Different Types of Collage and Cubism

A collage (From the French: coller, to glue) is a work of formal art, made from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole. Use of this technique made its dramatic appearance among oil paintings in the early 20th century as an art form of groundbreaking novelty. An artistic collage work may include newspaper clippings, ribbons, bits of colored or hand-made papers, portions of other artwork, photographs, and such, glued to a piece of paper or canvas.


Techniques of collage were first used at the time of the invention of paper in China around 200 BC. The use of collage, however, remained very limited until the 10th century in Japan, when calligraphers began to apply glued paper, using texts on surfaces, when writing their poems.

The technique of collage appeared in medieval Europe during the 13th century. Gold leaf panels started to be applied in Gothic cathedrals around the 15th and 16th centuries. Gemstones and other precious metals were applied to religious images, icons, and also, to coats of arms.
In the 19th century, collage methods also were used among hobbyists for memorabilia (i.e. applied to photo albums) and books (i.e. Hans Christian Andersen, Carl Spitzweg).



Collage in Painting

Collage in the modernist sense began with Cubist painters Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso. According to some sources, Picasso was the first to use the collage technique in oil paintings. According to the Guggenheim Museum's online article about collage, Braque took up the concept of collage itself before Picasso, applying it to charcoal drawings. Picasso adopted collage immediately after (and was perhaps indeed the first to use collage in paintings, as opposed to drawings):
"It was Braque who purchased a roll of simulated oak-grain wallpaper and began cutting out pieces of the paper and attaching them to his charcoal drawings. Picasso immediately began to make his own experiments in the new medium."

In 1912 for his Still Life with Chair Caning (Nature-morte à la chaise cannée),[3] Picasso pasted a patch of oilcloth with a chair-cane design onto the canvas of the piece.

Surrealist artists have made extensive use of collage. Cubomania is a collage made by cutting an image into squares which are then reassembled automatically or at random.

Inimage is a name given by René Passerson to what is usually considered a style of surrealist collage (though it perhaps qualifies instead as a decollage) in which parts are cut away from an existing image to reveal another image. Collages produced using a similar, or perhaps identical, method used by Richard Genovese are called etrécissements by Marcel Mariën from a method first explored by Mariën. Genovese also introduced excavation collage (that includes elements of decollage) which is the layering of printed images, loosely affixed at the corners and then tearing away bits of the upper layer to reveal images from underneath, thereby introducing a new collage of images. Penelope Rosemont invented some methods of surrealist collage, the prehensilhouette and the landscapade.


Collage was often called the art form of the twentieth century, but this was never fully realized.Surrealist games such as parallel collage use collective techniques of collage making.
Another technique is that of canvas collage, which is the application, typically with glue, of separately painted canvas patches to the surface of a painting's main canvas. Well known for use of this technique is British artist John Walker in his paintings of the late 1970s, but canvas collage was already an integral part of the mixed media works of such American artists as Conrad Marca-Relli and Jane Frank by the early 1960s. The intensely self-critical Lee Krasner also frequently destroyed her own paintings by cutting them into pieces, only to create new works of art by reassembling the pieces into collages.

The above exerpt was taken from wikipedia.com

1. What is collage?
2. Using the website: http://www.arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/cubism/ or http://instruct.westvalley.edu/grisham/1d_analycub.html, http://instruct.westvalley.edu/grisham/1d_synthcub.html and answer the following questions:
3. What is cubism? Give a general definition.
4. How did it start?
5. What is analytical cubism? Name a piece of analytical cubist artwork.
6. What is synthetic cubism? Name a piece of synthetic cubist artwork.
7. Do you like cubism? Why or why not explain using the vocabulary of the elements and principles of design.

Assignment:

Step One Answer the questions above on your blog or post your answers on your own blog.

Step One:  paint a portrait of yourself using layers like was done in Grade 11

Step Two: fragment or break that painting a part so that it becomes either a synthetic or cubist self-portrait
(Make sure that you keep a copy of your original painting as you will need it). Every time you make a major shift or change in your original portait painting you must save it as a new layer.

The work should show some aspect of your personality in it.