War and Peace Project

Laura “Lola” Baltzell ’83 and Christiane Carney Johnson ’83 returned to Grinnell’s campus in the fall, bringing their exhibition of collages with them. The War and Peace Project, started by Baltzell, consists of 747 collages made from the pages of a

Soviet-era copy of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Both Baltzell and Johnson took the Tolstoy course from the late John Mohan, professor of Russian. He inspired their love of Tolstoy and War and Peace. Johnson described Mohan as “one of those professors that change your life.”

Baltzell began making collages as a personal project. “I started the project in winter of 2009 following a serious health crisis,” Baltzell says. “I wanted to do a long-term project that would encourage me to keep going — a project that engaged me and was fun.” After a friend received an equally serious diagnosis, Baltzell invited her to join the project, and it kept growing from there. In addition to Baltzell and Johnson, four Grinnell alumni contributed collages: Otto Mayr ’82, Lucy Zahner Montgomery ’83, Beth Jorgenson Sherman ’83, and Lynn Waskelis ’83.

Every Friday for two-and-a-half years, Baltzell and several of the other artists would meet in Baltzell’s Boston, Mass., studio and complete as many as 10 collages. “You’d feel emotions that would help you choose the ink, paper, and color,” says Johnson. There were only a couple of rules the artists were asked to follow: Each collage had to use at least one word of the original and there would be no touch-ups or redos. Each artist was free to respond to the storyline or not.

An exhibition of all 747 collages was held at Yasnaya Polyana, the Tolstoy family estate, in 2012. Among the bits of ephemera that made their way into the collages were pressed flowers from Yasnaya Polyana, other books, sheet music, and a label from a champagne bottle that Baltzell had kept from her study-abroad trip to Russia in 1981. The artists made a conscious effort not to buy supplies. Once their work gained notice, through their blog, people started donating supplies to the project.

While Baltzell and Johnson were on campus, they gave a talk about their project, visited and talked with Associate Professor of Russian Kelly Herold’s War and Peace tutorial, and led a collage-making workshop.