffy Victorian culture in British contemporary life with the subtlety of that giant foot stomping down at the end of each Gilliam short. Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage, a new exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art kicks back at the idea of a monolithically moralistic Victorian age and shows the subversive side of the Victorians themselves, who poked fun at themselves long before the Pythons. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "The Other Victorians."
[Image: Georgina Berkeley (English, 1831–1919), Untitled Page from The Berkeley Album, 1866–71. Collage of watercolor, ink, pencil, and albumen silver prints. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.]
[Many thanks to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for providing me with image above and press materials for the exhibition Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage, running through May 9, 2010.]
