Collage

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

For most of Western art history, a painted surface represented the world without literally containing any part of it. A tablecloth in a still life was an arrangement of pigment describing linen, not linen itself. That separation between depiction and material broke down in Paris in 1912, in the joint experiments of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, and the break produced what is now recognized as the origin of collage as a modern fine art. The first move is usually credited to Picasso. In the spring of 1912 he glued a strip of oilcloth printed with a machine-made chair-caning pattern into Still Life with Chair Caning, framing the composition with a length of rope. The oilcloth did not depict wickerwork, it was a manufactured fragment of the same visual world the painting referred to, pasted directly onto the canvas. Braque's contribution followed that September, while he was working in the south of France. Passing a wallpaper shop in Avignon, he noticed a roll of paper printed to imitate wood grain, a cheap industrial stand-in for real oak paneling, and bought it. Back in the studio he pasted rectangles of the paper into a charcoal still life, producing Fruit Dish and Glass, generally regarded as the first Cubist papier colle. By his own account, showing the finished work to Picasso came as a shock to them both, and Picasso responded with a burst of activity, producing dozens of his own papiers colles before 1913 was out, several built from clipped pages of the newspaper Le Journal rather than decorative paper. The consequence for Cubism itself was structural, not just technical. The movement's earlier Analytic phase had reduced objects to overlapping, nearly monochrome planes that grew increasingly abstract and difficult to read. Pasting an actual newspaper fragment or a strip of wallpaper back into the picture restored a foothold in recognizable, everyday material even as the surrounding forms stayed fractured, and that combination carried Cubism from its Analytic phase into its Synthetic one. Neither artist dated or signed most of this work at the time, which is why historians still argue over exact priority. What is not disputed is the outcome: after 1912, a work of art could contain a piece of the actual world rather than only an image of it, and that possibility has never left painting since.

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

Collage did not stay a Cubist still life technique for long. Within a few years of Braque and Picasso's first papiers colles, a new generation of artists working under the banner of Dada took the same basic act, gluing found material to a surface, and pointed it at a different target, the recent memory of a world war and the culture of mass production many Dadaists blamed for enabling it. The word collage itself only entered common use for the work of Dada and Surrealist artists, especially Max Ernst, whose collages were built from old engravings and printed illustrations, carefully cut apart and reassembled into scenes that read as calm on the surface and deeply irrational underneath. Where Braque's wallpaper had evoked an ordinary domestic object, Ernst's spliced engravings produced images that could not exist in the world at all, closer to a visual equivalent of automatic writing than to a Cubist still life. Other Dada artists pushed the technique in still other directions. Hans Arp allowed chance to compose some of his torn paper works, dropping cut pieces onto a surface and gluing them roughly where they landed, treating collage as a way to remove the artist's controlling hand rather than to sharpen observation of an object. In Germany, Kurt Schwitters built an entire private practice out of the same gesture, naming it Merz after a fragment of the word Kommerz that appeared, by his account, in one of his own compositions. His Merz pictures were assembled from tram tickets, wrappers, string and other everyday debris, and in his hands the practice grew into a three-dimensional, room-filling construction called the Merzbau, built inside his own house in Hanover over roughly sixteen years before its destruction in the Second World War. This spread illustrates something about collage as a form rather than as a single invention: the underlying method proved adaptable to purposes its Cubist originators had not intended, from Ernst's uncanny narrative scenes to Arp's experiments in chance to Schwitters's lifelong accumulation of scrap. What began as a way to reintroduce a recognizable object into an increasingly abstract picture became, in Dada hands, a way to question what counted as art material at all.