A Feminist History of Assemblage

Cut Out: A Feminist History of Photo Collage, Montage and Assemblage

Fiona Rogers

Thames & Hudson with the Victoria & Albert: London, June, 2026

Feminist scholarship has, over the past two generations, radically transformed art history. A surprising number of previously obscure or entirely unknown female artists have been rediscovered and written about and displayed. And so, the story of art, both in the West and internationally, looks very different now. Artemisia Gentileschi has become a major baroque figure, Hilma af Klint is identified as a great modernist, Joan Mitchell is a major abstract artist, and (of course!) A whole host of contemporary female artists are being celebrated. In this long-overdue process, numerous female painters and sculptors are added to the canon. In the late twentieth century, when I taught a large survey course on philosophy for freshmen in Pittsburgh, I included John Stewart Mill’s The Subjection of Women (1869) in my discussion of feminism, which offered a striking, pioneering defense of women’s art. Comparing the numerous successful female writers with the paucity of famous women artists, Mill argued that only sociology could explain this difference. My discussion focused on the conceptual issues. Now, thanks to Linda Nochlin, Ann Sutherland Harris, and two generations of their successors, including Fiona Rogers and her colleagues at the V&A, who have created this book, a large number of impressive female artists have been identified. And so we can start writing and presenting a revisionist history.

We have become familiar with the now-long process by which artists from every period and every culture have been identified and celebrated. This truly is an international activity that often involves looking beyond Western Europe and White North America. Cut Out: A Feminist History of Photo Collage, Montage and Assemblage offers something different, and more surprising— a revision of our established ways of thinking about the media of art. College involves the appropriation and recycling of pre-existing materials. Focusing on women, Cut Out indicates how female artists of all classes and many nations have employed this technique. Thus, Lady Georgina Caroline Hill created photomontages in the 1860s, Queen Victoria cut and pasted family portraits, and Sojourner Truth, the famous American abolitionist, collaged and sold her own likenesses. The variety of their collages is striking. Eighteenth-century German nuns pasted lace onto paintings of saints; Braque and Picasso created cubist collages; and Gee’s Bent African Americans made quilts after the Civil War from fragments of fabric. Like Duchamp’s ready-mades, these artworks all used ready-made materials; they are based on pre-existing representations or artifacts. Femmage, as collages by women were named by Grace Glueck, often show bodies in unclichéd ways. Hence, their importance in the Black Power movement, the Women’s Liberation Movement, and the punk scene. Often, these works employ grids to align the cutouts.

There is an obvious political allusion to the role of female artists in the art world in the very materials of these collages. As these artists don’t create from scratch but only assemble pre-existing forms, these women reassemble and creatively rework pre-existing represented forms. Thus, Claude Cohon creates assemblages of body parts; Toshiko Okanoue, a Japanese surrealist, removes women’s heads from her photomontages; and Alice Lex-Neringer, a Weimar-era German communist, produces political photomontages. Collage was an ideal art form for post-colonial artists, such as Wangechi Mutu, the Kenyan-American who uses body imagery to critique colonial legacies, reinterpreting these images to suit her progressive politics. A few of these women are well known, such as the Dada artist Hannah Höch and Dora Maar, the Surrealist best known for her long relationship with Picasso. But many others are fresh discoveries. I especially admired the works of Nara Velimirova, Russian constructivist collages, and the re-creation of old-world images by Liliane Farber. The political implications of women’s cut-outs are elusive, for they were made by British aristocrats, French Surrealists, and Russian Constructivists. And, of course, by many contemporary feminists.

I cannot recall a single book that has drawn my attention to as many fascinating artists previously unknown to me as this publication. Nor another recent account which offers such a suggestive novel conceptual framework. This, then, is a great achievement. Scholars will be fascinated, and artists will love this book, which offers plenty of material to inspire reflection and emulation.

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