Photomontage | Tate

Photomontage

A photomontage is a collage constructed from photographs

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Exhibition PAST EVENT

Dora Maar

The most comprehensive retrospective of Dora Maar ever held

Tate Modern 20 Nov 2019 – 15 Mar 2020

Photomontage is often used as a means of expressing political dissent.

It was first used as a technique by the dadaists in 1915 in their protests against the First World War. It was later adopted by the surrealists who exploited the possibilities photomontage offered by using free association to bring together widely disparate images, to reflect the workings of the unconscious mind.

In 1923 the Russian constructivist Aleksander Rodchenko began experimenting with photomontage as a way of creating striking socially engaged imagery concerned with the placement and movement of objects in space.

Other key exponents of the medium are John Heartfield, the German artist who reconstructed images from the media to protest against Germany’s Fascist regime and Peter Kennard; whose photomontages explored issues such as economic inequality, police brutality and the nuclear arms race between the 1970s and the 1990s.

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related terms and concepts

Left Right 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

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

read

Mixed media

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

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

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

Constructivism

Constructivism was a particularly austere branch of abstract art founded by Vladimir Tatlin and Alexander Rodchenko in Russia around 1915

selected artists in the collection

Left Right

Robert Rauschenberg

1925–2008

Kurt Schwitters

1887–1948

John Stezaker

born 1949

Man Ray

1890–1976

Raoul Hausmann

1886–1971

Peter Kennard

born 1949

Gilbert & George

born 1943, born 1942

Andy Warhol

1928–1987

selected artworks in the collection

Left Right

Pledge

Robert Rauschenberg 1968 View by appointment

Mask XIV

John Stezaker 2006

The Kissinger Mind

Peter Kennard 1979

The Proposal

Kurt Schwitters 1942

Light Headed

Gilbert & George 1991

Andy Warhol’s Exposures

Andy Warhol 1979 Close