Collage - Tate

Collage

Collage describes both the technique and the resulting work of art in which pieces of paper, photographs, fabric and other ephemera are arranged and stuck down onto a supporting surface

• Twitter
• Facebook
• Email
• Pinterest

The term collage derives from the French term papiers collés (or découpage), used to describe techniques of pasting paper cut-outs onto various surfaces. It was first used as an artists’ technique in the early twentieth century.

Collage can also include other media such as painting and drawing, and contain three-dimensional elements.

Collage allows the opening up of conscious, which is very direct…its also a way of looking at what you are consuming all the time – John Stezaker

Does this text contain inaccurate information or language that you feel we should improve or change? We would like to hear from you.

RELATED TERMS AND CONCEPTS

Left Right read

Papier collé

French term which translates as pasted paper, papier collé is a specific form of collage that is closer to drawing than painting

read

Montage

A montage is an assembly of images that relate to each other in some way to create a single work or part of a work of art

read

Photomontage

A photomontage is a collage constructed from photographs

read

Mixed media

Mixed media is a term used to describe artworks composed from a combination of different media or materials

read

Dada

Dada was an art movement formed during the First World War in Zurich in negative reaction to the horrors and folly of the war. The art, poetry and performance produced by dada artists is often satirical and nonsensical in nature

read

Neo-dada

The term neo-dada applied to the work of artists working in America in the 1950s and 1960s which was reminiscent of the art of the early twentieth century dada movement

read

Arte nucleare

Arte nucleare was an artist group founded in Milan in 1951 whose aim was to make art in response to the nuclear age

read

Nouveau réalisme

Nouveau réalisme was a French movement which can be seen as a European counterpart to pop art

read

Décollage

Décollage is a French word meaning literally to unstick, generally associated with a process used by artists of the nouveau réalisme (new realism) movement that involved making art from posters ripped from walls

read

Merz

Merz is a nonsense word invented by the German dada artist Kurt Schwitters to describe his collage and assemblage works based on scavenged scrap materials

read

Pop art

Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the 1950s and flourished in the 1960s in America and Britain, drawing inspiration from sources in popular and commercial culture. Different cultures and countries contributed to the movement during the 1960s and 70s

read

Surrealism

A twentieth-century literary, philosophical and artistic movement that explored the workings of the mind, championing the irrational, the poetic and the revolutionary

read

Independent Group

The Independent Group (IG) were a radical group of young artists, writers and critics who met at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London in the 1950s, and challenged the dominant modernist (and as they saw it elitist) culture dominant at that time, in order to make it more inclusive of popular culture

read

Assemblage

Assemblage is art that is made by assembling disparate elements – often everyday objects – scavenged by the artist or bought specially

EXPLORE THIS TERM

Left Right read

John Stezaker on Joseph Cornell

John Stezaker

In our continuing series in which we invite an artist to focus on a work in the Tate collection, John Stezaker reveals his debt to the self-taught American artist, sculptor and filmmaker Joseph Cornell (1903–1972), who was best known for his boxed assemblages of found objects

read

Merzzeichnung: Typology and Typography

Michael White

When Kurt Schwitters began making collages in 1918, the initial term he used to describe them was Merzzeichnungen (Merz drawings). This article considers the place of drawing in the development of Schwitters’s Merz practice and argues that the close connection he made between drawings and collages was not merely because of their common status as works on paper. By analogising collage and drawing, Schwitters gave new priority to the latter but not as immediate access to the artist’s thought. Rather, drawing was a medium that could meld together elements of painting, printmaking and writing, disrupting conventional artistic categories and demanding a greater role for the viewer in creative interpretation.

read

Paolozzi’s Pop New Brutalist World

Alex Potts

In its engagement with mass media and modern industry, the work of Eduardo Paolozzi combined pop tendencies with the logic of new brutalism, as Alex Potts explores.

read

Beatriz Milhazes on Matisse

For issue 31 of Tate Etc., we asked three contemporary artists to talk about their personal fascination with Henri Matisse. Here, Beatriz Milhazes reflects on seeing the restoration of Acanthus 1953 at Fondation Beyeler, Basel

read

'I sing with my pens'

Eleanor Clayton

To coincide with her forthcoming exhibition at Tate Liverpool – her first solo show in a British institution – Eleanor Clayton pays a visit to the studio of celebrated octogenarian Romanian artist Geta Brătescu

read

Merzzeichnung: Typology and Typography

Michael White

When Kurt Schwitters began making collages in 1918, the initial term he used to describe them was Merzzeichnungen (Merz drawings). This article considers the place of drawing in the development of Schwitters’s Merz practice and argues that the close connection he made between drawings and collages was not merely because of their common status as works on paper. By analogising collage and drawing, Schwitters gave new priority to the latter but not as immediate access to the artist’s thought. Rather, drawing was a medium that could meld together elements of painting, printmaking and writing, disrupting conventional artistic categories and demanding a greater role for the viewer in creative interpretation.

listen

Schwitters in context: The British years

Audio recording. This half-day conference brings together leading scholars in the field to discuss Kurt Schwitters’s British period and its broader context.

SELECTED ARTISTS IN THE COLLECTION

Left Right

John Stezaker

born 1949

Kurt Schwitters

1887–1948

Barry Martin

1943 – 2025

Richard Hamilton

1922–2011

Sir Eduardo Paolozzi

1924–2005

Max Ernst

1891–1976

Peter Blake

born 1932

Robert Rauschenberg

1925–2008

SELECTED ARTWORKS IN THE COLLECTION

Left Right

Mask XIII

John Stezaker 2006

Bottle of Vieux Marc, Glass, Guitar and Newspaper

Pablo Picasso 1913 On display at Tate Modern Part of Theatre Picasso

Just what was it that made yesterday’s homes so different, so appealing? (upgrade)

Richard Hamilton 2004

The Art Critic

Raoul Hausmann 1919–20

Magnetic Moths

Sir Roland Penrose 1938

Movement Collage

Barry Martin 1965 View by appointment

SELECTED SKETCHBOOKS, LETTERS ETC.

Left Right

‘A collage for Eileen’

Paul Nash, recipient: Eileen Agar [1935–46]

Private view invitation to the ‘Collage’ exhibition held at The Museum of Modern Art

Museum of Modern Art (New York, USA) 1948

Collage consisting of the lower legs of a statue cut out of a magazine or photograph and glued onto a painting of the head and torso of a man

Eileen Agar View by appointment

Leaflet for a collage exhibition entitled, ‘E.L.T. MESENS’

Palais des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles (Brussels, Belgium) [25 April–13 May 1959]

COLLAGE AT TATE

Exhibition PAST EVENT

Richard Hamilton

Tate Modern presents the first retrospective of a founding figure of pop art Richard Hamilton in February 2014

Tate Modern 13 Feb – 26 May 2014 Exhibition PAST EVENT

Schwitters in Britain

Spring 2013 Tate Britain presents Schwitters in Britain, the first major exhibition to examine the late work of Kurt Schwitters, one of the major artists of European Modernism. The exhibition includes collages, assemblages and sculptures

Tate Britain 30 Jan – 12 May 2013 Exhibition PAST EVENT

Robert Rauschenberg

Discover the artist who changed American art forever

Tate Modern 1 Dec 2016 – 2 Apr 2017 Close