Research: History of Collage

I obviously know what a collage is; I have made them at various times throughout my life. However, as I was pasting a collage together today and thinking about the blog posts I needed to make tonight, it occurred to me that I do not know that much about the history of collage. If I am going to spend the rest of the academic year making collages, I feel that I should be well informed about the medium. I did some research, and my findings are below.

Definition: A collage is a work of formal art, primarily in the visual arts, made from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole. The term is derived from the French word "coller" meaning glue. The term was coined by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso when collage became a distinctive part of modern art.

History: Collage techniques have been used since the invention of paper in China, around 200 BC. It became more widespread in the 10th century when Japanese calligraphers used glued paper when writing their poems. Collage appeared in medieval Europe in the 13th century to ornament religious icons and images with gold leaf and gemstones. In the 19th century, collage began to be used among hobbyists for such objects as photo albums.

Regardless of the early appearance of collage techniques, some argue that collage in its proper sense did not arrive on the scene until the early 1900s, when it appeared in conjunction with early modernism. In several art texts, it is stated that collage was first used as an artist's technique in the early 20th ccentury.

Collage in the modernist sense began with painters Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso. It has been extensively used by surrealist artists, and evolved into other forms such as wood collage, canvas collage, photomontage, decoupage, and most recently, digital collage.

Early Examples:

Kurt Schwitters, Das Undbild, 1919

Hannah Hoch, Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through the last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany, 1919

The history of collage is very interesting and extensive. To learn more, read here.