August 4, 2008
Clipping Art, One Engraving At a Time
While thinning out my hayloft of a design library recently, I came across a dusty collection of books that had not been opened in many, many years. Yet, as I began turning the dog-eared, torn and cut-up pages, vivid memories flew out and landed on me like flies on a heifer. These books, universally known as clip art books, some edited by Dick Sutphen and many others published by Dover and Chelsea House, were once owned by almost every American illustrator, designer and art director. They found solace in these books, when an idea was needed, but their imaginations were not entirely up to the task. I know: I was certainly one of the needy ones. The engravings, drawings and assorted decorative devices that filled the voluminous volumes were more than mere mainstays of the editorial and advertising art fields — the word bible comes to mind. While “copyright free digital art” is today generally available on CD or the web, in book form these are becoming increasingly scarce.
I don’t know who coined the term “clip art,” but it is the universal moniker for permission-free imagery. The concept dates back to decoupage in the late 19th century, but became a formal anti-art movement in the 20th century with the Dadas in Zurich and Berlin, who freely clipped printer’s cuts found in commercial catalogs and samplers for use in their ersatz advertisement and periodical layouts. It was further fine-tuned by, among others, Max Ernst in his 1934 proto-“graphic novel” Une Semaine De Bonté (A Week of Kindness), which usurps and converts 19th century steel engravings for his quirky surreal narrative. To say the preoccupation with old engravings and printer’s fragments pre-dates psychedelic, punk, and grunge is a cliché. Nonetheless it did, each style used clip art. While influenced by Dada and Surrealism, it was also a cheap and facile way to make something that had all the characteristics of professional art but none of the muss. All one needed were scissors, X-Acto, glue (or wax) and just a meager sense of the absurd. The funny thing about clip art, is it kind of composed itself. There were (and are), so many variations on so many visual themes, that one had to be blind as a mole not to find a way to make graphic connections. In other words, if one could not employ clip art to great advantage one should look for another line of less demanding work.
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Observed
By Steven Heller
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