Collage Art
History of Collages in Fine Arts Like Painting, From Cubism & Dada Movements: Influence on Assemblage.
Irish Visual Arts

Fruit Dish and Glass (1913)
by Georges Braque, who with
Picasso invented collage and
papier colle.

Collage Art

In visual art, the word 'collage' describes a composition made up of a variety of assorted materials - typically, printed matter like newspaper clippings, photographs, pieces of graphic or digital art, oddments of textile or fabric, and perhaps solid objects - all glued to a sheet of paper or board or canvas. Collage is associated with Henri Matisse who used cut paper shapes painted in gouache, but above all with the Cubism and Dada movements, as well as modern practitioners of assemblage art.

Collage in Cubism

Early twentieth century exponents of fine art collage were the two Cubist painters Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. According to Picasso, a head simply consisted of two eyes, a nose, and a mouth, which can be laid out in any way the artist desired. Cubist representations duly became more and more fragmented and their figures increasingly abstract.

Merzbild 5B, Picture-Red-Heart
Church (1919) by German
artist Kurt Schwitters, one of
his famous Merzbilder works.

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To offset this unreality, Cubists started to include words, then "real" elements, like newspaper cuttings, tickets, scraps of wallpaper and lebels to represent themselves. Another method used was 'papier collé', or stuck paper, which Braque used in his collage Fruit Dish and Glass (1913). These forms of Cubist collage, developed into three dimensional compositions. In this way, Cubism was the beginning of most abstract art, including Constructivism and Neo-Plasticism.

Collage in Dada Art

The Dada movement started in Zurich, Switzerland, during World War I, as an artistic revolt against the conventional values which had caused such horror. After the war, Dada developed into Surrealism in Paris and Cologne. Collage was a particular technique of this anti-art movement. The small "Merzbilder" collages of the German Dada artist Kurt Schwitters were meticulously constructed from street rubbish, to reflect a world gone mad. Max Ernst another German Dada and Surrealist artist also produced a number of collaged images, and incorporated frottage (rubbed patterns) in his fantasy art. Wolf Vostell invented decollages, that is the opposite of constructed collages using fragments of posters and other 'found' materials. Other famous artists who utilized collage included Arp, Marcel Duchamp, and Picabia.

The Entire City (1934) by Max Ernst,
the German Surrealist artist who
created a series of cityscapes,
using mixed-media techniques
of collage and frottage.

Modern Fine At Collage (Mixed-Media)

Since then, collage has been used by many other artists: like the Dutch abstract painter Piet Mondrian, the UK artist John Walker and the American Jane Frank (known for their canvas collages) have resorted to collage in their works. Lee Krasner, the wife of Jackson Pollock the inventor of "action painting", also created collages assembled from pieces of her own discarded paintings. However, during the late twentieth century, the concept of collage broadened and spread far beyond the visual arts to include musical and architectural arrangements as well as photographic collage (photomontage), assemblage and crafts like decoupage. Furthermore, the widespread use of the modern art term "mixed media" has effectively superceded the word "collage" in fine art, as it includes the glued assembly of objects on a canvas.

• For more information about contemporary art-forms, see: Irish Art Guide.

• How to Update This Mini Review of Collage Art.