From Blouin Art Info, http://www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/840686/from-cut-and-paste-to-action-montage-100-years-of-collage
From Cut and Paste to Action Montage: 100 Years of Collage History
A century ago Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, occupied with the development of Cubism, hit upon a technique of humble origins but resounding consequences. Once let loose, collage was so perfectly adaptable to other ways of thinking about art that it has been reworked and repurposed nearly every decade since. What is at the heart of this affinity for the medium in the modern age? To be sure, collage’s felicitous juxtapositions and rude incongruities are in step with the rise of mass culture and its relentless competition for our attention. On a darker note, maybe this method of creation that uniquely depends on a destructive act — wrenching and cutting bits of content out of context — was just what was needed to represent the turbulent 20th century. And the recasting of the romantic artist as scavenger and recycler seems apt in our post-heroic era. Whatever its root, the attraction continues. Contemporary collage has taken over l’Espace de l’Art Concret, in Mouans-Sartoux, France, through November 4, and has been the focus of a range of recent gallery shows, a few of which are cited in this short history of the innovators who used the technique to construct a whole new art.
Cutting and pasting, of course, predates Cubism. But it was the Parisian Cubists who first imported it from the realm of handicraft into the fine arts. (The technique’s name derives from the French papier collé, or “glued paper.”) No one is sure exactly who made the first snip. A case has been made for Picasso’s integration of a piece of oilcloth printed with a cane pattern in Still Life with Chair Caning; others argue for Braque’s use of wood-grain wallpaper in Fruit Dish with Glass. Both works are from 1912. Despite the long-recognized importance of this period to the development not only of collage but also of modernism, fine examples can still be had.
A leading Dadaist, tone poem composer, sometime typographer, and restless innovator, Schwitters introduced the use of collage as a snapshot of the everyday. He integrated scraps of cardboard, bits of text, and ticket stubs found in the street, their juxtapositions emblematic of life’s chance encounters. Newsprint was not an illusionary stand-in for a newspaper in a composed still life, but a piece of the quotidian right there on the picture plane. He liberated the letters merz from an ad for Kommerzund Privatbank and pasted the nonsense syllable on an early work, then went on to apply the term to hundreds of collages, paintings, and even an ever-changing environment of found objects bound together with plaster.
Though too often under-represented in its history, women were central to Constructivism in Russia. Stepanova created fabrics and clothes for the proletariat and designed some of the period’s most arresting graphics for posters and publications, working alongside her husband, Alexander Rodchenko. Collage played a key role in the development of the movement’s style, allowing for a mix of clean typography, active figures and engaging faces cut from photos, and thrusting geometric forms emblematic of the relentless march of Communism. Even in non-propaganda work, Stepanova’s shrewd ability to evoke motion on a static page shines.
“Höch’s work anticipates the feminist observation that the personal is political,” observes Jane Kallir, codirector of New York’s Galerie St. Etienne, which specializes in the art of Weimar Germany. As the most prominent woman in the male-dominated Dada circle, Höch had plenty of reason to take up the cause of women’s rights, but her art was never didactic. As Kallir notes, Höch was able to bring a subjectivity to even overt political topics that grounded her art without dulling its bite. And she embraced a wide range of aesthetics, deploying absurdist social parodies, nearly abstract graphic experiments, and Surrealist dreamscapes with equal aplomb.
Rauschenberg’s best-known work, from the “Combines” he introduced in the mid 1950s to the later screen- prints made of layered imagery lifted from mass media, derives directly from early experiments with collage proper. Works made in 1952 and 1953 already reveal him to be expert at editing visuals from the world around him. These spare pieces often join just a couple of pictures taken from old books with odd pieces of cloth. The addition of an occasional brushstroke of paint — and in one case feathers — now seems to foreshadow the “Combines.” The iconography steers clear of the overtly surreal, but hints at an intensely personal symbolism reminiscent of that of Joseph Cornell.
Putting to use her keen eye for graphic design, Herder built collages whose evocations of architectural facades and stage sets veer into the realm of abstraction. They are striking for her ability to treat monumental subjects at an intimate size as well as to infuse formalism with a sense of play. Where many collagists rely on figurative imagery to engage viewers, Herder’s work delights the eye with mere juxtapositions of shapes and variations of color. Herder honed her compositional skills working as a commercial artist, and although she never took to Pop, her studio was a meeting place for Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, and others who would take up techniques from both collage and commercial art.
Romare Bearden
Check out this NPR story covering the work of Bearden: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1428038
Bearden fused photographs, magazine clippings, paintings and old fabric to create collages that document life in the South during the mid-twentieth century. Much of the imagery in his work explores familial relationships, place and dislocation.
Wangechi Mutu
Mutu was born in Nairobi, Kenya, and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She is best known for her large-scale collages depicting female figures in lush, otherworldly landscapes. Her work explores issues of gender, race, war, globalization, colonialism and the eroticization of the black female body. She creates mysterious cyborgian figures pieced together with human, animal, machine and monster parts. She often combines found materials and magazine cutouts with sculpture and painted imagery, sampling from sources as diverse as African traditions, international politics, the fashion industry and science fiction.
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