I bet you could sometimes find all the mysteries of the universe in someone’s hand. – Benjamin Alire Saenz
Exploring the Cutting-Edge History and Evolution of Collage Art
By Kelly Richman-Abdou for My Modern Met. July 14, 2017.
Throughout the 20th century, creatives across many movements, mediums, and styles began to explore the practice of collage art. The inventive and innovative approach to art attracted artists due to its one-of-a-kind aesthetic and unique, pieced-together process.
Beginning in the modernist period and continuing into the contemporary art world, the collage art form has undergone a series of changes as more and more artists opt to explore it. Here, we look at the cutting-edge history and ever-changing evolution of the craft, paying particular attention to the movements and artists that have shaped it.
What is Collage Art?
Coined by cubist artists Braque and Picasso, the term “collage” comes from the French word coller, or “to glue.” The movement itself emerged under this pair of artists, who began working with various mediums to create avant-garde assemblages around 1910.
Collages can be created from a range of materials, though most are made of paper or wood and often feature cut-and-pasted photographs, painted forms, or even 3-dimensional objects. As more and more modern artists began exploring the practice throughout the 20th century, these mediums became more varied and increasingly experimental.
Associated Movements
CUBISM
While Cubism is most often associated with painting, its founding figures, Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, also created collages in this style. Defined by fractured forms and deconstructed subject matter, Cubism paired perfectly with the collage approach, as it enabled artists to literally piece together a picture from dissimilar components. .
Additionally, unlike painting, collages did not risk appearing flat. This fact, according to esteemed art critic Clement Greenberg, was appealing to artists like Picasso and Braque, who focused on evoking dimensionality in their work. “Flatness had not only invaded but was threatening to swamp the Cubist picture,” Greenberg explained in a 1958 issue of Art and Culture.
In addition to painted cut-outs, newsprint and patterned paper were often employed by Cubists, as evident in Picasso’s Bottle of Vieux Marc, Glass, Guitar and Newspaper and Braque’s Violin and Pipe.
DADA
Inspired by the cutting-edge work of Picasso and Braque, Dadaist artists also began to experiment with collage in the 1920s. Unlike the cubists who favored still-life arrangements, the Dadaists created collages that incorporated a wide array of iconography, from reinterpreted portraits to figures rooted in fantasy.
Dadaists also creatively incorporated more materials into their collages than their Cubist counterparts. Members of the movement are particularly renowned for their innovative use of seemingly worthless or often overlooked items like tickets, magazine clippings, candy wrappers, and even 3-dimensional trinkets. By transforming ephemera into polished pieces, the Dadaists challenged traditional perceptions of art.
SURREALISM
On the heels of Dada, Surrealists adopted and adapted this cut-and-paste technique. Much like their “automatic” approach to painting, these artists relied on the subconscious to produce one-of-a-kind assemblages made of photographs, illustrations, colored paper, and paint.
Abandoning the Cubists’ focus on still-life, they embraced and expanded upon the Dadaists’ move toward strange subject matter to create pieces evocative of a dream. This focus is exceptionally evident in the work of Joseph Cornell and André Breton, who both used the method as a means to conjure up cohesive yet entirely made-up scenes.
Know Some Greats
by Angie Kordic for Widewalls magazine. May 21, 2016
Hannah Hoch – The Feminist Pioneer of Photomontage
Although she is not Contemporary and is very much Modern, Hannah Höch has to be mentioned, as she is one of the most important collage artists with a great influence on all later generations. One of the originators of photomontage, a type of collage made of actual photographs or photographic reproductions, she created her most notable artworks during the rule of Weimar Germany. She worked hard to eliminate the sexist and racist codes ruling the country, challenging the marginalized place of women in the society and questioning beauty standards of the early 20th century by putting together clippings from fashion magazines and illustrated journals – thus creating a strong, independent woman ready for a treatment of equality. Many of her collages also depicted same-sex couples and broke down the concept of traditional gender roles. Hannah Höch was also the only woman among the Berlin Dada group, but her contributions to the movement are still considered crucial.
Peter Blake – The Pop Artist
Arguably the most famous collage ever created by Sir Peter Blake was the sleeve he created for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the eighth studio album by The Beatles released in 1967. At the time already a renowned Pop artist, Peter Blake designed the front of the LP, which included a colorful collage featuring the Beatles in costume as the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, standing with a group of life-sized cardboard cut-outs of famous people, including actors, sportsmen, scientists and gurus. In total, the collage includes 57 photographs and nine waxworks. In 2008, he created an updated version of Sgt. pepper for the campaign for Liverpool to become the European Capital of Culture in 2008, with famous figures from the city’s history. Continuing his work as a collage artist, Sir Peter Blake created other album covers as well, often in form of collages made of cut-out photographs and objects.
Eileen Agar – The Forgotten Surrealist
As a member of the Surrealist group which saw many other females like Gala Dali and Lee Miller as muses, rather than members, Eileen Agar shared the movement’s love of jokes, puns, and uncanny juxtapositions. Her collage work consisted of classical heads, antique jewelry magazine pages, layers of paper, parchment and marbling, for instance, although she also worked with painting alone. The British collage artist and painter was inspired by the English romantic painting as well, which could be seen in the poetic references of her pieces. Often leaning towards abstraction, Eileen Agar sometimes also depicted topics like death, life, seasonal cycles and the passing of time, for which she uses physical symbols to create found object art, for example.
Wangechi Mutu – The Queen of Wild Collage
One of the most important contemporary African artists today, Wangechi Mutu works across a variety of media, including video, performance, sculpture and of course collage, through which she investigates topics like gender, race and colonialism. Inspired by artists like Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, as well as movements like Surrealism, she composes imagery drawn from anthropological, medical and ethnographic texts, pornography and and even Vogue magazine, calling out the violence that women, and black women in particular, endure in today’s society. Wangechi Mutu’s works on paper are often painted with ink and acrylic paint, and accompanied with materials like plastic pearls, 24 karat gold and latex.
John Stezaker – The Eerie Photocollages
His photographic collages are, to say the least, disquieting. Collage artist John Stezaker has been making them in private for over four decades before they finally found their way to major galleries, and even the Sydney Biennale. Working in the realms of conceptual and appropriation art, he is clearly influenced by the Surrealist artists, as he cuts found photographs, usually glamorous portraits from the 1950s movie stars, and combines them other faces or shots of landscapes, but also pornography, vintage postcards and book illustrations – usually resulting in eerie hybrids that almost make us look away. The fact that John Stezaker received the prestigious Deutsche Börse photography prize for his collages, causing mixed reactions, proved that this form of art is very much alive and well, but also quite controversial.
In my own repeated attempts to become a modern-day primitive (outsider) artist, I am studying collage.
Have three Nike shoe boxes (size 13) full of phrases and illustrations and photographs and cartoons.
Missus Sweetie is accidentally watching a true crime show where the wife had no idea her husband was a serial killer.
Whenever he was home, she says, her husband, the serial killer, was always sitting in his recliner, cutting up magazines and newspapers, collecting phrases and illustrations and photographs and cartoons. And putting them in shoe boxes.
I should’ve known then, she says.