Collage

About

Collage, from the French coller, 'to glue', builds a picture from pieces of paper, photographs, fabric and printed matter fixed to a surface. Pasted paper appears in older traditions, including the layered, torn papers of 12th-century Japanese poetry anthologies, but modern collage began when Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso stuck wallpaper, newsprint and labels into still lifes in 1912.

It spread fast because it could absorb the modern world. Berlin Dada artists Hannah Höch and Raoul Hausmann cut up magazines into political photomontage, as in Höch's Cut with the Kitchen Knife (1919–20). Max Ernst turned engravings from old novels into dreamlike sequences, and Henri Matisse, late in life, composed with painted paper shapes. Romare Bearden assembled scenes of Black American life from magazine fragments in the 1960s; Jacques Villeglé peeled torn posters from Paris walls. Look for seams, jumps in scale and the differing grain and yellowing of papers.