Cubism and Collage: How Picasso and Braque Revolutionized Art

For a long time, collage technique was present in the long list of human creative activities, but it was rarely considered an art form. Everything changed with the advent of Cubism when Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso introduced collage as an expressive technique that widened artistic potential. From Cubism, collage moved to other art styles and movements, and still remains a popular technique among contemporary artists. Read on to get familiar with collage and the Cubist artistic revolution.

Cubism truly was one of the most radical and groundbreaking inventions in the history of art that changed the visual culture and perception of art. As a revolutionary art movement of the 1910s, Cubism grew out of several equally important factors. First was the influence of another great French artist, Paul Cezanne. Cezanne argued that any natural form could be simplified to a sphere, cone, or cylinder, turning the scene into a geometric structure. Cezanne’s still lifes and landscapes illustrated this principle. Sometimes, Cezanne represented objects, mostly fruit, placed in baskets and tables. In his works, these seemed slightly more complicated than they actually were, as if seen from several viewpoints at once.

Another key influence was African and Polynesian art, which became widely available in Europe around the time Picasso and Braque started their Cubist experiments. Non-Western art offered a radically different approach to rendering figures and spaces, representing different expressive forms and ideas. Constantly looking for alternatives to the existing order, Picasso collected African art and was even involved in an art theft. On his request, an ex-secretary of Guillaume Apollinaire Honore-Joseph Géry Pieret, notorious for his flexible morals and criminal experience, stole three prehistoric artifacts from the Louvre. These artifacts were Iberian sculpture heads that possessed Picasso’s mind. Soon after the theft, he revealed the final product of his inspiration—the legendary canvas Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.

Picasso and Braque brought Cezanne’s idea of geometric forms to the extreme, converting the entire pictorial space into geometric language. The expressive style of African art manifested itself in mask-like faces and stylized bodies. To focus on the structure of their object, Cubists minimized their color palettes to grays and browns. What started as a radical simplification of form turned into an intellectual exercise of collecting an expressive and multi-dimensional mosaic of forms, shapes, and conditions.

Collage is an art technique based on combining separate elements and forms to create something unrelated to the meanings and functions of its components. It is usually two-dimensional, gathered from drawings, cutouts, and other flat fragments. Assemblage, on the other hand, deals with three-dimensional objects and fragments.

The technique of collage most likely appeared soon after the invention of paper and its widespread use. However, it was hardly ever treated as a separate art form. Some art historians argue that, technically, medieval manuscript illumination with the application of gold leaf and gemstones was the earliest form of collage art in the West. Others cite early experiments with printed photographs, popular in the Victorian era, as another precedent. Many affluent Victorian women kept photo albums with cutout photographs glued to small drawings or paintings, creating caricatures and comic strips.

However, the true acceptance of collage as an art form started with Picasso and Braque’s experiments. After several years of intellectual exercises with form, artists started to look for new decorative and conceptual qualities that would enrich their expressive potential. By gluing wallpaper pieces, newspaper clippings, music sheets, and other objects, Braque and Picasso extended their pictorial space from canvases to the physical world. Elements of collage also created complex visual rhythms and compositional challenges for the artists.

Futurism and Cubo-Futurism

In all its complexity, Cubism had one major flaw: it was stable and immobile. The analytical exploration of cubist composition could not possibly handle the moving and transforming nature of objects in their active state. Futurist art, on the contrary, focused on mechanical mobility, speed, and dynamism, rejecting passive states.

In the Russian Empire, young radical artists managed to combine the two movements into something they called Cubo-Futurism. Unlike Cubism, which existed outside narratives, Cubo-Futurist works often built an image of utopian modernity with technology and humans organized into a single forward-moving force. It represented motion, dynamism, and optimism about the technological future. In Cubo-Futurism, the Cubist technique of collage received an odd and rather surprising twist. Newspaper fragments and letters frequently appeared in compositions, but usually, they were similarly painted on canvas. Such imitation of collage was explained by the Cubo-Futurist expressive goal. Instead of expanding their painted space into reality, they aimed to augment its expressivity with verbal and written signals.

Collage techniques migrated from Cubism to other styles and movements. They were particularly adopted by abstract artists like Jean Arp, who used collage to manipulate chance and the metaphysical nature of abstract art. Arp cut or tore out shapes from colored paper and threw them on the floor in random order. The compositions, created “according to the Law of Chance,” became blueprints for the next step of his work. Then, the artist carved out fragments of the same shape from wood and carefully arranged them so they would correspond exactly to the shapes created by chance. This voluntary loss of control over art was part of Arp’s idea to reinvent art and the relationship between an artwork and an artist.

Henri Matisse and Collage

A friend and rival of Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse was known as the principal representative of the Fauvist movement and a skilled artist who centered his efforts around color and its effects. For Matisse, his use of collage was less about creative experiment and more the result of necessity. After his cancer surgery in 1941, Matisse was confined to bed and had difficulty painting and holding a brush for a long time. Because of this, collage became an alternative for him. He cut out shapes from paper colored by his assistants and arranged the pieces into large-scale, colorful works. These compositions, enthusiastically accepted by critics and collectors, were monuments of artistic resilience that still reflected Matisse’s lifelong obsession with color and form.

After Cubism: Collage in Modern and Contemporary Art

Despite the development of artistic techniques and technology, collage as an art form did not go extinct, and it continues to develop in the works of many artists. Feminist artist Miriam Schapiro used collage as a form of bridging the gap between decorative fine art. She assembled her collages from patterned fabrics, referencing centuries of women’s manual labor related to sewing, crocheting, viewing, and patternmaking.

Some art historians believe that textile and design and other fabric-related crafts were excluded from the domain of art not only due to their practical purpose but also because of the label of feminine occupations. While painting and sculpture were in different ears analyzed through the prism of divine intervention or scientific knowledge, domestic crafts were treated as useful yet simple results of manual practice, devoid of intellectual effort. In that sense, Schapiro’s collages revert to this tradition, bringing millennia-old practices into the domain of fine art.

Contemporary Kenyan artist Wangechi Mutu used collages to comment upon the beauty industry and unattainable standards for women, as well as the way science absorbs cultural stereotypes. Mutu compiled her images from fashion magazines, medical atlases on female anatomy and tropical diseases, celebrity posters, and other media centered around the dictated feminine appearance. Built from seemingly perfect details intended to reflect the acceptable concepts of beauty and sexuality, they turn into monstrous non-human creatures. Issues of race, health, and age reveal themselves as pathological conditions.

Outside of art galleries, collages are often used as forms of artistic self-expression in diaries, personal notebooks, and social media. This way, they represent curated images of one’s identity intended either for public viewing or personal contemplation. Korean artist Kang Seung Lee, one of the most remarkable names of the 2024 Venice Biennale, utilizes collage to talk about artists who died during the AIDS crisis as the result of illness and its complications. Each collage is a story compiled from watercolor paintings, quotes from letters and diaries, personal objects, and embroideries. Kang Seung Lee immortalizes these figures in a non-monumental and non-hierarchical way, preserving intimate personalities in all their tenderness and complexity instead of rigid public images.