A century ago Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, occupied with the development of Cubism, hit upon a technique of humble origins but resounding consequences. Once let loose, collage was so perfectly adaptable to other ways of thinking about art that it has been reworked and repurposed nearly every decade since. What is at the heart of this affinity for the medium in the modern age? To be sure, collage’s felicitous juxtapositions and rude incongruities are in step with the rise of mass culture and its relentless competition for our attention. On a darker note, maybe this method of creation that uniquely depends on a destructive act — wrenching and cutting bits of content out of context — was just what was needed to represent the turbulent 20th century. And the recasting of the romantic artist as scavenger and recycler seems apt in our post-heroic era. Whatever its root, the attraction continues. Contemporary collage has taken over l’Espace de l’Art Concret, in Mouans-Sartoux, France, through November 4, and has been the focus of a range of recent gallery shows, a few of which are cited in this short history of the innovators who used the technique to construct a whole new art.
Georges Braque
Cutting and pasting, of course, predates Cubism. But it was the Parisian Cubists who first imported it from the realm of handicraft into the fine arts. (The technique’s name derives from the French papier collé, or “glued paper.”) No one is sure exactly who made the first snip. A case has been made for Picasso’s integration of a piece of oilcloth printed with a cane pattern in Still Life with Chair Caning; others argue for Braque’s use of wood-grain wallpaper in Fruit Dish with Glass. Both works are from 1912. Despite the long-recognized importance of this period to the development not only of collage but also of modernism, fine examples can still be had.
Kurt Schwitters
A leading Dadaist, tone poem composer, sometime typographer, and restless innovator, Schwitters introduced the use of collage as a snapshot of the everyday. He integrated scraps of cardboard, bits of text, and ticket stubs found in the street, their juxtapositions emblematic of life’s chance encounters. Newsprint was not an illusionary stand-in for a newspaper in a composed still life, but a piece of the quotidian right there on the picture plane. He liberated the letters merz from an ad for Kommerzund Privatbank and pasted the nonsense syllable on an early work, then went on to apply the term to hundreds of collages, paintings, and even an ever-changing environment of found objects bound together with plaster.
Varvara Stepanova
Though too often under-represented in its history, women were central to Constructivism in Russia. Stepanova created fabrics and clothes for the proletariat and designed some of the period’s most arresting graphics for posters and publications, working alongside her husband, Alexander Rodchenko. Collage played a key role in the development of the movement’s style, allowing for a mix of clean typography, active figures and engaging faces cut from photos, and thrusting geometric forms emblematic of the relentless march of Communism. Even in non-propaganda work, Stepanova’s shrewd ability to evoke motion on a static page shines.
Hannah Hoch
“Höch’s work anticipates the feminist observation that the personal is political,” observes Jane Kallir, codirector of New York’s Galerie St. Etienne, which specializes in the art of Weimar Germany. As the most prominent woman in the male-dominated Dada circle, Höch had plenty of reason to take up the cause of women’s rights, but her art was never didactic. As Kallir notes, Höch was able to bring a subjectivity to even overt political topics that grounded her art without dulling its bite. And she embraced a wide range of aesthetics, deploying absurdist social parodies, nearly abstract graphic experiments, and Surrealist dreamscapes with equal aplomb.
John Heartfield
As with collage itself, the question of exactly who invented the offshoot technique of photomontage is still debated. Heartfield often gets credit, and in any case he was an undisputed master, able to join pieces from various photos into balanced compositions perfectly calibrated to skewer the powers that be. Regularly arrested by Weimar authorities and, like Schwitters, forced to flee his native Germany following the Nazis’ rise to power, Heartfield was a devoted Communist, yet he steered clear of the Constructivists’ earnest celebration of the working class. While his art addresses social inequity, it also drips with acid humor.
Robert Rauschenberg
Rauschenberg’s best-known work, from the “Combines” he introduced in the mid 1950s to the later screen- prints made of layered imagery lifted from mass media, derives directly from early experiments with collage proper. Works made in 1952 and 1953 already reveal him to be expert at editing visuals from the world around him. These spare pieces often join just a couple of pictures taken from old books with odd pieces of cloth. The addition of an occasional brushstroke of paint — and in one case feathers — now seems to foreshadow the “Combines.” The iconography steers clear of the overtly surreal, but hints at an intensely personal symbolism reminiscent of that of Joseph Cornell.
Addie Herder
Putting to use her keen eye for graphic design, Herder built collages whose evocations of architectural facades and stage sets veer into the realm of abstraction. They are striking for her ability to treat monumental subjects at an intimate size as well as to infuse formalism with a sense of play. Where many collagists rely on figurative imagery to engage viewers, Herder’s work delights the eye with mere juxtapositions of shapes and variations of color. Herder honed her compositional skills working as a commercial artist, and although she never took to Pop, her studio was a meeting place for Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, and others who would take up techniques from both collage and commercial art.
Martha Rosler
The Pop art movement famously came into being with a collage: Richard Hamilton’s Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?, 1956, depicting a chockablock living room that mocks the media’s selling of the good life. A decade later, in a sort of hybrid of Hamilton and Heartfield, Rosler began an angry and witty series critiquing both the Vietnam War and the way civilians consumed easy doses of conflict in the newspaper alongside furniture advertisements. The photomontages in her “House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home” series place soldiers and casualties of war front and center in elegant interiors.
Betye Saar
At the heart of Saar’s practice is collage’s intrinsic potential to reanimate history. The artist has for decades scoured flea markets for remnants linked to the fractured story of African-Americans, which she then gives a new life. Mamie dolls are recast as heroines in works of assemblage — the three-dimensional sibling of collage, of which Saar is also a master — while collages create new context for book jackets worn down by readers’ hands, illustrations of slave ships excised from history primers, and anonymous portraits rescued from family albums. Manifestly narrative, these artworks fuse the individual and the archetypal in the manner of literature.
Arturo Herrera
If fragmentation and augmentation are collage’s twin operating principles, Herrera clearly favors the former. While he was known early on for taking cartoons as his starting point, one always sensed he felt a purely formal attraction to the curve of a line. If the source material then seemed beside the point, it is now largely invisible. As he has become more indiscriminate, cutting bits of imagery from all manner of media, including his own paintings, his knife work has become more severe, often producing little more than a jagged patch of red or blue. Yet when seen assembled in a mural-size abstract composition, these bits become a riot of color and more than the sum of its parts.
Wangechi Mutu
A Machine for Luddites, 1983, shown in “Intimate Scale: The Art of Addie Herder,” at Pavel Zoubok, New York, 2012. Augmentation is central to Mutu’s method, which typically integrates elements from fashion magazines, pornography, and documentary photography with ethereal watercolors. The results are surreal, hybridized female figures that are beautiful and monstrous, delicate and fierce, vulnerable and assertive. While the artist has said her aesthetic developed in response to her early encounters with sexism and oppression in her native Kenya, these figures embody a universal experience. Through augmentation, Mutu makes visible the transcendent processes by which the individual builds up her identities, lays on her defenses, and ultimately constructs her self.
Ryan McNamara
Donning the mantle of Allan Kaprow, who called his famous Happenings “action collages,” Ryan McNamara creates unscripted performances, often enlisting the help of whomever may be around. For his recent show at Elizabeth Dee, the young artist turned Kaprow’s coinage on its head, inviting gallery visitors during the first weeks to enact various situations, then in the final weeks displaying props collaged with photos from the actions. Silhouetted figures in garish colors prance and jump on a desk, a lamp, a sheet of wood paneling. Although collage is not central to McNamara’s identity as an artist, the spirited works show that after 100 years the technique provides artists with fresh inspiration.
Share This Story
This article was published in the October 2012 issue of Art+Auction.
To see images from select artists, click on the slideshow.