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. Their use of papier collé (a term used to distinguish cut and pasted papers from the more inclusive term collage) signaled the beginning of a new approach to art. Picasso and Braque placed great value on commonplace materials and objects and on subjects drawn from the everyday world: a newspaper, a bottle of ale, or a pipe are redolent with meaning. References to current events, such as the war in the Balkans, and to popular culture enriched the content of their art. The artists also extended their experiments to include sculpture constructed out of found objects and flimsy two-dimensional materials such as cardboard.

The Futurists and the Dadaists employed collage to protest entrenched values, while the artists of the Russian avant-garde used photomontage, an outgrowth of collage, to demonstrate their support for a progressive world order. For the Surrealists, collage served as a surrogate for the subconscious. Pop artists recognized it as a means of directly incorporating elements of popular culture into their work. Robert Rauschenberg expanded collage in his own way by creating Combines, assemblages of paintings and found objects that were intended, he said, to act in the gap between art and life.

Emphasizing concept and process over end product, collage has brought the incongruous into meaningful congress with the ordinary. With its capacity for change, speed, immediacy, and ephemerality, collage is ideally suited to the demands of this and the prior century. It is a medium of materiality, a record of our civilization, a document of the timely and the transitory. It is no wonder that today’s artists continue to use collage as a way of giving expression to the unorthodox, both in art and life.