The Collage
- Diamond Zhou
- 5 days ago
- 13 min read
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SATURDAY EVENING POST
May 3rd, 2025
Collage as an art form was born in the early 20th century amid the upheavals of modernity. In 1912, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque stunned the art world by pasting bits of wallpaper and newspaper onto their paintings, a radical break with tradition. Braque’s first papier collé (“pasted paper”) gave Picasso, as Braque recalled, “a great shock”. In works like Guitar, Sheet Music and Glass (1912), Picasso layered newspaper clippings and faux wood grain within a Cubist still life, literally “cutting” into fine art with everyday material. Cubist collage thus dramatized fragmentation as a metaphor for modern consciousness, tearing through linear perspective and demanding that the viewer reconstruct reality piece by piece. This inventiveness spread quickly: Juan Gris adopted collage in complex Cubist compositions, and even the Italian Futurists embraced pasted papers to convey the speed and fragmentation of modern life. What began as a playful subversion, assembling the mundane into the sublime, would revolutionize art, opening the door for artists to incorporate the raw material of the real world into works of art.
With the chaos of World War I, collage took on new urgency through the anti-establishment antics of Dada. Artists like Jean (Hans) Arp and Kurt Schwitters seized on collage’s “combinatory” powers to reject the logic of war-torn society. Schwitters famously scavenged trash from the streets to create his Merz collages – poetic junk assemblages that tried to “embrace all different branches of art” in one form. Berlin Dadaists John Heartfield and Raoul Hausmann pioneered photomontage, cutting and reassembling mass-media photographs into jarring new images; they saw themselves not as artists but as “engineers” constructing images to expose political truths. Perhaps the most iconic collagist of this era was Hannah Höch, the sole woman in Berlin Dada, whose klebebilder (pasted pictures) rearranged society’s images with subversive wit. Höch would put the “wrong head on the wrong body,” for example, slicing up magazines to critique gender roles and the Weimar social order. In works like Cut with the Kitchen Knife (1919), she mashed together politicians, dancers, machines, a mad kaleidoscope meant to reflect (and mock) a fractured post-war culture. As one writer later observed, these Dada collages and “word salad” poems aimed to produce shock and outrage by the deliberate destruction of the traditional art “aura,” jamming everyday cigarette packs and newspapers into art so that mystique vanished. Dada turned collage into a weapon against the pretensions of fine art and the propaganda of mass media, showing how slicing up reality could expose its absurdities.
Surrealist artists in the 1920s also fell under the spell of collage, seeing in it a method to free the unconscious mind. Max Ernst wrote that collage no longer had to do exclusively with paper and glue, for example, created bizarre collage novels (like Une Semaine de Bonté, 1934) by combining Victorian engravings into dreamlike tableaux. In 1930 the poet Louis Aragon even organized an exhibition in Paris dedicated solely to collage, featuring Ernst, Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, René Magritte, and others. Surrealists expanded the collage principle beyond cut paper: Man Ray’s cameraless photographs (rayographs) were likened to collage in spirit, and Miró began affixing objects to canvases, blurring the line between painting and assemblage. Collage, with its unexpected juxtapositions, was the perfect medium to make “poetry out of collisions”, to use disparate scraps of reality to spark subconscious associations. As Miró discovered, the collage technique helped him “find his freedom” from conventional painting by literally breaking the picture plane and crafting art from fragments of the real world.
By the mid-20th century, collage had thoroughly infiltrated modern art, from the whimsical to the monumental. During the 1940s, Henri Matisse turned to cutting painted paper into bold shapes, where his famous “cut-outs” effectively collaging with scissors to make exuberant compositions like The Sheaf (1953) in his old age. In New York’s Abstract Expressionist circle, collage offered a tactile counterpoint to splashy painting: Lee Krasner, for one, made intimate collages from ripped-up earlier canvases (sometimes even bits of her husband Jackson Pollock’s discarded paintings). “My collages have to do with time and change,” she said, embracing reinvention through cutting and pasting.
At the same moment, artist Romare Bearden began developing a unique collage language to portray Black American life. Bearden’s works were balanced arrangements of found imagery from magazines and photographs, creating vibrant urban narratives from a wild mix of faces, textures, and colours. Shown in his breakthrough 1964 exhibition, these works were immediately celebrated as “radical and important works” in American art and have only grown in renown for how they patch together the fractured experiences of Harlem into one cohesive, soulful vision. In his series The Prevalence of Ritual (1970), Bearden assembled photographs from magazines, patterned papers, and personal snapshots into vivid narrative panels. One critic describes Bearden’s collages as juxtapositions of startling fragments, As Mary Schmidt Campbell writes in her review: “faces are fractured and dislocated, hands swollen to twice their normal size, bodies pieced together from surprising juxtapositions, including…parts of African masks, animal eyes, [and] vegetation.” In Projections (the exhibition containing those works), Bearden sought to “re-envision” Black life: he both acknowledges historical distortions and creates a new visual ritual of identity. Bearden’s work illustrates collage’s power to convey complex histories. His broken, hybrid figures nod to African art and the trauma of slavery, while collaged photo-elements also reference the spread of mass media into Black communities. By enlarging his collages into photostatic prints (“Projections”), he exploded the personal back into the public sphere. Collage here becomes a visual vocabulary of resistance: its fractured images embody the contradictions of a “multiple inheritance,” even as they reassert dignity and continuity.
Painters like Robert Rauschenberg embraced assemblage and collage as central strategies. Rauschenberg’s Combines of the 1950s and 60s, for example, literally fuse painting and sculpture: a canvas might sprout a blanket, newspaper, even a taxidermied goat. In Cardbird Series (1971), he taped flattened cardboard boxes to the wall, elevating detritus to art. Collage in this era “became a staple of Pop Art,” a way to break down and critique consumer culture, turning advertising and packaging into loaded signifiers.
By the late 1960s and 70s, collage entered a new phase as a mode of political and feminist critique, heavily informed by semiotics and media theory. In the US and Europe, artists turned to found photographic imagery to expose ideology. Martha Rosler’s seminal series Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful (1967–72) is exemplary. In pieces like Red Stripe Kitchen (1967–72), Rosler splices glossy domestic interiors from House Beautiful with documentary war photos from Life magazine. The Metropolitan Museum notes that Rosler “reviv[ed] the modernist tradition of political photomontage” by combining preexisting mass media images to devastating effect. Her images collapse the binary of safe home and distant battlefield. Rosler’s collage indicts the media’s colluding roles: it shows how comfort images camouflage violence, and vice versa. In doing so, she highlights the signs and symbols of American culture and war.
This era saw collage interrogate semiotics, the study of signs and their meanings, as much as materiality. Rosler, Lorna Simpson, and others treated every magazine clipping or photograph as a loaded signifier. Lorna Simpson came onto the scene in the late 1980s with works of photograph-plus-text that deconstructed racial and gender tropes. In her early series, such as Guarded Conditions, 1989, she shows repeated back views of an anonymous Black woman in a plain shift dress, superimposed with words like “SEX ATTACKS” and “SKIN ATTACKS.” Simpson has said her work “interrogated stereotypical images of Black women” in popular culture. Her collages and installations use cropping, text, and repetition to fracture the photographic “object” into a language. By pairing an image with language, Simpson forces viewers to decipher the layers of meaning: the photograph is no longer innocent. In this way, collage becomes a second-order text, resonating with Roland Barthes’s idea that any image carries multiple connotations. Indeed, as Barthes argued, once the author (or photographer) releases meaning into the world, viewers become co-authors of interpretation. In the 1970s–80s, artists of the “Pictures Generation” (like Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine, Barbara Kruger) took this further, rephotographing and recontextualizing found images to question originality and authenticity. Rosler and Simpson fit within this milieu: their collages call attention to the codes of advertising, news, and art itself, using collage’s disruption to expose ideology.
Canadian artist Barbara Astman also pioneered photo-collage techniques from the 1970s onward. Astman pioneered the artistic use of both analogue and digital reproduction techniques and often incorporated everyday objects into her photos to explore gender and memory. Her early works (1970s) and later oversize photomontages blend snapshots with painted textures, turning casual scenes into enigmatic visual narratives. Astman’s collages dematerialize objects and make personal the impersonal, where she imbues household wares with memories and histories. In doing so, she follows the feminist collage tradition of reclaiming the everyday as art, asking viewers to trace how media and object-collecting shape identity.
Her Daily Collage was born of a simple ritual, she decided to create one collage every day using that morning’s newspaper images. Armed with scissors, glue, and a ruled Moleskine notebook, she clipped headlines, photos, and ads, then shuffled these fragments into whimsical compositions spread across two notebook pages. In each piece, Astman carefully aligned at least one cut edge of a fragment with the edge of the notebook page, “imbu[ing] the project with a sense of order, as though the rest of each figure or object continues into a space we cannot see”. This method is key to the work’s philosophical underpinnings: by hinting that every scrap came from a larger whole, Astman acknowledges the ontology of the found image that each picture’s prior life and context extend beyond the collage’s frame. Rather than fully severing images from their origins, she leaves a trace of their original continuity. The lined notebook background, identical in each piece, serves as a subtle grid that both contains and contrasts the randomness of the daily news. The effect is almost archival. As curator Liz Wylie observed, Astman’s daily practice turned the quotidian into art, “the quotidian becomes writ large”, with humble notebook pages later blown up into exhibition prints almost a meter tall. In these enlargements, even the faint “ghost image” of whatever was on the reverse side of the newspaper sometimes appears in the background due to the scanning process, a literal palimpsest of media layers that Astman “hadn’t expected but loved”, embracing chance discoveries.
Astman’s collages are playful and often absurd, in a manner that echoes Dadaist collage humour (she has cited her love of 1920s Dada collages). One collage might feature, say, a politician’s head sprouting a giant marijuana leaf, or Hillary Clinton’s portrait with a caped superhero flying out of it, incongruous juxtapositions that invite free association. She did not intend any specific meaning, treating each daily composition as an intuitive visual experiment, open-ended approach is part of her philosophical stance: rather than starting with a message, Astman lets meaning emerge from the chance relationships between fragments, a process-oriented ethic common in feminist art. Yet, even without a predetermined political agenda, Daily Collage inevitably absorbed the zeitgeist of its time. The series became “a time capsule” of late-2000s events, as Astman later reflected. The faces of world leaders (Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi was a recurring figure in the news and thus in her collages), celebrities, and everyday oddities all intermingle on her pages, capturing what one might call the collective unconscious of the daily news cycle. In this way, Astman’s work touches the same ethical questions as more overtly political collagists: What does it mean to take images of “global catastrophes, as reported in the newspaper,” and repurpose them in a private art diary?
Kenyan-born Wangechi Mutu’s work is a striking example of using collage to interrogate histories of oppression, gender, and race. Mutu’s mixed-media collages on paper and Mylar (from the 1990s onward) splice together fashion magazine figures, biological diagrams, and African iconography to form mythic hybrid women. Early series like “Pin-Ups” (2001–03) portrayed wounded beauty: figures with missing limbs and crutches, referencing child soldiers in Sierra Leone. Mutu explains that her collages “insinuate meanings that are political, aesthetic and psychological, without ever declaring”, they act as “warnings of medical and cultural problems to come”. Her collage process itself mimics amputation and grafting: headdresses of hair become jungle canopies, torsos of beauty queens sprout roots.
In Mutu’s hands, collage is an act of resistance. She deliberately re-contextualizes “found” images of women and wildlife, often sourced from Western media, into new forms that subvert the viewer’s gaze. Her use of glitter, medical charts and fashion cutouts confronts “African identity and political strife” all at once. In doing so, Mutu’s work embodies decolonial strategies: it refuses a single narrative of Africa, instead collaging together fragments of history and fantasy. Each composite figure preserves trace elements of its original source (a beauty pageant photo, a science diagram, an insect), yet becomes irreducibly another being.
Every act of collage is an act of taking apart and putting together – a destruction and a creation. This duality naturally raises questions of ethics: What does it mean to appropriate fragments of other images or cultures? How do we treat the pieces we take, and what responsibility do we have in the way we reassemble them? As collage moved from margin to mainstream, artists and scholars began to grapple with these questions, often drawing on philosophy for insight. French philosopher Jacques Derrida, for instance, introduced the idea of bricolage, constructing something new from whatever materials are at hand, as a fundamental human activity. In his view, all creators are essentially bricoleurs, piecing together concepts and signs from the debris of prior texts and cultures. This is essentially a philosophical validation of collage: there is no creation ex nihilo, only endless reassembly. Derrida suggested that since all discourse borrows from the past, the ethics lies in how openly and playfully we do this, rather than pretending to absolute originality. Collage, which transparently borrows and transforms, can be seen as an honest art in that regard, it acknowledges its sources, even flaunts them, but also gives them new voice.
The ethics of collage also touch on ideas of healing, mending, and conserving. The Japanese concept of kintsugi comes to mind: the art of repairing broken pottery with gold-filled lacquer, treating the breakage as part of the history of an object rather than something to hide. Kintsugi philosophy celebrates the mended object as more beautiful for having been broken, its cracks now illuminated, literally. Collage operates on a similar ethical aesthetic. It takes the broken pieces of images, of cultural narratives, even of personal memory and glues them together into a new whole, often in a way that highlights the seams. The collage doesn’t try to disguise its composite nature; the edges and overlaps are visible, just as kintsugi makes the cracks shimmer with gold. This can be interpreted as a form of care: rather than throwing away images or stories deemed useless or fragmented, the collagist saves them and gives them new life. In a world that often seeks the new and perfect, collage says there is value in the discarded and imperfect. It aligns with the phrase “waste not, want not,” which is indeed an aspect of kintsugi philosophy noted by practitioners.
Collage is far more than a technique of art, it is a way of seeing and being in the modern world. The notion of reassembly suggests a hope: that from the broken pieces we can make something not just new, but perhaps better. The ethics of reassembly is about responsibility to the future. Kintsugi teaches that the repaired object can be stronger and more precious; likewise, collage tells us that wholeness can be improvised, that our stories are mixed and layered, and that sometimes the cut is what lets the light in – or the gold that mends the crack.
CURRENT EXHIBITION
Barbara Astman: Concealed/Revealed
UPCOMING EXHIBITION
Tony Robins: Flowers of Resistance
Opening Saturday, June 21st, 2025
