Collage, a picture made entirely or in part of photographs, fabric, newspaper clippings, and other so-called found objects and materials, which are pasted or glued to the picture surface. Collage can be used to emphasize two aspects of picture making: the purely formal and the illustrative. In the purely formal approach artistic values dominate, and the placement of the parts, overlappings, contours, shapes, intervals, and colors are of primary concern. In the illustrative approach, imagery and content take precedence. The photomontage provides a good example. The content—for instance, photographic images from magazines or books—is chosen for its associations and then opened to fresh interpretation through its new setting and through juxtapositions likely to be incongruous.

Scholars generally agree that collage was invented in 1912 by Spanish artist Pablo Picasso, although French painter Georges Braque produced his first collages at about the same time. In their cubist period, which had started a few years earlier, Picasso and Braque became deeply involved in radically new ways of picture making (see Cubism). Collage developed when they began to incorporate newspaper clippings, labels from bottles, bits of wallpaper, and similar printed extracts in their drawings and paintings. The addition of such elements surprised viewers who expected art to produce an illusion of the real world, rather than contain items from that world. Picasso, Braque, and their followers further complicated this mixture of reality and illusion by painting imitations of wood veneer, marble, and similar materials, which were intended to fool the eye.

The futurists, a group active in Italy in the years before World War I (1914-1918), borrowed the notion of collage from the cubists. Futurist collages celebrated the vitality and conflict of the modern technological world. Futurist artists expressed noise, speed, the roar of a train, shouts of protest, and other aspects of the modern world by a collision of pictures, words, and fragmented sentences.

After World War I a group of artists who formed the dada movement exploited collage for its unconventionality. The senselessness and brutality of the war had disillusioned many people, including the dadaists who considered traditional art stuffy and irrelevant in the face of the recent death and destruction. Collage perfectly expressed the dada movement’s denial of art as a “pretty” representation of life: Composed of materials from the everyday environment, collage was life itself. As opposed to the formal calculation of traditional art, collage could emphasize the elements of chance and accident, which the dadaists found characteristic of life rather than of art. French artist Jean Arp, for example, glued down pieces of paper or other material after dropping them in a random manner onto the picture surface.

The fragmented, disjointed quality of collage attracted dada’s successors, the surrealists (see Surrealism). This quality provided a perfect parallel to dreams, free associations, and other emblems of the subconscious, which the surrealists sought to reveal. In contrast to the cubists, the surrealists subordinated form and color to imagery. German-born artist Max Ernst clipped engravings from old scientific catalogs and juxtaposed images so as to suggest a nightmare or insanity. More than any other group, the surrealists extended the uses and techniques of collage. They employed accidental effects through random associations; invented décollage by tearing bits and pieces from layers of collage; and combined collage with splatterings of paint or with frottage—rubbings of surface textures such as the grain of wood.

Related to both the dadaists and surrealists, German artist Kurt Schwitters restricted his art solely to collage. He also extended the range of materials and objects that could be used. His small but exquisitely arranged collages were made of bits of waste paper, bus transfers, tickets, labels, coupons, and similar discarded objects. He referred to these colorful compositions by the nonsense word Merz.

In its emphasis on pattern and texture, collage exemplifies a major characteristic of modern art. Its confrontation of materials, images, and forms is especially suitable to the diversity, tensions, and incongruities of modern life. Outstanding makers of collage in the last half of the 20th century included Robert Motherwell, Jean Dubuffet, Alberto Burri, Larry Rivers, Conrad Marca-Relli, Romare Bearden, Anne Ryan, Manolo Millares, and Robert Rauschenberg.

Closely related to collage is the construction, a combination of various materials extending into space like a sculpture. Three-dimensional works made of found objects are generally referred to as assemblages. They include the evocative juxtapositions of objects in small boxes produced by artist Joseph Cornell. Filmmakers such as Norman McLaren, Red Grooms, and Stan Vanderbeek have also used collage techniques, editing, intermixing, fusing, and superimposing images, and even drawing directly on the film.