Collage is often perceived as child’s play, dismissed as craft with paper, scissors and glue, and associated with amateur, folk and women artists. Even in my own research, I’ve been guilty of overlooking it, while prioritising painting and drawing. But collage is sophisticated, political and cutting edge, as I’ve recently discovered while presenting Painting with Scissors, a documentary for Radio 4. The history of collage is revolutionary and, at times, dangerous.
At times of technological and geopolitical change, collage has been an essential creative medium for outsiders, revolutionaries and creative trouble makers. Ever since Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque began to stick bits of found materials into their painting, collage has allowed artists to access bold new ideas and turn the traditional art world upside down.
Dada artists used photomontage to criticise German culture after the First World War and, in 1933, John Heartfield became Number 5 on the Gestapo’s Most Wanted List for his outrageous political collages. Hannah Höch was also branded degenerate for slicing apart heads of state in photomontages such as Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany, 1919.
The surrealists, including Max Ernst, Man Ray and Dora Maar used collage to access their inner minds, juxtaposing incongruous images in dream-like pictures. During the 20th century, Henri Matisse achieved his most expressive works by ‘painting with scissors’ in the final stages of his career. He’s an artist I included in This Book Will Make You An Artist.
Then pop artists, like Peter Blake, used the juxtaposition of images, from commercials to literature, to challenge ideas of ‘high’ art. At 93, he’s still making a collage a day, from the analogue to digital, and in their multi-figure compositions they echo his famous Sgt Peppers album cover, co-created with Jann Haworth.
Since then, feminist artists like Linder, Martha Rosler and Chila Singh Burman have adopted collage as a powerful weapon, using it to subvert recognisable images into new, even dangerous ideas. In an age of AI and digital deepfakes, their scalpels and glue-guns feel more vital than ever.
Today, digital artists like Cold War Steve create controversial, satirical collages on social media, while we all watch videos which cut together art, film, photos and text. It seems that collage is now everywhere we look. But it is still a powerful tool to shift the status quo.
When it’s not changing the world, it can also be personally transformative. For instance, John Stezaker uses collage to find a third space, a way of reclaiming the image in our culture which is saturated by visual displays.
And Hazel Pitt believes that collage’s readymade imagery, torn from magazines and books, allows anyone to tell stories that are perhaps too difficult to express with words, using this art as a form of therapy. Making a collage with her, I discovered this for myself.
Having revolutionised art history, collage is more vital, and rebellious, than ever before. Not just for artists, but for all of us. You can listen to ‘Painting with Scissors’ on BBC Sounds.
