Collage

Collage, from the French coller meaning to glue, is a technique and its resulting work in which pieces of paper, photographs, fabric, newspaper clippings, and other found materials are arranged and pasted onto a supporting surface. Although pasting was long known in folk and decorative art, collage gained the status of a serious modernist method around 1912 through Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, who introduced scraps of the real world into Cubist pictures, questioning the boundary between image and reality. Collage was then taken up by the Dadaists and Surrealists as well as the Constructivists. Within the Ukrainian avant-garde the Kharkiv artist Vasyl Yermilov developed montage and collage principles, combining wood, metal, typography, and texture. Collage radically expanded ideas about the material of art, becoming the basis for assemblage, photomontage, and mixed media. It remains one of the most widespread methods in contemporary visual art, design, and education.