Within this essay I will explore and discuss the history of collage and how it is an art form that visually communicates with its viewers. I will also be pointing out the important moments in this part of history and its practitioners. I will also be referencing a named contemporary illustrator. I then will share my thoughts on the current visual communication possibilities, by discussing how the art of collage has impacted the art industry today.
Collage gets its name from the French word for glue and describes a broad range of art-making techniques that rely on re-appropriating previously created images and found materials into new radical compositions. The origin of collage is attributed to both Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso. Each artist made use of the method at the turn of the 20th century, that is when collage truly emerged as a medium within it’s own right. To describe the works composed from random pasted pieces of colored paper, newsprint, and fabric, considered at the time to be a bold intermix use of rescourses. Little did anyone know, Picasso and Braque efforts changed modern art in quite a way. Their main objective was to reject the traditional ways of showing the three dimensional nature of an object, but instead to show the true reality of it- not just the appearance of it. Whereas the artists much earlier Cubist phase which is known as “Analytic Cubism,” was comprised of paintings that disjointed the world into a series of simplistic lines and curves. The later period of “Synthetic Cubism” included combining fragments of various materials to create a new piece as a whole. In Picasso’s piece ‘Still Life With Chair Caning'(1912), possibly the most famous piece of this period. The artist playfully renders a tabletop still life by adding everyday elements like newspaper and rope, as well as a trompe-l’oeil piece of oilcloth printed with a chair-caning pattern along with other materials. I think it is brilliant how Picasso has taken something so ordinary and incorporated it to make a piece of art. So, from what I have gathered, this was the start of collage and it’s visual communication possibilities. Which made us question what art really is and the methods of it. Influenced by the Cubist experiments, many artists started using collaging as a visual tool to analyse society in depth. it was a method to break the norms. The art critic Clement Greenberg wrote in a 1959 essay, “Collage was a major turning point in the evolution of Cubism, and therefore a major turning point in the whole evolution of modernist art in this century.” For the Cubists, collage became a central part of their campaign to explore painting’s illusion of three dimensionality whilst frankly acknowledging the true flatness of the canvas, a break from hundreds of years of Western painting tradition. So, if Cubists used the methods of collaging as a platform to expand art, the group Dada used collage as anti-art. Artists involved with Dada—particularly the movement’s Berlin branch—began using collage techniques within their work. Hannah Hoch, Richard Huelsenbeck, John Heartfield, and others pioneered the technique of photomontage, using pre-existing photographs, which were often drawn from mass-media sources. They created composed images that bluntly critiqued the German society and culture in the aftermath of World War 1. Drawing on the foundations of Dada, neo-avant-garde artists of the 1950s such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns created pieces that brought collage techniques into three dimensions. Which meant laying down the groundwork for much contemporary sculpture, as well as works on paper that incorporated found resources drawn from the mass media and everyday life and the social issues. Likewise, the incorporation of materials and images culled from mass culture and consumer goods was a signature of Pop art, exemplified by collage-based works like British artist Richard Hamilton’s ‘Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?’ (1956), which ironically parodied the lifestyles peddled in advertising through the direct inclusion of its imagery. Like many other artists of the era, Hamilton incorporated images from commercial media and advertising into his work, disrupting long-held conventions about the subjects and materials allowed in serious art. In the United States, Robert Rauschenberg’s “combine” paintings blurred the lines between mediums, with material (including, most famously, a stuffed bald eagle) jumping off the canvas in his pieces. The Dadaists used collage effectively to express their views of society by gluing together unwanted everyday items and incorporate them into clever pieces of art work. To the Dadaists, collaging was a tool of political protest. Using a set of composed imagery as a visual message in such a way is very intelligent. Not only are we forced to figure out the meaning behind such pieces, we were forced to look into the reality of the social issues that we were faced with. Using typographing with the images too was also strategic decision. Along with Dada, surrealists used the method of collage to express their ideas/ wish to create a new world as a response to World War 1. Surrealists also used collage as a visual communicator. Surrealists preferred to ignore rationalism and instead to the sub conscious. Collage was one of the methods they used to create artwork that came with originality with a completely raw feeling. Max Ernst is said to have ‘invented the surrealist collage’ (TATE, GLossary of Art Terms Collage). Ernst used many images from advertising, information books and catalogues to create visual new worlds, his aim was to unsettle and daze so it’ll liberate the viewer’s sub conscious. Though informally related to the Dada and Surrealist movements, the highly known American artist Man Ray contributed impressively to avant-garde, fashion and portrait photography, in particular with his solarised and isomorphic portraits of Lee Miller. Ray’s photomontages play with femininity and form, as in his multiple exposures of Alice Prin, better known as Kiki de Montparnasse, and Dora Maar. Between 1916 and 1917, photographer Man Ray created a series of collages he called “Revolving Doors.” Ray included the series in his third solo exhibition at the Daniel Gallery in New York, in 1919. The vibrant collages, that had geometric shapes which were combined to create machine-like forms. They were framed and installed on a rotating pole that the viewer could spin. The original collages were destroyed, but Ray later reproduced them in this series of stencil prints, published by Editions Surrealists in Paris. The Revolving Doors: “The concern of a period of time often leads to the disappearance of material space. That is what the images in two dimensions shown here tend to prove; by a mutual action, they give birth to a series of events escaping from the control of all diversion.”
Two pieces from ‘The Revolving Doors’
As I bring this essay to a finish, I have concluded that the methods of collaging today is an accepted and a very muched appreciated art form. Although, some sceptics in the past considered collage a “lesser” form of art than painting and sculpture, its role as a tool of the avant garde in the 20th century is pretty much impossible to ignore. Collage allows the artist the freedom to approach the medium in whatever manner they seem fit and does not restrict them to any format or material. This medium is considered as a direct form of communication for an artist. That is, it allows one to work with whatever materials that tickles their fancy. Collage is different from other art forms because it does not mean that you can only stick to a particular style. Style is often dictated by materials and because the materials are never the same for any two persons, the style of collage is always vast in variables. The inventiveness and creativity used in a collage usually do not result from experience but from a willingness to experiment with the basic procedure.