montage – ultrawolvesunderthefullmoon

The Montage Work of John O’Reilly

Born in February of 1930 in Orange, New Jersey, John O’Reilly was an American artist whose intricate assemblages combine art, literature, history, and autobiography. His works of montage, both paper and photographic, investigate the issues of religion, violence and eroticism in society. O’Reilly studied at Syracuse University in New York where he earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1952. After serving in the Army, he studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, from which he graduated in 1956 with a Master of Fine Arts. While at the Art Institute, he met sculptor James Tellin, who became his lifelong partner and, later, husband in 2013.

Upon graduation, O’Reilly supported himself as an art therapist at the Worcester State Hospital in Massachusetts for twenty-seven years. He made small, intricate photo-collages in private for many years, only sharing them with close friends. In O’Reilly’s work, foreground and background are merged together to form the plane on which are placed fragmented images: Greek statues, Titian paintings, heads of World War Two soldiers, self-portraits, clippings from gay porn magazines, and works by Cézanne, Caravaggio and Vermeer, among others. O’Reilly’s works are in the same tradition as that of the boxed found-object assemblages created by Joseph Cornell, one of the pioneers and most celebrated exponents of assemblage.

One of John O’Reilly’s first works was his 1965 “Self Portrait”, in which he combined polaroid images of himself with astronomic images and details from the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. During the 1970s, he combined in his collages images of California’s west-coast modern architecture with works by Poussin, Titian and other historical art references. O’Reilly first started publicly exhibiting his photo montages at the age of fifty. One of his first exhibition was in 1983 at the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. O’Reilly exhibited his work multiple times through the 1980s, including solo shows at New York’s Alan Stone Gallery and Boston’s Howard Yezerski Gallery, and a 1985 group show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

John O’Reilly’s main subject in his 1900s work was the topic of war which he felt was a great obscenity. Exhibitions during the period included group shows at the John Weber Gallery and the Wessel & O’Connor Gallery in New York, a solo exhibition at New York’s Julie Saul Gallery, and another group show at MOMA. In 1995, art dealer and curator Klaus Kertess, the owner of New York’s Bykert Gallery, selected a number of O’Reilly’s images for inclusion in the Whitney Museum’s Biennial. Works during this period of the 1990s included stage dioramas from his series “Occupied Territories”, which featured bodies from gay porn magazines collaged to the heads of German soldiers from World War II; these newly eroticized figures were then attached to scenes from painter Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot’s landscapes.

Starting in the early 2000s, O’Reilly began to remove his image from his photo montages. The collages became more dense in appearance, fragmented and austere with his only appearance being one reflected in images of glass shards. Endlessly suggestive, the montages contain shadows drifting from bodies and body parts wafting out of open mouths. Discarding the seamlessness of his previous works’ backgrounds, O’Reilly began using complex, intersecting lines at the edges of his collage work which pushed his work closer to abstraction.

John O’Reilly, at the age of ninety-one, died of a stroke on May 20th of 2021 in the Briarwood retirement community of Worcester. He was survived by his husband, James Tellin, and his brother Edward. The majority of O’Reilly’s work, a collection in excess of thirteen-hundred works, is now housed at the Addison Gallery of the Phillips Academy. His work is included in the collections of many museums including Boston’s Museum of Fine Art, the Detroit Institute of Art, the Princeton University Art Museum, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others.

“I have to fight intellect — my work needs to look like one unit without looking like a collage. It starts with an idea, then I go through book after book until I find something, over a long period of time. I call them montages, where one thing logically flows into another.”—John O’Reilly, The Brooklyn Rail, 2017

Note: A collection of twelve black and white photomontages by John O’Reilly can be found at the online Queer Arts Resource located at: http://www.queer-arts.org/archive/jun_98/oreilly/oreilly.html

Top Insert Image: Seth David Ruben, “John O’Reilly”, 2021

Second Insert Image: John O’Reilly, “Tears”, 1999, Polaroid Montage, 20 x 17.1 cm

Third Insert Image: John O’Reilly, “Umbrella”, 1981, Paper Montage, 20.3 x 20.3 cm

Bottom Insert Image: John O’Reilly, “A Constellation”, 1982, Caseine and Halftone Montage, 25.4 x 17.3 cm

Alice Lex-Nerlinger, “Racecar Driver”, 1926, Vintage Silver Print from an Original Photogram, Private Collection

Alice Lex-Nerlinger, was born in 1893 to the owner of a gas lamp factory on Moritzplatz in Berlin-Kreuzberg. Between 1911 and 1916, she studied painting and graphic art at the Teaching Institute of the Museum of Arts and Crafts under painter and lithographer Emil Orlik and other teachers.

Personal experience of the First World War and the atmosphere of artistic experiment in 1920s Berlin created provided a source of ideas for Alice Lex-Nerlinger’s artistic works: heroism versus the soldier’s death, man and machine, capital and labour, state and censor, and not least, the misogynist. She found stimulus and confirmation in groups of artists with similar attitudes such as the Abstrakten (the Abstracts) and the Association of Revolutionary Fine Artists in Germany founded in 1928. Like Alice Lex, these groups rejected Expressionism, Cubism and Dadaism as bourgeois art. She expressed her political convictions by joining the German Communist Party (KPD) along with her husband Oskar Nerlinger in 1928.

Photographs, newspaper clippings and strikingly contrasted colors, such as red and blue, provided the ingredients for Lex-Nerlinger’s socially critical montages, specializing in photomontages and colored spray painting. Her work was often produced in sequential series creating rhythm and multi-dimensionality. Lex-Nerlinger succeeded in translating the complexity of political statements into simply structured individual images or compositions which prompted discussion and inquiry.

In 1933 Lex-Nerlinger was expelled from the German Association of Fine Artists by the National Socialists and banned from practicing her profession and from exhibiting her artwork. Censorship and this ban on her artwork drove her into engaging in underground political activities against the regime.

Alice Lex-Nerlinger did manage to survive during National Socialism in Germany; but, fearful of persecution and house searches, she destroyed some of her artworks. After the Second World War, she worked in the German Democratic Republic primarily on official portrait commissions. She was honored with a honorary pension in 1960, which she received with the support of the Germany Academy of Arts, and was honored with the Patriotic Order of Merit of the GDR in 1974.