Etching on printed paper
Tate Collection
Works with images
General Collection
Art Fund
Collection
<a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/cecil-collins-930" aria-label="More by Cecil Collins" data-gtm-name="header_link_artist" data-gtm-destination="page--artist">Cecil Collins</a>
Bequeathed by Elisabeth Collins, the artist's widow, through the Art Fund 2001
abstraction
chair
domestic
from recognisable sources
furnishings
interiors
living room
man-made
objects
table
<p>This complicated composition of geometric shapes is built up from engraved lines. By overlapping and crossing lines on the metal plate, Collins has created three dimensional shapes. Unusually the etching has been printed on to newspaper which has discoloured over time. The reason why Collins produced this image is unclear, but it may have been an experiment in print-making.</p>
paper print etching printed
Untitled
image: 92 × 93 mm
Bequeathed by Elisabeth Collins, the artist's widow, through the <a href="/search?gid=999999968" data-gtm-name="tombstone_link_bequest" data-gtm-destination="list-page--search-results">Art Fund</a> 2001
<p>This complicated composition of geometric shapes is built up from engraved lines. By overlapping and crossing lines on the metal plate, Collins has created three dimensional shapes. Unusually the etching has been printed on to newspaper which has discoloured over time. The reason why Collins produced this image is unclear, but it may have been an experiment in print-making.
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<br/>Collins pursued his vision of a lost paradise, destroyed by the mechanisation of the modern world, throughout his lifetime. Creating his own version of archetypal figures, such as the Fool and the Angel, Collins attempted to reveal to us our innermost selves. These figures, he believed, represented an innocence that had ceased to exist in the ‘Machine Age’ (Keeble, p.73). Many of Collins’s aims and beliefs were published in an essay he titled <i>The Vision of the Fool </i>which was first published in 1947. This essay, written during World War II (1939-45), affirmed the importance of the divine imagination, and has led Anderson, amongst others, to claim that Collins is the ‘most important metaphysical artist to have emerged in England since Blake’ (Anderson, p.11).
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<br/><b>Further reading:</b>
<br/>Richard Morphet, <i>The Prints of Cecil Collins, </i>London 1981
<br/>William Anderson, <i>Cecil Collins: The Quest for the Great Happiness, </i>London 1988
<br/>Judith Collins, <i>Cecil Collins: A Retrospective Exhibition, </i>exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery, London 1989
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<br/>Heather Birchall
<br/>September 2002
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Summary
2009-03-04T00:00:00
summary
SHORT_TEXT
abstraction chair domestic from recognisable sources furnishings interiors living room man-made objects table