The Art of Collage and Assemblage in Modern Art

Collage and assemblage are two techniques for creating artworks from existing pieces. Collages usually feature flat fragments of paper, while assemblages include three-dimensional pieces. Collages became popular artistic techniques among modern artists who sought new forms of expressive methods. Popularized by Cubists, collage and assemblage were soon adopted by other art movements. Here’s everything you need to know about collage art techniques.

Usually, we associate collage with something found in family photo albums, social media feeds, or diaries. Most arts and crafts admirers see it as something sentimental but not entirely artistic, as if the act of rearranging pre-made pieces seems just as creative as assembling a factory-produced jigsaw puzzle. However, collage has a long history as a proper artistic medium in its own right.

The earliest occurrences of collage art can be traced back to the invention and the start of the widespread use of paper. Elements of collage were used in Japanese and Chinese calligraphy and poetry. In Western culture, collage-making existed only as a popular hobby for a long time. Middle-class Europeans arranged postcards, drawings, and later photographs in aesthetically pleasing ways, creating comic strips, caricatures, and narratives.

The attitude towards collage radically changed in the 20th century. Modernist artists started to explore new expressive forms and techniques, looking to revive traditional art that seemed dated and unfit for the new era. Collage was one such technique, eagerly adopted by many art groups and movements.

In its simplest explanation, collage is an arrangement of cut-out pieces and fragments that are glued together to create an entirely new and often unexpected composition. For decades, artists used their own drawings, photographs, newspaper clippings, and other fragments for collages. From the strictly visual technique, collage evolved into an artistic principle, sometimes applied to music, film, and writing.

Assemblage

Assemblage is an offshoot of collage. The boundaries between the two techniques are rather blurry, which often leads to confusion. Generally speaking, collages are two-dimensional artworks, while assemblages are three-dimensional. Apart from clippings and drawings, assemblages often incorporate found objects—elements not manufactured by an artist but appropriated by them. Assemblage started from collages with inclusions of three-dimensional elements, such as Pablo Picasso’s still life with a chair seat attached to the canvas. Little by little, the concept developed into large-scale complex constructions from numerous components.

The art movement of Cubism was the first one that adopted collage and assemblage as legitimate and widespread artistic techniques in combination with painting. Inspired by African art and the world of Paul Cezanne, Cubist painters challenged traditional ways of rendering space and objects, searching for new forms of expression. They simplified the world into geometric forms and then assembled it piece by piece, painting their scenes from multiple angles and in multiple states at once

The adoption of collage was both an aesthetic and intellectual choice. From the aesthetic point of view, collage inclusions created complex visual rhythm and added depth to otherwise strict and limited color and texture palettes of Cubism. Moreover, Cubist paintings were usually the results of deep analytical work and were sometimes hard to read or compare with objective reality. Collage and assemblage elements in such works acted as a bridge between the painted and the real, extending pictorial space right into the viewer’s realm.

As noted by art historians, Cubist subject matter and recurring symbols reflected the gender and class conventions of the society the artists functioned in. The two principal types of Cubist painting were still lifes on bar and cafe tables (almost exclusively male spaces) or portraits of women—particularly, artists’ lovers or sex workers. Moreover, their use of collages often highlighted and deliberately relied on gender differentiation and norms. For instance, Spanish Cubist Juan Gris in his collage Flowers arranged objects in a way that suggested a date or a similar amorous encounter. The flower bouquet indicated the presence of a woman behind the scenes and the clay pipe the presence of a man. In the absence of human figures, their belongings, as well as the coffee and wine they share at the table, tell the story of their characters and interactions.

Dada art was a phenomenon even more radical and complex than Cubism. Dadaism was born as a protest against World War I, its traumas and horrors. Mass-scale destruction accompanied by mustard gas attacks, explosives and artillery, trench warfare, and severe disfiguring wounds showed the side of human creativity and ingenuity that was largely ignored in previous centuries. As it turned out, humans were so good at and enthusiastic about murdering each other that no limits of common sense and compassion could stop them. Traditional pre-war art that talked about harmony, order, and sophistication proved to be useless and dysfunctional, unable to either prevent the suffering or express it.

Dada was born in neutral Switzerland which was surrounded by a raging war and was a safe haven for many artists who wished to avoid the bloodshed. Soon, they started to create their own visual art and poetry that was deliberately nonsensical and laid outside of traditional art boundaries. Their poems were incoherent screams performed by a convulsing poet, lists of newspaper headlines arranged in random order, or simply strange roaring and clicking sounds. Dada was attacking the public’s common sense and their basic understanding of art and performance. Logic, harmony, and good taste were ridiculed as absurd old fashions.

If Cubist artists used collage and assemblage as additions to painting, Dada artists frequently entirely substituted paint with collaged images. Collage was their way of rearranging current reality and giving it a new form, often dictated by chance rather than a conscious artistic decision. German Dadaist Kurt Schwitters compiled his compositions from magazine images, candy wrappers, flyers, and other objects often categorized as trash.

Dada and Surrealism had a significant theoretical divide between them but nonetheless attracted similar crowds. By the 1930s, many maturing and developing Dada artists moved to Surrealism. Instead of exploring nonsense, they now came to explore the subconscious, giving sense to the strangest and darkest silhouettes lingering in their minds. The idea of bringing together unrelated pieces into a single whole was at the center of the Surrealist mind and started with a popular salon game known as Exquisite Corpse.

The first player took a sheet of paper and started either writing a sentence or drawing part of the image. Then, they folded the sheet in a way that would conceal their creation and passed it to the next player so they could continue the sentence or the drawing. After several rounds, the players unfolded the sheet to find an odd construction of words and images that were unrelated to each other but united as a whole.

One of the former Dadaists turned Surrealist was German artist Max Ernst. In his long career, Ernst worked in a variety of mediums and techniques, yet his collages were particularly notable. Instead of using contemporary popular culture sources like newspapers and magazines, Ernst dived deep into Victorian Gothic novels, 19th-century engravings, posters, and illustrations. The result was the dark and unsettling series of collages that featured hybrid human-animal creatures. These collages were violent yet strangely mesmerizing hallucinations, snapshots of horror dreams messing with real-life memories and experiences.

Photomontage: The Surrealist Extension of Collage

Photography as an artistic medium was particularly popular among Surrealist women artists, who eagerly mastered the relatively new technology. Instead of aiming to represent objective reality, they appreciated the camera’s expressive possibilities, which could build an entirely new realm from familiar pieces. The earliest artistic experiments with photomontage are often attributed to Dada artist Hannah Hoch, who created photo collages and montages that were highly politicized and usually commented upon the Weimar-era gender roles and expectations.

Surrealist photographer Dora Maar mastered the art of manipulating the camera and the finished images. In her works, hands crawl out of mollusk shells, women hide behind intricate spider webs, and space seems both infinite and limited. Although underappreciated as an artistic creation in her time, Dora Maar’s Surrealist work was successfully sold as a commercial product and was published in fashion magazines of the time.

After World War II, collage techniques made a surprising comeback in the movement of Pop art. Pop art relied on images from consumer culture, advertisements, and popular media products. It was an opposite reaction to the prevalence of abstract art on the market that both celebrated and ridiculed capitalist consumption and its attributes. Billboards, TV commercials, shop displays, and magazine features became integral parts of the contemporary landscape. Pop artists reflected this landscape in their works, often reconstructing this imaginary realm of affluence and endless consumption through collage.

One of the movement’s most iconic works, Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing? consists of figures cut out of American magazines, including images of bodybuilders, perfect fashionable living rooms, and various objects branded with popular logos. Human beings on the collage exist as commodities, representing the picture-perfect lifestyle that is seemingly available for purchase.