Collage

See also: Collage (album)

A collage composed of magazine articles and pictures

Collage (From the French: coller, to stick) is regarded as a work of visual arts made from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole. 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 solid support or canvas. An innovative collage technique that eliminates liquid adhesives from the collage assembly process was developed by Jonathan Talbot, who creates multi-dimensional collage-constructions.

Origins of the technique

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 "colle" 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 in painting

Compotier avec fruits, violon et verre by Pablo Picasso (1912)

Cubist painter, Pablo Picasso, was the first to use the collage technique for oil paintings. In 1912 for his Still Life with Chair Caning (Nature-morte à la chaise cannée), he pasted a patch of oilcloth with a chair-cane design onto the canvas of the piece.

Surrealist artists have made extensive use of collage. Cubomania is a collage made by cutting an image into squares which are then reassembled automatically or at random. Inimage is a name given by René Passerson to what is usually considered a style of surrealist collage (though it perhaps qualifies instead as a decollage) in which parts are cut away from an existing image to reveal another image.

Collages produced using a similar, or perhaps identical, method are called etrécissements by Richard Genovese from a method first explored by Marcel Mariën. Genovese also introduced excavation collage (that includes elements of decollage) which is the layering of printed images, loosely affixed at the corners and then tearing away bits of the upper layer to reveal images from underneath, thereby introducing a new collage of images. Penelope Rosemont invented some methods of surrealist collage, the prehensilhouette and the landscapade.

Collage was often called the art form of the twentieth century, but this was never fully realized.

Surrealist games such as parallel collage use collective techniques of collage making.

Another technique is that of canvas collage, which is the application, typically with glue, of separately painted canvas patches to the surface of a painting's main canvas. Well known for use of this technique is British artist John Walker in his paintings of the late 1970s, but canvas collage was already an integral part of the mixed media works of American artist Jane Frank by the early 1960s. The intensely self-critical Lee Krasner also frequently destroyed her own paintings by cutting them into pieces, only to create new works of art by reassembling the pieces into collages.

Collage in architecture

Though Le Corbusier and others used techniques that are akin to collage, collage as a theoretical concept only became widely discussed after the publication of Collage City by Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter in 1978. The authors were, however, not championing collage in the pictorial sense, much less seeking the types of disruptions of meaning that occur with collage. Instead they were looking to challenge the uniformity of Modernism and saw collage with its non-linear notion of history as a means to reinvigorate design practice. Not only does historical urban fabric have its place, but in studying it, designers were, so it was hoped, able to get a sense of how better to operate. Rowe was a member of the so-called Texas Rangers, a group of architects who taught at the University of Texas for a while. Another member of that group was Bernhard Hoesli, a Swiss architect who went on to become an important educator at the ETH-Zurirch. Whereas for Rowe, collage was more a metaphor than an actual practice, Hoesli actively made collages as part of his design process. He was close to Robert Slutzky, a New York based artist, and frequently introduced the question of collage and disruption in his studio work.

Collage with wood

File:Jane Frank Plum Pt thumb.jpg

What may be called wood collage is the dominant feature in this 1964 mixed media painting by Jane Frank (1918-1986)

Wood collages are a relative novelty in the world of collages. It was during a fifteen-year period of intense experimentation beginning in the mid 1940s that Louise Nevelson evolved her sculptural wood collages, assembled from found scraps, including parts of furniture, pieces of wooden crates or barrels, and architectural remnants like stair railings or moldings. Generally rectangular, very large, and painted black, they resemble gigantic paintings. Concerning Nevelson's Sky Cathedral (1958), the Museum of Modern Art catalogue states, "As a rectangular plane to be viewed from the front, Sky Cathedral has the pictorial quality of a painting..." Yet such pieces also present themselves as massive walls or monoliths, which can sometimes be viewed from either side, or even looked through.

Much wood collage art is considerably smaller in scale, framed and hung as a painting would be. It usually features pieces of wood, wood shavings, and scraps, assembled on an empty canvas (if there is painting involved), or on a wooden board. Such framed, picture-like, wood-relief collages offer the artist an opportunity to explore the qualities of depth, natural color, and textural variety inherent in the material, while drawing on and taking advantage of the language, conventions, and historical resonances that arise from the tradition of creating pictures to hang on walls. The technique of wood collage is also sometimes combined with painting and other media in a single work of art.

Frequently, what is called "wood collage art" uses only natural wood - such as driftwood, or parts of found and unaltered logs, branches, sticks, or bark. This raises the question of whether such artwork is collage (in the original sense) at all. This is because the early, paper collages were always constructed from synthetic bits of text or pictures - things made by people and originally, symbolic in some cultural context. The collage brings these still-recognizable "signifiers" (or fragments of signifiers) together, in a kind of semiotic collision. A truncated wooden chair or staircase newel used in a Nevelson work can also be considered a potential element of collage in the same sense: it had some original, culturally determined context. Unaltered, natural wood, such as one might find on a forest floor, arguably has no such context. (Driftwood is of course sometimes ambiguous: while a piece of driftwood may once have been a piece of worked wood - for example, part of a ship - it may be so weathered by salt and sea that its past functional identity is nearly or completely obscured.)

Collage in music

Main articles: Musical montage and Sound collage

The concept of collage has crossed the boundaries of visual arts. In music, with the advances on recording technology, avant-garde artists started experimenting with cutting and pasting since the middle of the twentieth century. George Martin created collages of recordings while producing the records of The Beatles. By the 1990s and 2000s it became apparent that "musical collages" had become the norm for popular music, especially on rap, hip hop (rap-pop), and electronic music.

Digital collage

Digital collage is the technique of using computer tools in collage creation to encourage chance associations of disparate visual elements and the subsequent transformation of the visual results through the use of electronic media.

Literary collage

Collage novels are books with images selected from other publications and collaged together following a theme or narrative.

The bible of discordianism, the Principia Discordia, is described by its author as a literary collage. A collage in literary terms may also refer to a layering of ideas or images.

Decoupage

Main article: Decoupage

Decoupage is a type of collage usually defined as a craft. It is the process of placing a picture onto an object for decoration. Often decoupage causes the picture to appear to have depth and look as though it had been painted on the object.

The process is to glue (or otherwise affix) a picture to an object, then adding more copies of the picture on top, progressively cutting out more and more of the background, giving the illusion of depth in the picture. The picture is often coated with varnish or some other sealant for protection.

Photomontage

Main article: Photomontage

File:Hockney-collage-pearblossom-highway.jpg

Repetitive patterns created by the seams of individual images in David Hockney's "Pearblossom Highway" (1986) produce an internal tension within the overall composition.

Collage made from photographs, or parts of photographs, is called photomontage. Photomontage is the process (and result) of making a composite photograph by cutting and joining a number of other photographs. The composite picture was sometimes photographed so that the final image is converted back into a seamless photographic print. The same method is accomplished today using image-editing software. The technique is refered to by professionals as "compositing", and in casual internet usage it is often called "photoshopping".

Other methods for combining pictures are also called photomontage, such as Victorian "combination printing", the printing from more than one negative on a single piece of printing paper (e.g. O. G. Rejlander, 1857), front-projection and computer montage techniques. Much like a collage is composed of multiple facets, artists also combine montage techniques. Romare Berden’s (1912-1988) series of black and white "photomontage projections" is an example. His method began with compositions of paper, paint, and photographs put on boards 8 1/2x11 inches. Berden fixed the imagery with an emulsion that he then applied with handroller. Subsequently, he enlarged the collages photographically.

The 19th century tradition of physically joining multiple images into a composite and photographing the results prevailed in press photography and offset lithography until the widespread use of digital image editing. Contemporary photo editors in magazines now create "paste-ups" digitally.

Creating a photomontage has, for the most part, become easier with the advent of computer software such as Adobe Photoshop, Pixel image editor, and GIMP. These programs make the changes digitally, allowing for faster workflow and more precise results. They also mitigate mistakes by allowing the artist to "undo" errors. Yet some artists are pushing the boundaries of digital image editing to create extremely time-intensive compositions that rival the demands of the traditional arts. The current trend is to create pictures that combine painting, theatre, illustration and graphics in a seamless photographic whole.

Legal issues

When collage uses existing works, the result is what some copyright scholars call a derivative work. The collage has a copyright separate from any copyrights pertaining to the original incorporated works.

Due to redefined and reinterpreted copyright laws, and increased financial interests, some forms of collage art are significantly restricted. For example, in the area of sound collage (such as hip hop music), some court rulings effectively have eliminated the de minimis doctrine as a defense to copyright infringement, thus shifting collage practice away from non-permissive uses relying on fair use or de minimis protections, and toward licensing. Examples of musical collage art that have run afoul of modern copyright are The Grey Album and Negativland's U2.

The copyright status of visual works is less troubled, although still ambiguous. For instance, some visual collage artists have argued that the first-sale doctrine protects their work. The first-sale doctrine prevents copyright holders from controlling consumptive uses after the "first sale" of their work. The de minimis doctrine and the fair use exception also provide important defenses against claimed copyright infringement. The Second Circuit in October, 2006, held that artist Jeff Koons was not liable for copyright infringement because his incorporation of a photograph into a collage painting was fair use.

Collage artists

• Nick Bantock
• Romare Bearden
• Umberto Boccioni
• Georges Braque
• Alberto Burri
• Arthur G. Dove

• Max Ernst
• Hannah Hoch
• David Hockney
• Lee Krasner
• Kazimir Malevich
• Man Ray

• Henri Matisse
• Robert Motherwell
• Joseph Nechvatal
• Fred Otnes
• Pablo Picasso
• Francis Picabia

• Robert Rauschenberg
• Mimmo Rotella
• Kurt Schwitters
• Gino Severini
• Jonathan Talbot

See also

• Altered book
• Appropriation (art)
• Décollage
• List of pieces which use collage
• Mixed media
• Papier collé

Further reading

• Adamowicz, Elza (1998). Surrealist Collage in Text and Image: Dissecting the Exquisite Corpse. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-59204-6.

• Ruddick Bloom, Susan (2006). Digital Collage and Painting: Using Photoshop and Painter to Create Fine Art. Focal Press. ISBN 0-240-80705-7.

References

• Etrécissements by Richard Genovese
• Museum Factory -by Istvan Horkay
• History of Collage Excerpts from Nita Leland and Virginia Lee and from George F. Brommer
• West, Shearer (1996). The Bullfinch Guide to Art. UK: Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 0-8212-2137-X.
• Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter. Collage City MIT University Press, Cambridge MA, 1978.
• Mark Jarzombek, "Bernhard Hoesli Collages/Civitas," Bernhard Hoesli: Collages, exh. cat. , Christina Betanzos Pint, editor (Knoxville: University of Tennessee, September 2001), 3-11.

External links

• Exhibition of traditional and digital collage by many artists - curated by Jonathan Talbot in 2001
• The International Museum of Collage, Assemblage and Construction
• Some Assembly Required Sound Collage Radio Program
• collageart.org, "A website dedicated to the art of collage
• Franz Kafka and Marcel Proust, the 2 Albums, "recomposed photographs", in a rather surrealist spirit