Collage
In the early part of the twentieth century, the artistic revolution in Europe was shocking the world with images that had never before been seen. Instead of representational content, the pictorial sources came from an abstraction of physical reality or the realization of a personal, inner reality. Cubists, Dadaists, and Surrealists changed the face and meaning of art.
Before World War I, the Dada movement produced works of anti-art that deliberately defied reason. Growing principally out of Dada, Surrealism flourished in Europe between the world wars as a visual art and
literary
movement. Surrealist images had a dreamlike quality ”time, space, and matter were completely malleable. Compelled by the idea that rational thought and behavior had brought the world close to the brink of annihilation, the Surrealists created images that were anti-rational and anti-bourgeois. Surrealist
painters
such as Jean Arp, Max Ernst, Salvador Dal , Paul Delvaux, Ren Magritte, Andr Masson, Joan Mir ³, and Yves Tanguy created new
worlds
where the nature of reality depended only on the artist s unlimited
imagination
.
Hand in hand with this new
aesthetic
freedom came new image technologies. For
artists
concerned
with the free association of images and the meaningful relation of unrelated objects, collage was the technique of choice. The recycling of printed graphics and text in the form of collage was developed to accommodate the Surrealists need to create the visual non sequitur. For the first time, printed images from multiple sources were combined to produce a new pictorial reality. The Surrealist Max Ernst created a book called
Une semaine de bont
(
A Week of Kindness
), a pictorial novel consisting entirely of recycled engravings from newspapers, magazines, and catalogs. This
novel
was a technical and aesthetic tour de force when it was published in 1933. It epitomized and refined the absurdist viewpoint of the Surrealists and the freedom and creativity in which they pursued their artistic vision.
Photomontage
New movements in art and graphic design blossomed in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s as a result of the instability brought about by the aftermath of World War I, the Great Depression, and the Russian Revolution. Constructivism, New Typography, Streamline, and Dada recycled photographic images, typography, and graphics as collage elements in a new process called photomontage.
Radical magazines and newspapers from the period, for example,
Simplicicimus, Der Knuppel,
and
Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung
(
AIZ
, or
Worker s Illustrated Times
), published photomontage images as satirical cartoons to promote a
socialist
or anti-fascist political agenda.
Photomontage
is a collage of photographs that are
carefully
cut and pasted together to create a new visual reality. Often, type and other graphic elements are incorporated into the composition. These images
synthesized
the seamless pictorial realities of multiple photographic images into biting political metaphors and clever visual puns. Traditional cut-and-paste photomontage was an art form derived from the Cubist, Dadaist, and Surrealist movements, but was displayed in the commercial
venue
of magazine
publications
. It was the predecessor of the digital composite images we see in many of today s advertisements.
The ability to combine photographs, text, and graphics from multiple sources is one of Photoshop s strongest features. Images can be collected from a scanner, digital camera, or Photo CD, and be composited, superimposed, positioned, scaled,
flipped
,
rotated
, and
distorted
. In Photoshop, almost any effect is possible; the only limitation is your
imagination
.