Collage Drawing for Sale

Q: Who first used collage in art?

Collage's invention is credited to Cubism , an art movement created by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. They began to work in collage around 1910 and were attracted to the technique because of its unique aesthetic.

Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque are often credited with the invention of the collage technique within the visual arts. When the two artists created Cubism between 1908 and 1914, they invented a method for representing space and perspectives that allowed them to comprehend objects from different angles, thus offering a more complete vision of reality through painting and sculpture.

In 1912, they start experimenting with a brand new medium, collage. To obtain the desired composition, they used fragments of several images that they assembled to build objects. It is by following this process that they created the famous work “Nature Morte à la Chaise Cannée", one of the first collages to be recognised as an artwork. They gave up on using collage a few years later but numerous artistic movements of the 20th century went on to make use of this innovative technique. This was to the delight of the poet Charles Baudelaire, who wished to see artists transform and work with elements of “the shop of the images and signs" that made up reality.

Surrealist, Dadaist, and Futurist artists adopt this technique and start to cut and combine different elements: newsprint, cardboard (to create embossed designs), old magazines (for vintage collages), several photos and various objects were assembled to produce a single work. The use of disparate collages marked the end of the reign of noble materials and oil painting, opening the way for deconstruction and reconstruction, random and unlikely combinations.

Louis Aragon, André Breton, Jacques Prévert et Pierre-Olivier Walzer start introducing this practice in literature through the odd juxtapositions of ideas in their texts, followed by Edward Verral Lucas and George Morrow who produced the first collage book, which narrates the story of an English dandy using images from a department store. The Dadaists Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Hoch, Max Ernst, and John Heartfield were fond of the collage technique, particularly for interpreting the contemporary events.

Painters such as Paul Klee and Henri Matisse also engaged in the technique of artistic collage: Paul Klee by giving a second life and second identity to old works, and Henri Matisse by cutting painted paper which he pieced together to create stunning compositions.

By adapting collage to their own style, each artist creates uniques effects with this technique: Jean Dubuffet assembles his own paintings to draw meandering lines, Jiri Kolar fragments his collages to create geometrical optics, Bernard Réquichot accumulates images of a single subject to provoke disgust, Pop Art artists pick up the symbols of capitalism in magazines… As for contemporary art, collage manifests itself in street art, for example in the works of the artist Madame.

On Artsper you'll find a wide variety of collage works, such as Bonnie and Clyde's exotic collages, Matthew Rose's assemblages of photographs, words and drawings, the stories told by Alexandre Taillandier in modern paintings…