The History of Collage

September 1912. Pablo Picasso has just returned to Paris after an intensive working period with Georges Braque in Sorgues. The exchanges between the two artists in this period were later to be described by Braque as ones that ‘nobody but us would ever be able to understand.’ Braque wanders past an Avignon wallpaper store, and spots some wood-grain wallpaper. He immediately goes in to buy it. Back in the studio, he starts pasting rectangular patches onto the surfaces of several large charcoal drawings. The drawings and the paper intersect and interact in a way that will bring a totally new direction to the art of both Braque and Picasso. The tension of the combined tactility and visuality creates a rupture, a jolt. “After having made the first papier collé, I felt a great shock, and it was an even greater shock for Picasso when I showed it to him,” recalls Braque later.

Back in Paris, after having seen Braque’s papier collé (from the French word coller, meaning “to glue”), Picasso immediately embarked on a phase of collage – he created nearly a hundred papiers collés in short succession. In one of Picasso’s earliest collage works, Guitar and Sheet Music, he pasted and layered paper, creating shading and structure. The early collages are also filled with fragments from popular songs, fake wood-grain paper, and snippets of bodies, faces, instruments and other objects. Picasso was in the process of studying and dissecting objects like a surgeon dissecting a corpse.

It didn’t take long before other artists in Paris caught on to this new exciting development that Braque and Picasso were immersed in. The Spanish artist Juan Gris, a deeply committed two-dimensional artist, used collage to continue to develop his two-dimensional art. His papiers collés have been described as some of the most pictorially complex of his time. Futurist artists quickly took over the collage style as well. In the art of Boccioni, it became a method of enriching the surface, while Carrà included ready-made elements in his ‘free word’ pictures. Then there was Balla, who used collage to craft visually mobile versions of three-dimensional constructions.

https://magazine.artland.com/the-history-of-collage-art/