It is interesting to speculate on the coincidence of the explosion in the Arts which, with the advent of Cubism, Abstraction and Collage, literally blew apart traditional pictorial perspective, space and eventually all recognizable traces to reality just before World War I. His art cannot help but reflect - to some extent - the environment in which it is created. The artist, after all, does not live in some kind of isolated vacuum, but is part and parcel of the time, place and society in which he lives. The drastic and rapid changes in the Arts of this period must be considered related to everything else that was happening all around the artist. This sudden upheaval of artistic creativity was part of all the other revolutions occurring at about the same time in the fields of science, technology, medicine, economics, sociology and politics. What happened in Europe at the beginning of the 20th Century was a revolution, when, within a few years, more radical and drastic changes took place in the Arts than in all the centuries preceding it. It occurred mainly in Paris - but also in Germany, Russia and Italy and after World War II has continued in the United States. The time was the great artistic revolution we call Modern Art which began at the turn of the 20th Century. It was this motivation - to explore Art beyond the limits of traditional painting - that the first experiments in collage as a serious creative medium took place. But used discriminately and judiciously, collage can be the means to go beyond the limits of painting and open up for the adventurous artist new fields of ever-expanding creativity. The artist working in collage, to an even greater extent than the painter, must develop a keen sense of esthetics as the only true guide if collage is not to degenerate into mere decoration or a gaudy assembly of meaningless material. The range is limitless.īecause of these limitless material possibilities, it becomes particularly essential for the collagist to be discriminating in choosing among this limitless array. The range of material for collage is truly unlimited and infinite, subject only to the limitations imposed by the individual artist's imagination and discrimination.Īmong the various materials successfully used in collage have been: newspaper and magazines (typographical as well as pictorial elements), wallpaper and other decorative papers as well as solid colored material such as construction and tissue paper, leaflets and posters, letters and post cards, all kinds of woven cloth (opaque as well as transparent), canvass (raw as well as primed and tinted), fragments of paintings, drawings and collages, all kinds of organic substances such as leaves, flower petals, bark, butterfly wings, sawdust, coffee grounds, potato peel as well as sand, string, etc., etc. A collage, on the other hand, is created by the progressive addition (or also subtraction) of an unlimited variety of already finished materials, substances and objects. A painting is created by the progressive addition of a universally uniform substance - paint, consisting of a basic raw material - a color pigment and a medium. Other related terms are: Assemblage, which is the three-dimensional or sculptural equivalent of College Montage, which usually consists only of pictures or photos and Deshirage, when tearing rather than cutting is used.Īll these terms signify the basic difference of collage from the medium of painting. Since the mainstream of Modern Art had its beginnings in France, the term Collage, as so many other art terms, is French, meaning that which is pasted together. When speaking of Collage, one refers to an art style, concept and technique closely bound up with the very beginnings of Modern Art and particularly with Cubism and Surrealism. Actually, the first serious use of collage occurred in 1912. This quotation is from the book "Collage" by Janis and Blesch, published by Chilton in 1967.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |