Cutting up the American dream

The method could not be simpler, which is part of why it was so radical. Paolozzi took scissors to the magazines, cut out the fragments he liked, and pasted them onto a single sheet of card, a collage (from the French coller, “to glue”: a picture assembled from glued-on scraps rather than painted). No oil, no canvas, no drawing of his own to speak of. The picture is made of other people’s printed pictures, rearranged. The Tate, which owns it, describes the object plainly as “printed papers on card.”

And it is small. It is about fourteen inches by nine (35.9 by 23.8 cm), smaller than a sheet of letter paper, a thing you could hold on your lap. Everything in it is packed into that little portrait-format sheet, which is its own kind of surprise for a picture this famous.

Even the title is a found object. I was a Rich Man’s Plaything is not a phrase Paolozzi coined, he lifted it, word for word, off the largest clipping in the collage: the cover of a pulp confessions magazine called Intimate Confessions, a woman in red surrounded by sensational teaser lines like “Daughter of Sin” and “Woman of the Streets.” The title of the artwork is just the headline of the trashy magazine it is partly made of. The rest of what is stuck to the card (the pistol, the soda logo, the bomber, the pie) comes next.