A Collage is, by definition, a work of visual arts made from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole. While the concept dates back to the very invention of paper in China around 200 BC, and 10th century Japanese calligraphers were applying glued text on their poems, the collage as we understand it made its appearance in the early 20th century.

The papier-collé technique (from the french "glued paper") was developed by cubist artists such as Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, and its goal was to bring concrete references to reality onto the painting. Newspaper clippings, letters or fabric were included by cubists because of their very actuality: they linked the work of art to what was current.

It is the Surrealist movement which develops, from the cubist
papier-collé, the approach to collage that we are more familiar with: one with a new spirit, born from photographies and illustration. The Surrealist poet Louis Aragon claims that the paternity of the collage which takes distance from the cubist technique "...in spite of the attempts of some dadaists, it should be attributed to Max Ernst". Ernst discovered, in 1919 and next to Paul Klee, the metaphysical canvases of De Chirico and the dadaist publications. From that moment he experimented with old prints from adventure or romantic novels and illustrations from technical treatises and advertising catalogs, which he cut and pasted along with pieces of paper, seeking to express irrational associations and diluting the boundaries of the author/spectator dichotomy.

The contemporary collage preserves the sense given to it by Max Ernst. Its source materials are made by authors different from the collage artist, and the bits and pieces carry their own recognizable functional significance. What the artist does is bringing this significants together in a new way, provoked by the collision of the parts.

In a world where photography and image-editing software have renewed collage's actuality, let's look at the work of artists that represent the source of a new way of approaching artistic creation, a way that was once called "the art form of the 20th century".


~nea-kameni



~chadwhite



*lowclouds



*jellyfishenroyale



*alienari



~cutesypukesy



~b-polar



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