These ‘60s Artists Reinvented Antiquarian Paper Marbling To Depict Their Psychedelic Trips

How do you depict what you see when you drink a cup of psilocybin tea? In the 1960s and ’70s, countercultural artists opened their minds with psychedelics, entering planes of existence they sought to represent yet struggled to instantiate with conventional brushwork. Some looked toward the future, anticipating novel technologies such as virtual reality. Others recognized what they were seeking in the dank understories of libraries, discovering old leatherbound tomes embellished with fancifully marbled endpapers.

Marbling had many of the trippy qualities that couldn’t easily be achieved by pushing paint. The colorful patterns were almost unfathomably intricate, recurring without ever repeating. They evoked otherworldly landscapes that were mindbendingly detailed, inviting hours of introspective exploration with or without drugs. The only problem was that nobody remembered how to recreate the fantastical compositions seen in the bindings of antiquarian books. In the 1960s, marbling was largely a lost art.

A thrilling new exhibition at the Grolier Club, Pattern & Flow, retraces the modern revival of marbling, showcasing spectacular examples from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Thomas J. Watson Library. Additional information is provided in an accompanying publication that will undoubtedly become a standard reference and encourage the next generation of marblers, helping to ensure that the art isn’t lost again.

For artists in the 1960s, the only reliable sources of information about marbling were technical manuals written for a generation familiar with exotic substances such as ox gall. These 18^th and 19^th century artisans had a working knowledge of pigments and mordants that had to be experimentally rediscovered, a process of trial and error that happened to be suited to the ‘60s ethos because countercultural artists were eager to share what they learned with anybody who might be interested. Crafts fairs and concerts became places for people to swap recipes. Workshops were conducted in Volkswagen campers (the tops of which were sometimes converted into chemical baths for floating oversize sheets of paper).

Other innovations made the new compositions even trippier than their antecedents. Replacing traditional watercolors with oil paints (and eventually acrylics), artists were able to intensify the colors. They also mixed and matched marbling traditions, ranging from Japanese suminagashi to Turkish ebru.

John Coventry, who sometimes called himself Danny Cabeza de Calabazo, exemplifies the remarkable combination of tradition and invention that made marbling modern. Coventry worked with industrial materials such as sign paints and primers for wallpaper, all mixed up in the inverted roof of his VW bus. The papers he marbled were often recycled. Sometimes they were printed with star maps or embellished with stenciling. Other times they became backdrops for collage. For instance, the Grolier Club features a whimsical piece in which the marbling is explored by a pasted paper astronaut.

By the 1980s, as the number of practitioners multiplied and the range of styles grew, marbling moved from the counterculture into the mainstream. Although some veterans never stopped peddling their wares in hippie havens such as the Renaissance Pleasure Faire, marbling was also prominently featured in middlebrow magazines such as Better Homes and Gardens. Even the Kimberly-Clark Corporation caught on, introducing marbled Kleenex boxes in 1990.

The marbled Kleenex packaging was licensed from Faith Harrison, whose focus was the opposite of Coventry’s. Harrison strove to reproduce traditional designs using water-based inks made from hand-ground pigments. Her designs were also licensed by Hallmark Cards and the Limited Editions Club, and the papers were sold in museum shops. Although it wasn’t a way to get rich – Kimberly-Clark paid $500 for her Kleenex design – Harrison’s success exemplifies the reintroduction of marbling into the aesthetics of everyday life.

The Grolier Club exhibition ends in the 21^st century, showcasing a new generation of practitioners such as Sheryl Oppenheim, whose experiments include silkscreens of marbled patterns from which all color has been removed. After seeing so much color, you might expect them to look austere. On the contrary, they have the wonderous quality of photographic plates from historic expeditions. They offer a fitting coda for a show that begins with ‘60s psychedelic visions, and also provide a tantalizing hint of all that marbling still has to explore.