Why did Picasso (and Braque) invent collage, why in Paris, and why exactly in 1912? Because they were men, artists, geniuses, because they were driven by a creative impulse toward the new (in this case within the novelty of Cubism they had also invented) and because they were doing so in a time and a place that could institutionally recognize their achievement. Or to put it more bluntly: because this has longtime been how art history taught us how to think about collage and the rules of the game in art in general, a game with winners and losers, with a strong sense of the tradition of the new, with no room for craft and amateur work, paying little or no attention to women and those working anonymously or collectively in the sphere of domestic and private life, in short with a sharp awareness of the difference between the unique creation of an artist working for the art market and art world of collectors, curators, connoisseurs, and the industrial mass-products catering to the practical needs of the crowds.

Yet once one accepts to look beyond these old-school art-historical conventions and prejudices – and who is not willing and capable to do so today? – a totally different history pops up: a “global” history (this is Gowrley’s term) of collage as a way of doing, a real way of life, that cuts across many boundaries: historical, spatial, social, cultural, and so forth. This wonderful book aims thus to write this other history, bringing together an exceptional wealth of collage-related practices and works that radically exceed our traditional ideas of collage as originated overnight by Picasso and Braque. However, the objective of the book is not to redefine collage per se. Gowrley’s approach is as catholic as possible and the author shies away from any unifying or universalizing intention to replace one definition by another (this is also the reason why the book does not spend time on the discussion on the differences and analogies between collage and montage, for instance). Gowrley is happy with a very open definition of montage as gluing something on something else, in the first place, but not exclusively, paper. What the book wants to achieve is to open our eyes to the incredibly rich and diverse iconography and history of collage. As a matter of fact, this publication can be read twice, that is in two ways: first as a moving panorama of what collage can stand for (the book is so cleverly illustrated as well as captioned that a purely visual reading of it makes perfectly sense), second as a scrupulously documented and always illuminating commentary of the forms, materials, styles, genres, but above all functions of the works under scrutiny.

If Gowrley is not looking for a new definition of collage but to broaden the existing one, she nevertheless accepts the importance of collage’s history and historicity as promoted by traditional art history. Her book is chronologically organized, starting with the invention of paper and ending with the leap into the digital, and she also wisely acknowledges the Cubist invention as a watershed moment in the history of collage, that is as the decisive moment when “craft” turns into “canon”. But that is where Gowrley’s acceptation of conventional art history stops. The real contribution of the book, alas not really reflected in the subtitle which foregrounds the new and only the new, is to elaborate something else: not only a global but also a cultural history of collage. Instead of following the conventional take on collage as just another step in the unfolding of modernity, more precisely of modern painting after Fauvism and before Dada and Surrealism, Gowrley brilliantly demonstrates that collage is the result of, first, technological, economic, social, and ideological (and thus not necessarily artistic) changes, such as for instance the progressive valorization of self-expression in the 18th Century or the easy and almost general access to mass-produced materials in the 19th Century, and, second, the combination of these material conditions and affordances with specific personal and collective needs and desires. Collage, in other words, exists each time that it possible to assemble materials in order to perform a specific function, but these functions cannot be reduced to one pattern. They can be religious or devotional, they can have to do with collecting and classifying, they are often militant and political (and the importance of the political has only been growing over time), as shown by a stunning wealth of examples, ranging from scrapbooks to quilts or from herbaria to valentines, among countless others. Moreover, each type of collage involves specific producers and consumers, with often the impossibility to draw strict frontiers between both, as well as specific uses and conventions that are generally overlooked or discarded. One will find in this book for instance extremely interesting commentaries on the knowledge and expertise of female “shopping” in relationship with collage and the making of “assemblages imbued with creativity and personal significance” (p. 173).

It is no exaggeration to state that this book is timely: a new reading of collage was much needed and Gowrley perfectly links her global approach with the post-colonial, feminist, queer and other critical priorities and sensibilities of our time. Yet the broadening of art history does not reduce its art-historical qualities: Fragmentary Forms is not anti- or counter-art history, but art history as it should be today. Finally, the book is not only a must read for all those interested in the globalization of collage and art history; it is not less a great model of what can be done in other fields such as literary studies, where analogous attempts to rethink collage would be more than helpful. No, literary collage has not been invented by William S. Burroughs and there is more in it than just the famous cut-up technique.