Collage as Catharsis & Political Expression
In times of great change and uncertainty, I have looked to creating art as a means to transform stress and pain into an object that can be examined and interpreted by others, but most importantly, something that exists outside of myself.
Collage, being the compilation of images or other materials into a single composition or piece, I feel, lends itself nicely to sorting through difficult feelings and a variety of ideas to assemble the most essential & impactful parts to make a collective whole.
Interestingly, the Cubists in France, Pablo Picasso and George Braque are said to have coined the term collage. During the first phase of Cubism referred to as the Analytic period, Picasso and Braque began to breakdown 3-dimensional objects into fragments corresponding to an object’s viewpoints from various perspectives. Rather than modeling forms in illusionistic space, they were depicting a dynamic arrangement of volumes and planes merging background and foreground elements.
But at some point during 1911, Picasso and Braque’s work began to shift away from deconstructing the image and towards building up the image, which is why it was dubbed “synthetic” period for synthesis or “a collection of disparate elements into a coherent whole”.
In Picasso’s “Still-life with Chair Caning”, not only is he playing with the ideas of illusion, depth, and form, he is also incorporating physical objects into his compositions. In this painting, he has glued the woven material that is found in rattan seats directly on to the canvas and framed the painting with a rope. Picasso and Braque began to incorporate printed and mass-produced items into their painting which also influenced the Futurists in Italy, and the Dadaists in Zurich, bringing me to the first artist I want to talk to about.
Hannah Höch (1889–1978) — German Dadaist who helped pioneer photomontages and was one of the few female members recognized by the Dadaist movement.
In 1912, she studied glassworking and book arts design at the School of Applied Arts in Berlin but during WW1, she took a break from her studies and worked for the Red Cross. After the war was over, she met artist and writer Raoul Hausmann and became associated with the Berlin Dada group, a circle of mostly male artists who satirized and critiqued German culture and society during the interwar era.
Despite her significant skill, artistic voice, and critical acclaim that her photomontages received, her work wasn’t taken seriously by her male counterparts.
“ Most of our male colleagues continued for a long while to look upon us as charming and gifted amateurs, denying us implicitly any real professional status.” — Hannah Höch
She was nearly rejected from participating in the First International Dada Fair in Berlin in 1920, but as The Guardian points out in their article about her work, “Judging by reviews of the time it (the piece pictured below) was one of the hits of the fair, perhaps because it’s so richly legible in terms of contemporary cultural politics”.
Astutely splicing together photographs or photographic reproductions she cut from popular magazines, illustrated journal, fashion publications, and political propaganda at the time from the Weimar rule, she recontextualizes them in a dynamic and layered style. She was quoted as saying
“ there are no limits to the materials available for pictorial collages — above all they can be found in photography, but also in writing and printed matter, even in waste products.”
References
Picasso, Still-life with Chair Caning — https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/art-1010/cubism-early-abstraction/cubism/v/picasso-still-life-with-chair-caning
Birth of Collage and Mixed Meda — https://www.artsy.net/article/matthew-the-birth-of-collage-and-mixed-media
Cubism —
https://www.theartstory.org/movement/cubism/
https://cubismsite.com/picasso-collage/
Hannah Höch —
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-radical-legacy-hannah-hoch-one-female-dadaists
Collage —
Photomontage —