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.