Assemblage

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The direct ancestor of assemblage is a small piece of oilcloth. In May 1912 Pablo Picasso glued a scrap of oilcloth printed with a chair caning pattern onto the canvas of Still Life with Chair Caning, framing the whole thing with a length of actual rope rather than a painted or carved frame. Georges Braque followed within months with papiers colles, pasted paper compositions using wallpaper, newsprint and wood grained paper to stand in for the surfaces they depicted rather than painting an illusion of them. Both moves broke a rule painting had followed since the Renaissance: that everything on the canvas should be paint, describing a world it does not literally contain. Once that rule was gone, the next step, building a genuinely three dimensional object out of literal materials rather than describing one in paint, followed within the same few years. Picasso's Guitar (1912), constructed from sheet metal, wire and cardboard rather than carved or cast, is the work historians point to as assemblage's true beginning, because it does not merely include a found material as one element of a painted composition. It IS the found materials, arranged into a form, with no other substance underneath. Everything assemblage did across the following decades, Rauschenberg's Combines pairing painting with three dimensional junk, Cornell's glass fronted boxes of found ephemera, Nevelson's salvaged wood walls, follows the same basic permission Picasso's guitar first took for granted.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Assemblage spent forty years as a technique other movements used before it was widely treated as a category on its own. Dada artists including Marcel Duchamp, Hans Arp and Kurt Schwitters, whose Merzbau turned an entire house into an accumulating assemblage over more than a decade, all built with found and discarded materials in the 1910s and 1920s, but each is generally discussed under Dada first and assemblage second, if at all. The shift came with the American curator William Seitz, whose 1961 Museum of Modern Art exhibition The Art of Assemblage was the first major institutional attempt to name the technique as a coherent tradition running from Picasso's 1912 constructions through Rauschenberg's Combines, then showing at the same museum, and Cornell's boxes. Seitz's own catalogue essay is careful about what the show was and was not claiming: not a movement with a manifesto and a membership, the way Cubism or Surrealism had one, but a technique, a shared way of building an object out of the literal world's own discarded materials, that recurred across otherwise unrelated artists and decades because the same basic permission, that a work of art could be made of real things rather than only representations of things, kept proving useful to different people for different reasons.