Collage
Collage - from the French coller, to glue - is the technique of assembling fragments of paper, photographs, fabric and found material onto a surface. Cubism gave it its birth certificate: Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso began sticking newspaper, wallpaper and oilcloth into their pictures around 1912, and Picasso's Still Life with Chair Caning built rope and oilcloth directly into the frame. Dada turned collage into assault - Hannah Höch and Raoul Hausmann cut up mass-media photographs into photomontage, and Kurt Schwitters built his Merz pictures from bus tickets and waste. Surrealists, Pop artists and later practitioners from Robert Rauschenberg onward kept the technique alive. Collage collapsed the border between art and everyday material, and it remains one of modern art's foundational moves.
Defining characteristics
- Everyday materials pasted onto or into the picture plane
- Fragmentation of printed matter, photographs and typography
- Flattened, layered space where real texture interrupts illusion
- Juxtaposition of unrelated elements producing new meaning
- Chance and the street-found scrap as creative inputs
Key figures
- Georges Braque (1882-1963) — Invented papier collé with Picasso in 1912
- Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) — Pushed collage into constructed, mixed-media pictures
- Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948) — Built Merz collages from bus tickets and street refuse
- Hannah Höch (1889-1978) — Dada photomontagist who cut mass media into caustic new images
Example works
- Still Life with Chair Caning — Pablo Picasso (1912)
- Fruit Dish and Glass — Georges Braque (1912)
- Das Undbild — Kurt Schwitters (1919)
Sources
- Collage - Wikipedia encyclopedia