Introduction

Collage links with the most revolutionary innovation movement of artistic practice in the 20th century. Redefined relationships between images, visual, graphic, material, subject, and object are revealed by this means. There are many supports for the collage as a means of artistic practice that changes the art world, for instance, Ulmer, David Antin, Raussline Krauss. While others also argue that collage failed its duty for employing and reflecting enough social values as part of modernist art, like Crow.

This essay argues the undeniable and invincible importance of collage that changes the definition of space, material, subject, depth on canvas. By insightful analysis of Picasso’s fruit, Violin, and Wineglass and Braque’s The Clarinet. This essay presents viewers comprehensive social and historical contexts about collage before heading into the visual analysis of two mater’s collage works.

 

（Picasso's Bowl with Fruit, Violin, and Wine) 

Social and historical contexts about collage and linkage with cubism

Collage is a widely discussed topic in art history as it reveals the most subversive art movement in the 20th century. As Ulmer argues that collage represents juxtaposition, disruption, and a fundamental sense of anti-narrative. (Ulmer, 1983)

Moreover, David Antin proactively elaborates the idea of collage in his 1974 tour de force interview, which is known as “some questions about modernism”. Inspired by Duchamp and Arman, David claims to “identify the underlying logic of collage with a strategy of presentation rather than its habit of a multiplicity of parts”. (Antin, 2002)

On the other hand, Crow points out his counterargument towards this widely appraised means of artistic practice and its succeeding status of Collage among art history. He states that collage intends to deny the correspondence between mass culture and modernist art. Crow insists that collage is outweighed by overweighting its contribution. While Picasso and Braque proved that there is commercial nature of the collage elements. From the labels, fragments of newsprints, shards of wallpapers, which these two masters already pasted the mass culture into their collage. (Florman, 2002)

The major feature of collage is its anti-narrative nature as a boundary breaker. The disruptive nature of collage creates new aspects of the literary and non-literary by destroying barriers. Collage can be viewed as the unconditional presentation of one single thing or the same thing all over again within a planar space. Thus, the structure of collage and its boundaries disruptive nature made it become peculiarly favorable for the transmission of political critique. This essay continues the legacy of appraising collage by analyzing works by the fathers of collage, Picasso and Braque.

 

The birth of collage is a milestone of breaking the past, which intrinsically links with the cubism movement in the 20th century. This paper starts the examination of collage by tracing back the cubism movement.

Cubism is an early 20th-century avant-garde art movement that analyzes the structure within painting and vision. The cubism art movement was inspired by Cezanne, the fathers of collage, Picasso, and Braque, who played a vital role in inventing analytical cubism from 1909 to 1912. During this period, both artists turned their artistic practices from figurative into complete abstraction. They broke the traditional rule of painting single perspective objects, but rather interpreting a subject from many angles and layers of views. (Greenberg, 1959)

By doing so, the pictorial surface of the canvas becomes a fragmented picture. Cubism arguably began with Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) and George Braque's Houses at L'Estaque (1908), and the name was initially applied as an insult like many of the names of avant-garde movements by a critic when he was discussing Braque’s Houses. Cubism is widely accepted as having phases: Analytic and Synthetic. During the Analytic period, Picasso and Braque progressively broke down three-dimensional objects into fragments corresponding to an object’s appearance from various viewpoints in space, until they came close to entirely abstract artworks. Braque’s 1908 Houses and Picasso’s 1910 Portrait of Art Dealer Ambroise Vollard concisely illustrates the speed of this progress. It is these works that are best-known as Cubist. At some point during 1911, Picasso and Braque became less concerned with painting as a description of multiple viewpoints or as a collection of shattered viewpoints depending on how you interpret Analytical Cubism but instead in a new kind of pictorial construction and a new kind of art-making. The built-up rather than broken-down or apart art form contributed to the creation of cubist images, which is why this period was dubbed “synthetic,” meaning a synthesis, or a collection of disparate elements into a coherent whole. Central to the ability of these works to build up elements was the invention of collage (Artsy, 2014)

Analytical cubism reflects the major feature of collage by destroying the traditional relationship between shapes and space. In analytical cubism, shapes and space intersect into a single intermeshed and intrinsically entangled composition on the canvas surface. Analytical cubism represents a breakthrough of reconstructing the pictorial surface and discarding the old-school artistic practices. (Pierre, 2001)

Therefore, tracing back the analytical cubism is essential to decoding the social and historical context of collage.

Collage is invented by Picasso and Braque along the way of exploring analytical cubism. Picasso and Braque came to the analytical cubism phase due to the unsatisfaction of taking objects apart and overturning the surface. Rather, they intended to create a new object with new material. Picasso and Braque collaborated intensively on trying everyday materials to create paintings. Such as fabrics, wax cloth, wallpaper scraps, newsprints fragments, and so on. During this period, a new type of painting that extends the so-called high art into the realm of common daily life is made, known as the famous papier colles. (Greenberg, 1959)

The central ability of papier colles’s comprising elements and reconstructing planar surface reveals the invention of collage. From 1912 to 1913, Picasso and Braque found this new legibility and idea to turnover surfaces and make synthesis by applying new materials onto the canvas. They used papers as their primary material and adorn it with cardboard, paper shades, patterns, sand, combs, metal shavings, ripping varnish, sheet stencils, razor blades, and craft tools. (Pierre, 2001) In these two master’s genius hands, disparate elements are put into a coherent whole.

The papier colles is usually comprised of a seemingly random group of newsprint fragments. Picasso and Braque usually paste or glue the shards onto the canvas, which is viewed as reconstructing the pure surface texture into a newly coherent artwork. By doing so, it conveys a new meaning of reconstruction and reconnection between the surface and material.

Collage plays as a juxtaposition that combines interruptive images and makes new continuity. Form and genre exist as joining forces within a collage. Form and genre are no longer apart but combine their power in all aspects. The form can be viewed as textural material, while the genre can be seen as a presentational mode to interact with the viewer.

Moreover, the business of illusionism is more and more divorced from the modeling principle under collage context. Instead of simply scissored apart and transported to separate sites on the visual field, the replaced fragments and paper shards achieved a new reality by flipping those materials reversely. (Hildner, 1996)

The reform of collage’s pictorial surface includes the interpretation of frontality, flatness, depth, structured linguistic, and sign. (Krauss, 2016).

This paper examines the collage’s visual reform on the surface through analyzing Picasso’s fruit, Violin, and Wineglass and Braque’s The Clarinet. Picasso’s Bowl with fruit, Violin, and Wineglass was created in 1913 when he started the journey of synthetic cubism alone. It was at the point that Picasso finally leads the cubist innovation away from Braque in late 1913 or early 1914. While The Clarinet made by Braque in the same year witnessed his use of collage elements moves beyond the ironically structured sign towards a symbolic one. Both works present the typical collage material that was used by Picasso and Braque from the very first beginning, which is pasted or glued a piece of extraneous material to the surface of a picture. Differences can be seen from their ways of manipulating the collage principles. Picasso pasted more newsprints and blended extravagant layers of charcoal drawing with the glued material. Whereas Braque presents a clearer layer of pasting by using the charcoal drawing as a base and glued newsprints fragments onto the aesthetic surface of the drawing he did previously.

Picasso and the Fruits, Violin and Wineglass

Picasso’s exploration of collage focuses on figures and symbols, with a particular interest in adopting newsprints as the primary material.

Robert Rosenblum thinks Picasso’s art practice is the subjectivism that is regarded as existing independently of Picasso’s social experience, while Krauss insists on the structuralism point of view that it was the product of a linguistic system or the expression of Picasso’s sensibility. Rosenblum claims that Picasso’s papier were self-evidently and unproblematically “high art”, but the notion of high art is not a given, immutable one, it is a social construct, and the practices that are understood to be framed by it are social practices. (Krauss, 2016)

Shortly after moving to his new studio on the Boulevard Raspail in October, Picasso began to explore the pictorial possibilities of Papier colles in a series of small charcoal drawings on paper that addressed subjects of everyday city life with a new freshness, making deft and lighthearted use of newspapers, food and drink labels, and sheet music. (Cottington, 1988)

The Fruits, Violin and Wineglass demonstrate a tendency of breaking the grip of the two-dimensionality. The collage of newspaper, cardboard, and charcoal drawing shards results in an impenetrable frontality of the pictorial surface by reversing the fragments.

Picasso has an exceptional love for newsprints as his collage material. The importance of newspaper is highlighted in the Fruit, Violin, and Wineglass as it produces an unbendingly opaque façade.

The evocation of the pasted fragments back declares a reality of those attached materials. All pasted material of drawing sheet comprises the frontality of fruits, violin, and wineglass as a visual absolute in all. The frontality of the Fruits, Violin and Wineglass is insisted upon, for there the three subjects are separated and figured by other charcoal and drawing shades. (Krauss, 2016).

While the frontality in the collage is secured by the way of pasting paper elements onto the surface, it results in an inevitable literal flatness. And the literal flatness is composed primarily of two aspects.

First of all, Picasso spreads over the glued and pasted newsprint fragments, color blocks, and charcoal drawings on the pictorial surface.

Secondly, the rigid geometries of other shades align with the subjects on newsprints form flat-footed parallelism. Five silhouette locks the notched contour of the violin at the central. With one blue cardboard drawing the violin’s body and the charcoal slashes declare the top and left-hand side of the subject. In all, the five pieces present a powerful flatness of the objects as material and its foursquareness shape of the violin.

Collage completely ironed out the fabric of illusionism and discard the traditional style of modeling effect. The frontality created by the collage fragments and shades is unassailable in its availability to the visual sense.

There is no absence in the collage’s visual field. Picasso renders the object’s existence within the visual field as inexorably flat in the Bowl with fruits, violin, and wineglass. No rotation, no obliquity, no slide from luminous highlight into the cool of shadowed depths. Nothing can be seen to turn within the vise of this frontal display.

The collage heightens the poignancy of the way depth is absent. The enacting action now vanished, instead, it becomes a very gesture that originally produced it as the reverse of its partner.

On the other hand, the pasted fragments conjure up as a flip of a flat page from one frontal position to another, the gesture already heralds the reduced condition of a plenitude no deeper than a sheet of paper.

Although there is no absence in the collage’s visual field, the absence transforms and exists in an essential meaning of structural linguistic. The couple Picasso produces in these scraps of discarded newsprint perform just such a system-which in linguistic terms is described as diacritical-as the one gets to speak of transparency in relation to the signified opacity of the other.

Furthermore, As Robert Rosenblum states that Picasso’s collage contains a turned-on confrontation between visual and verbal signifiers. Instead of implying as the conventional purely formalistic painting, the collage forms a new visual and verbal sign between its subject matters.

 

Braque and the Still life with Tenora

Unlike Picasso’s interest in daily life, Braque’s collage reveals his passion for bourgeois interiors and privacy. Although Gertrude Stein denied Braque’s contribution in co-inventing the papier colle with Picasso in 1912, it is widely recognized that Braque’s effort in experimenting the collage. (Krauss, 2016).

By the 1930s, the rise of fascism brought new urgency of questioning the interconnection between aesthetics and politics. Braque’s emphatically focused inward-looking on his structured still life and bourgeois interiors.1930s is an era of fascism, which brought new urgency of questioning the interrelationship between aesthetics and politics. While Braque creates an unfamiliar world that disconnects the outside and remains quiet human freedom inside by his collage.

He emphatically inward-looked structured still life and bourgeois interiors. The subjects in his collage convey a complex narrative of a secluded and private disengagement with the outside environment.

The Still life with Tenora reveals the centripetal force in Braque’s collage that effectively blocks all possible limited movements. The still life with Tenora is Braque’s mixed-media collage representative. It was created in 1913 and comprised of wood grain paper, colorful paper, charcoal drawings, and paper.

Human spiritual connotation and figurative motifs are intertwined to evoke a rich vibrant composition. The mixed-media elements group out a centripetal shape at the center of the canvas. The outline lines and shadow around the clustered shapes arouse a spiritual connotation. While the figurative motifs are embedded in the charcoal drawing and interlaced with the bold geometric shards. Therefore, the human spiritual connotation and the figurative motifs are intertwined and framed within the collage. The unique structure of Braque’s collage creates a reality that disengages with the outside world and each element acts as a foil into the other. (Rubin, 1989)

 

Braque’s collage achieves phenomenal transparency and dialectic contingency in creating the pictorial plane. Comparing to Picasso, whose primary focus and interest in form, Braque’s chief principal is the space, and his main concern is the problem of the pictorial plane.

Braque’s composition reveals two major principles of his collage. First of all, his collage achieves a high level of phenomenal transparency. The phenomenal transparency is constructed by a spatial fluctuation and an interconnection of the background, figure, and an overall pictorial flatness. Secondly, Braque’s collage makes a complex, two levels of inside and outside dialectic contingencies

In the Still like with Tenora, the phenomenal transparency is achieved by the spatial collapse of pasted fragments. In Still life with Tenora, although the charcoal drawing at the bottom of the picture is applied to the table, it creates an imagination that understands to be in the foreground. The wood-grained paper at the center elevates as an interior wall with the other two black strips of paper, which in all constructs a spatial collapse and achieves phenomenal transparency.

Moreover, the phenomenal transparency achieves a reciprocal interpretation of the frontality, foreground, and background. Such achievement of phenomenal transparency perceives the two black stripes on the side as advancing even more forward than the wood-grained paper stripes. The wood-grained paper stripe and two black paper stripes can be read as the positive figure.

However, the lighter area of the canvas away from the central pasted elements can also be read as the positive figure. As if the wood-grained paper stripe to be viewed as negative, or residual, space of the canvas. It can be read as no less calculated or figural in elevation or plane. In this way, the black stripes might be read as the visual but non-physical separated element. In other words, the pasted papers construct a co-planar surface, a reciprocal foreground, and background relationship. Such reciprocity obscures a continuity of the frontality.

Furthermore, Braque’s collage delivers an inside/outside dialectic by its complex composition. In the Still life with Tenora, 1913, Braque created a rectilinear frame that presents a contingent condition for less egalitarian visual expansion.

Braque makes his collage composition like an interior. In which the still life opens up like a window and the audience beholds an exterior realm through the window. For example, in the Still like with Tenora, the pasted wood-grained piece, and glued black piece frame a phenomenal window that opens up or voids the space on the surface of the canvas. Nevertheless, the pasted paper pieces imply an architectural window within the interior room that is depicted by the collage. The depth of Braque’s collage is perceived by the exterior realm that recedes from the pictorial plane and exists as a world of nature beyond.

Any one of the four edges is independent of the other three on the visual field that is coherently presented and altered as a whole. Therefore, the conventional rectangular frame creates an inside/outside dialectic of an asymmetrical composition, which connects to Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec. (Hildner, 1996) Braque’s collage also foreshadows the paintings of Mondrian and Fritz Glarner on the level of a pure pictorial plane and equivocally balance.

Moreover, Braque’s collage reveals the opposition between the interior and pictorial plane. The interior realm is defined by the pictorial frame, while the pictorial planes make a laterally and top-to-bottom exterior that exists outside the two-dimensional restricted plane of a canvas. For example, the wood-grained pieces at the center the two black stripes at the bottom illustrate a planar extension beyond the edges of the frame.

Braque’s collage is ultimately about depicting the idea of window, which is the idea that vital to the interdependent consciousness of painting and architecture on all levels. As Rosalind Krauss states that “behind every 20th century grid there lies...a symbolist window parading in the guise of a treatise on optics.” (Krauss, 2016) The window in his collage creates an architectural perspective. The window achieves an equivocal balance between the abstraction and representation, the reality of canvas surface, and the phenomenon of depth, structure, and symbol.

 

Conclusion

Collage paved the way for the development of cubism. Picasso and Braque shared their advantages during the progress of inventing the collage. Two pioneering artists closely worked together in developing new art forms and bringing changes to the 20th-century art scene. Through detailed social and historical context and visual analysis, this paper examined Picasso and Braque’s artistic practice of collage. Their collage shared similarities in many aspects and both keep distinctive characteristics.

  

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