Assemblage is sculpture made from found objects and everyday materials. Learn its history from Picasso to Rauschenberg, key artists, and how it changed art.
In the spring of 1912, Pablo Picasso glued a piece of oilcloth, printed to simulate chair caning, onto a canvas he was painting. He wrapped a length of hemp rope around the oval canvas instead of framing it. The result, Still Life with Chair Caning, is considered the first collage by a modern master. But it also did something else: it brought a real object, a piece of manufactured oilcloth, into the space of art. That act of incorporation, of taking something from the world and placing it in a work without transforming it into paint or marble, is the foundation of assemblage.
Assemblage is an artistic technique in which three-dimensional works are constructed from found objects, everyday materials, and prefabricated elements rather than carved, modeled, or cast. The term was coined by the French artist Jean Dubuffet in the early 1950s for a series of collages using butterfly wings, which he called assemblages d'empreintes. The practice itself dates to Picasso's cubist constructions of 1912-1914. Assemblage blurs the boundary between sculpture and collage, between art and the everyday world, and between the artist as creator and the artist as selector. The Museum of Modern Art's 1961 exhibition The Art of Assemblage, curated by William Seitz, established the term and the practice as a major movement in 20th-century art.
This entry covers what assemblage is, its history from Cubism to the present, which artists defined it, and how to understand it when you encounter it.
Assemblage is sculpture built from pre-existing materials. The artist does not carve a figure from stone or model one in clay. Instead, the artist selects objects, combines them, and presents the combination as a work of art. The objects may be modified, painted, or left in their original state. They may be natural (stones, branches, bones) or manufactured (bicycle wheels, bottles, furniture, photographs). The key characteristic is that the components retain some trace of their original identity and function, even as they take on new meaning within the artwork.
William Seitz, curator of the 1961 MoMA exhibition, described assemblages as being made of "preformed natural or manufactured materials, objects, or fragments not intended as art materials." The assembler, he wrote, is "like a beachcomber, a collector, or a scavenger wandering among ruins" who "discovers order as well as materials by accident." Read the exhibition catalogue at MoMA.
Assemblage overlaps with collage, which is two-dimensional, and with installation art, which is environmental. The distinction is that assemblage is typically a discrete object, freestanding or wall-mounted, while installation art fills a room or space. The Tate defines assemblage as "a broad term referring to sculpture or installation art that assembles various found objects." Read more at Tate.
Assemblage began with Picasso and Georges Braque. In May 1912, Picasso completed Still Life with Chair Caning, which incorporated oilcloth and rope. Shortly after, he began constructing small cubist sculptures from fragments of cardboard and wood. Still Life (1914), made from scraps of wood and a length of tablecloth fringing glued together and painted, is an early three-dimensional assemblage. Braque introduced newsprint into his drawings, and Juan Gris added mirror glass, photographs, and other materials to his paintings. These works broke the convention that art must be made from traditional materials and opened the door to the use of anything as art material.
Dada artists embraced assemblage as part of their attack on traditional art. Marcel Duchamp designated ordinary objects, like a bottle rack and a urinal, as artworks he called readymades. Kurt Schwitters began assembling pictures from bus tickets, labels, buttons, and refuse collected from the streets of Hanover, calling his technique Merz. Schwitters's Merzbau, a room-sized sculptural construction built into his house over many years, was the most ambitious assemblage of the period before it was destroyed by Allied bombing in 1943. Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, the Dada Baroness, created assemblages from found objects in New York, establishing herself as one of the earliest women artists in the medium.
Surrealist artists used assemblage to create surprising and unsettling combinations of objects. Salvador Dali fabricated agglomerations of mannequins, lobsters, and bread. Meret Oppenheim's Object (1936), a teacup covered in fur, is a surrealIST assemblage that transforms a familiar object into something disturbing. The surrealists drew on Freud's writings about the unconscious and dreams, combining unlikely objects to create what they called the "uncanny."
In the 1950s, assemblage became widely practiced. Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns used scrappy materials and found objects to create what was called Neo-Dada. Rauschenberg's Combines (1954-1964), such as Bed (1955), which incorporates a real quilt and pillow, and Monogram (1955-1959), which includes a stuffed goat with a tire around its middle, blur the line between painting and sculpture. Louise Nevelson began creating her monumental wooden assemblages from found pieces of wood in the late 1930s, painting them uniform black or gold to unify disparate fragments. The Britannica notes that Jean Dubuffet coined the term "assemblage" in the early 1950s for his collages of butterfly wings. Read more at Britannica.
The exhibition The Art of Assemblage at the Museum of Modern Art in 1961 brought together works by Braque, Dubuffet, Duchamp, Picasso, Schwitters, Man Ray, Joseph Cornell, Rauschenberg, and West Coast artists including George Herms, Bruce Conner, and Edward Kienholz. The show revealed an international, multi-generational interest in found object sculpture and established assemblage as a recognized art form. The National Galleries of Scotland note that the exhibition "revealed a widespread, international interest in found object sculpture as a means of connecting art with the matter of ordinary life." Read more at National Galleries of Scotland.
Picasso's Still Life with Chair Caning (1912) and his constructed sculptures of 1912-1914 are the origin point of assemblage. His Bull's Head (1942), made from a bicycle saddle and handlebars, is a concise demonstration of the assemblage principle: two ordinary objects, combined, become something else entirely. Picasso continued to use assemblage intermittently throughout his career, building sculptures from ceramics, wood, and metal.
Schwitters's Merz works, made from scavenged refuse, are among the most influential assemblages in art history. His collages and three-dimensional constructions from bus tickets, wood scraps, and found paper established the principle that any material can be art. The Merzbau, his room-sized architectural assemblage, was destroyed in 1943 but has been reconstructed at the Sprengel Museum in Hanover.
Rauschenberg's Combines are the most famous American assemblages. Monogram (1955-1959), with its stuffed Angora goat, tire, and painted platform, and Bed (1955), with its real quilt and pillow splashed with paint, challenged the distinction between painting and sculpture, between art object and real object. Rauschenberg described his approach as operating "in the gap between art and life."
Nevelson created monumental assemblages from found wooden objects, architectural fragments, and furniture parts, arranged in stacked boxes and painted a single color. Sky Cathedral (1958) and Dawn's Wedding Feast (1959) show her ability to unify disparate fragments through monochrome painting, creating works that read as abstract compositions while retaining the ghost of their original materials.
Kienholz created life-size assemblage environments from found objects, furniture, and mannequins. The State Hospital (1966) and Back Seat Dodge '38 (1964) are gritty, confrontational works that use assemblage to address social and political subjects. Kienholz's work, shown at the 1961 MoMA exhibition, represented the West Coast assemblage tradition, which was rougher and more politically engaged than the East Coast version.
Cornell's box constructions, assembled from found objects, photographs, and ephemera, are intimate and poetic. Untitled (Soap Bubble Set) (c. 1936) and his Medici Slot Machine series combine Victorian imagery with scientific instruments in glass-fronted boxes. Cornell's assemblages are the opposite of Kienholz's in scale and tone, but they share the principle of using found materials to create new meaning.
Assemblage is related to collage, the two-dimensional version of the same principle, and to the found object (objet trouve), the individual element from which assemblages are built. Marcel Duchamp's readymade is a related concept: an ordinary object designated as art without modification. Assemblage connects to installation art, which extends the principle to entire spaces, and to Dadaism and Surrealism, the movements that first embraced found objects. The Arte Povera movement in Italy extended assemblage using throwaway natural materials.
Picasso's Bull's Head is at the Musee Picasso in Paris. Rauschenberg's Monogram is at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. Nevelson's works are at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, and the Whitney Museum. Cornell's boxes are at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago. Kienholz's works are at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum.
When you look at an assemblage, identify the components. Some will be recognizable, some transformed beyond recognition. The tension between the object's original identity and its new role in the artwork is what gives assemblage its power. For more on related techniques, read our entries on collage and found objects, or explore our guide on how to read a painting for visual analysis skills.
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