Braque bought oak wallpaper; Picasso glued chair caning next
Collage, from French coller, builds a new whole from pasted fragments—paper on paper, or assemblage in three dimensions. Japan’s tenth-century poem papers and Mary Delany’s flower “Mosaicks” came first; Cubism after 1912 made gluing a modernist shock.
Magazine scraps, ribbons, paint, handmade papers, photos, and found bits stuck to canvas or board define the everyday technique. Papier collé named by Braque and Picasso early in the twentieth century marked collage as modern art. Japanese calligraphers of the tenth century already glued text papers for waka anthologies preserved at Nishi Hongan-ji. Gothic gold leaf and gems adorned sacred images; Delany, starting at seventy-two, made 985 botanical collages. Nineteenth-century albums and books by Hans Christian Andersen and Carl Spitzweg used related methods; Victorian photocollage of the early 1860s staged aristocratic group portraits even if museums later filed them as hobby craft.
Tate and Guggenheim glossaries still date artists’ collage to the twentieth century and modernism. Cubist papier collé broke still life into unrelated snippets. Guggenheim notes Braque first cut simulated oak-grain wallpaper onto charcoal drawings; Picasso followed, pasting oilcloth chair-caning onto Still Life with Chair Caning in 1912. Surrealists such as Joseph Cornell chased dream scenes instead of Cubist tabletops; cubomania cubes and Mariën’s etrécissements randomized cuts. Ellsworth Kelly’s 1951 Study for “Cité,” made in Paris under Arp and Cage’s chance lessons, cut brushstrokes into twenty squares.
Pop’s November 1962 New Realist Exhibition at Sidney Janis mixed Wesselmann, Dine, Lichtenstein, Warhol, and European nouveaux réalistes after a Paris precursor. Wesselmann showed Still life #17 and #22 with reservations. Canvas collage—gluing pre-painted patches—marked John Walker’s late-1970s canvases and earlier work by Conrad Marca-Relli and Jane Frank. Whether one starts the clock in Heian Japan or Cubist Paris, the durable idea is collision: pasted matter arguing with the painted surface until the picture stops pretending to be a single seamless window.
Source: Collage
