Paper Cutting (student album of kindergarten work, Froebel Gift #13)

Album of paper cutting exercises, ca 1890s. Gilt-stamped pebbled cloth concertina fold album, 9.5 x 9.5 x 2.5 inches. 39 panels, several with designs on both sides. The album dates to the early-mid 1890s and was executed by student Anna Olga Müller, the daughter of two German naturalized citizens of considerable social and economic status living in Haddonfield, New Jersey, just across the river from Philadelphia. She was born in 1881 and likely completed this at about 12 years old.

Number 13 in Froebel’s sequence of gifts and occupations, the progression from geometric exercises to fully realized scenic pictures helps illustrate the transformative intention behind the paper gifts, bridging 2- and 3-dimensional space by moving the universal grid, the foundation of kindergarten work, from being inscribed on a table to being implied and manipulatable in a piece of paper. The progressive work is accompanied by small grids in the corner of alternating panels that provide a guide to the cutting patterns, helping to articulate the transformation of form. Three extra panels of work executed on the versos present naturalistic and representational images.