Collage

I

Introduction

Collage, an artistic technique practised since the early 20th century in which paper or other objects are attached to another surface, usually by gluing. (The word derives from the French word coller, “to glue”.) This is sometimes combined with more traditional techniques such as drawing and painting. Collage was first used for serious artistic purpose by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in 1912. If the work moves substantially into the third dimension it is more common to talk of “assemblage” or “construction”.

II

Visual Characteristics of Collage

There are a number of reasons why the technique has been so significant over the past hundred years. It can provide areas of pure flat colour as in the pasted papers that Henri Matisse worked on at the end of his life. Here the process of cutting became a kind of drawing. Other artists have been drawn to the variety of textures and colours the process makes possible. Jean Dubuffet employed sand, tar, and butterfly wings. The Italian artist Alberto Burri collaged material such as wood, sacking, and burnt plastic. The surfaces of some paintings by Jasper Johns, the design of which are derived from some simple given image such as a target or a flag, are enriched by newspaper collage soaked in semi-transparent encaustic pigment.

III

Collage as Representation

Collage also provides the artist with a means of making direct reference to the artefacts of modern urban life and popular commercial culture. Before World War I the Parisian Cubists Picasso, Braque, and Juan Gris incorporated cuttings from newspapers, bottle labels, and fragments of wallpaper in their pictures. This aspect of collage was important for the work of Pop artists of the 1950s and 1960s such as Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi. A kind of collage in reverse has been practised by Mimmo Rotella with his layers of superimposed torn posters creating random juxtapositions of contemporary politics and popular culture. Using natural materials to suggest the landscape has been less common but examples include the late work of the Kurt Schwitters, whose Merz pictures had formerly been constructed from urban detritus, made while he was living in Ambleside in the English Lake District. Because objects and pictures evoke memories, collage can also fulfil a nostalgic function as in the box constructions of Joseph Cornell.

IV

Collage and Language

Collage can also be a device for linking the verbal to the visual. Picasso’s Bottle of Suze (1912, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St Louis) contains numerous references in the press texts that form part of the composition to war in the Balkans and related political demonstrations, and this has been thought by some historians to represent a political commentary. The Italian Futurist Carlo Carrà promoted mechanization and militarism through collaged words in his Interventionist Manifesto (1914, Guggenheim Collection, Venice). This coincided with bold experiments in typography in the poetry of Futurism’s leading figure the poet Filippo Marinetti. In the book collages of John Latham—such as Burial of Count Orgaz (1958, Tate Collection, London)—in the words of art critic Lawrence Alloway, “non-verbal art appears out of the wreckage of the printed word”.