Though photomontage has traveled the world, it has never shaken its adolescent roots. Whether in Germany, where it began with the Dada movement, or in Russia, where it found a political cause, or in France, where it linked up with Surrealism, it has remained resolutely immature, a rebellious art exulting in clever visual puns, overly significant juxtapositions and crazy assemblages of ill-fitting body parts. At its best, it is deft satire and at its worst, heavy-handed commentary.
The show, ''Fotomontage: European and Russian Collage, 1920-1950'' at Ubu Gallery in Manhattan, is a casual display of this pubescent preoccupation as practiced by some of its lesser lights. The gallery uses the German term ''fotomontage'' rather than ''photomontage'' to signify that the 30-odd works here are not photographs of collages but collages of photographs.
The earliest work in the show is a 1920 photo-collage of boxers fighting over New York, an aerial shot of the city overlaid with silver print cut-outs of Jack Johnson and Jim Jeffries, the Great White Hope, duking it out like gods in the sky. It was made by Erwin Blumenfeld, who signed the work Blumenfeldada. (Many of these artists cut and pasted their names as readily as they cut and pasted images.)
The latest piece in the show is from the 1950's: a collage by George Grosz featuring a tiny black-and-white man sitting at a desk in the back of a giant black-and-white work cubicle. His head is in his hands and a file cabinet keeps him company. In the foreground of the office is the fragment of a secretary's arm, offering him his colorful coat, his way out of the drab world.
In a sense, these two works, 30 years apart, are anomalies in the world of photo-collage, since both feature intact human beings and both lack the giddy intensity of many of the others. Photo-collage, at its most energetic, looks like the work of teen-agers who have gotten hold of their fathers' newspapers, their mothers' magazines and their first pair of scissors. Everywhere there are tiny heads, legs and arms; words like dada, shimmy and korpulenz, and lists of the names of masseuses -- Nelly, Noel and Miss Floggy.
One of the funniest of the collages is the Frenchman George Hugnet's 1937 work featuring a blue-ish cut-out of a woman being swallowed head-first by an elephant whose trunk wraps seductively through her legs.
The Romanian Andre Racz created a figure with a Mayan sculpture as the head, a cactus as multiple breasts and ordinary human legs as legs. The Czech Surrealist Karel Teige pasted pictures of some girls standing on a map of the Alps as if it were a sandy beach. One holds a ball overhead, seemingly oblivious to the fact that her stomach is marred by a giant gash -- a pair of lips.
The French poet Jacques Prevert created a chimera: a busty woman with a boy's head and a billowing gown standing on a raccoon's back while simultaneously cradling and dancing with a giant bird in a tuxedo. The Belgian Raoul Ubac composed a strange surrealist landscape by arranging cutouts of two identical crucifixes, one big, one little, surrounded by a wire mesh fence. In the foreground he left a sensual tangle of body parts. Well, you get the picture.
The photo-collage was often used to crush as many things as possible into a single work. Konstantin Kazansky did tributes to French and Soviet film directors. And Nikolai Fedorovich Denisovsky bowed to the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky by pasting a photograph of his head on the shoulders of a flowered suit, painting a cigarette in his mouth, drawing him some delicate pen-and-ink shoes, placing a few giant fountain pens under his arm, giving him a leash attached to a tiny lion, (the lion was a symbol for Lef, the journal he founded) and offering him a devotee in the shape of a pen-and-ink drawing of the critic Osip Brik, with a real piece of newspaper shoved under his arm.
Many of the serious, political collages are too loaded to be moving. Alexander Zhitomirsky, who was supposed to be Russia's John Heartfield, made a collage titled ''Eastern Wall,'' a graveyard presided over by Hitler the vulture. It is grim but hardly affecting.
The surrealistic extravaganzas have now become mere camp. In 1935, the German Marta Hoepffner, a student of the painter Willi Baumeister, created a dream sequence for a magazine illustration. In the first frame, a bed bobs on the ocean with a woman in it. In the second, the bed floats through the starry sky. Then it lands near a cactus, some rocks and a tall, lighted lantern. The woman goes up to the lantern while a wooden god sits watching nearby. In the final frame a serpent hisses as the woman shrinks away in horror. As Dorothy said to Toto, ''I have a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore.''
''Fotomontage: European and Russian Collage, 1920-1950,'' will be at the Ubu Gallery, 16 East 78th Street, Manhattan, until Feb. 14.
photo collage Picasso & Kirk Schwitters.
