Collage

A collage (From the French: coller, to glue) is a work of formal art, primarily in the visual arts, made from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole. more...

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Use of this technique made its dramatic appearance among oil paintings in the early 20th century as an art form of groundbreaking novelty.

An artistic collage work may include newspaper clippings, ribbons, bits of colored or hand-made papers, portions of other artwork, photographs, and such, glued to a piece of paper or canvas.

Techniques of collage were first used at the time of the invention of paper in China around 200 BC. The use of collage, however, remained very limited until the 10th century in Japan, when calligraphers began to apply glued paper, using texts on surfaces, when writing their poems.

The technique of collage appeared in medieval Europe during the 13th century. Gold leaf panels started to be applied in Gothic cathedrals around the 15th and 16th centuries. Gemstones and other precious metals were applied to religious images, icons, and also, to coats of arms.

In the 19th century, collage methods also were used among hobbyists for memorabilia (i.e. applied to photo albums) and books (i.e. Hans Christian Andersen, Carl Spitzweg).

The term collage derives from the French "coller" meaning "glue". This term was coined by both Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso in the beginning of the 20th century when collage became a distinctive part of modern art.

Collage and modernism

Despite the pre-twentieth-century use of collage-like application techniques, authorities on art history generally do not consider collage, properly speaking, to have emerged until after 1900, in conjunction with the early stages of modernism. For example, the Tate Gallery's online art glossary states flatly that collage "was first used as an artists' technique in the twentieth century." . Additionally, the Guggenheim Museum's online art glossary plainly states that Braque and Picasso invented collage — which would obviously imply that any earlier artworks which might technically have anticipated collage were nevertheless not collage. Collage, according to these sources, is an artistic concept associated with the beginnings of modernism and entails much more than the idea of gluing something onto something else. The glued-on patches which Braque and Picasso added to their canvases "collided with the surface plane of the painting." This was part of a methodical reexamination of the relation between painting and sculpture, and these new works "gave each medium some of the characteristics of the other," according to the Guggenheim essay. Furthermore, these chopped-up bits of newspaper introduced fragments of externally referenced meaning into the collision: "References to current events, such as the war in the Balkans, and to popular culture enriched the content of their art." This juxtaposition of signifiers, "at once serious and tongue-in-cheek," was fundamental to the inspiration behind collage: "Emphasizing concept and process over end product, collage has brought the incongruous into meaningful congress with the ordinary." Arguably, any work of art which involves the application (with glue or by any other means) of things to a surface, but which lacks this purposeful incongruity, this quality of fragmented signifiers colliding, is not truly collage in any important sense.

Read more at Wikipedia.org