Shock of the News

In the early twentieth century, visual artists began to think of the newspaper as the basis for verbal and visual puns, as a source of found language and images, as a means to mark time and place or express political criticism. Shock of the News - its title playing on that of Robert Hughes' popular BBC television series and book The Shock of the New (1980) - traces the newspaper's impact on modern art from 1909 to 2009. Beginning with Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, founder of futurism, and Pablo Picasso, co-inventor of cubism, the catalogue considers the role of newspaper in the work of 60 artists, including Man Ray, Kurt Schwitters, Robert Rauschenberg, Laurie Anderson, Adrian Piper, Robert Gober and Mario Merz. By snipping and overdrawing pages, transferring fragments to canvas, embalming full sheets in encaustic, excising texts, or gilding whole editions, European and American artists to the present day have transformed newspapers into artworks of protean identity and compelling interest.