Collage is art made by assembling paper, photographs, and found materials. Learn its history from Picasso and Braque to Hannah Hoch and contemporary artists.
In May 1912, Georges Braque was in his studio in Paris, working on a series of paintings that fragmented objects into geometric planes. He picked up a roll of wood-grained wallpaper, the kind used to line the interiors of furniture, and cut three pieces from it. He glued them onto a drawing he had made of a fruit dish and a glass. The drawing was in charcoal and gouache. The wallpaper was not drawn to look like wood grain. It was wood grain, printed on paper, pasted directly onto the surface of the artwork. Braque called the result Fruit Dish and Glass. It is considered the first papier colle, the first pasted-paper collage, and it changed what an artwork could be made of.
Collage is an art technique in which materials are cut, torn, or assembled and glued onto a surface to create a new image. The word comes from the French "coller," meaning to glue. The materials can be anything: newspaper, wallpaper, photographs, fabric, sheet music, ticket stubs, packaging, or any other piece of paper or material that the artist selects. Collage is distinct from painting because the materials retain their original identity. A piece of newspaper in a collage is still a piece of newspaper, even as it becomes part of a composition. This quality, the simultaneous presence of the material's original meaning and its new role in the artwork, is what gives collage its particular power.
This entry covers what collage is, how it emerged from Cubism, which artists defined it, and how a technique that began as a radical disruption of painting has become one of the most widely practiced art forms in the world.
Collage is the act of assembling pre-existing materials onto a surface to create an artwork. The artist does not paint or draw the image from scratch. Instead, the artist selects, cuts, arranges, and glues materials that already exist, creating new meaning through their combination. The materials may be modified (cut, torn, painted over) or left in their original state. The surface may be paper, canvas, wood, or any other support.
The Tate defines collage as "a technique that incorporates the use of found materials, such as paper, photographs, and fabric, which are glued to a surface to create a new image." Read more at Tate. MoMA notes that collage "introduced the use of everyday materials into fine art, breaking down the distinction between art and life." Read more at MoMA.
Collage is related to assemblage, which is the three-dimensional version of the same principle. Collage is two-dimensional, assemblage is three-dimensional. Collage is also related to found object art, in which an existing object is presented as art without modification. The distinction is that collage combines multiple materials into a new composition, while a found object is typically a single item designated as art.
Collage as a fine art technique was invented by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso between 1912 and 1914. Braque made the first papier colle, Fruit Dish and Glass, in May 1912, using wood-grain wallpaper pasted onto a charcoal and gouache drawing. Picasso made his first collage, Still Life with Chair Caning, in May 1912 as well, gluing a piece of oilcloth printed with a chair-caning pattern onto an oval canvas and wrapping it with a length of hemp rope.
The invention of collage was not accidental. Braque and Picasso had been developing Cubism since 1907, breaking objects into geometric facets and showing multiple viewpoints simultaneously. By 1912, they had pushed fragmentation as far as it could go in paint. Collage was the next step. Instead of painting a newspaper, they pasted a real piece of newspaper onto the canvas. Instead of painting wood grain, they pasted wood-grain wallpaper. This introduced real objects into the space of art, collapsing the distance between representation and reality.
The effect was profound. A painted newspaper in a Cubist painting is still an illusion. A pasted newspaper is the thing itself. The viewer sees both the newspaper and the composition it is part of, and the tension between those two readings is what collage produces. Picasso and Braque made dozens of collages in 1912-1914, using newspaper, wallpaper, sheet music, and labels. The Cubist collage established the principle that art could be made from anything, not just paint and canvas.
Dada artists embraced collage as part of their attack on traditional art. In Berlin, Dada artists developed photomontage, a form of collage that used photographs cut from newspapers and magazines. Hannah Hoch created photomontages that critiqued gender roles, mass media, and the Weimar Republic. Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany (1919) is a dense, satirical collage that combines images of politicians, dancers, machinery, and text into a chaotic but precisely composed image. Hoch's work showed that collage could be political, not just formal.
Kurt Schwitters, who was not officially a Dadaist but shared their spirit, made collages from refuse collected from the streets of Hanover: bus tickets, labels, buttons, scraps of wood and metal. He called his technique Merz, a word he took from a fragment of the word "Kommerz" found in a collage. Schwitters's Merz works established the principle that any material, no matter how humble, could be art if the artist selected and arranged it with intention.
Surrealist artists used collage to create unexpected combinations of images. Max Ernst developed the collage novel, a sequence of collages that told a narrative using images cut from Victorian engravings. Une Semaine de Bonte (1934) and La Femme 100 Tetes (1929) are composed entirely of collaged engravings, recombined to create dreamlike, disturbing scenes. Ernst's technique of rubbing textures onto paper (frottage) was itself a form of collage, transferring the surface of an object onto the image.
In the 1950s and 1960s, collage became central to Pop Art. Richard Hamilton's Just what is it that makes today's homes so different? (1956) is a collage of images cut from American magazines, assembled into an interior scene that satirizes consumer culture. The collage includes a bodybuilder holding a Tootsie Pop, a woman with a lampshade on her head, and a television showing a woman's face. Hamilton's collage is considered one of the first works of Pop Art, and it used collage's ability to combine mass-media images into a new, critical whole.
Collage has continued to evolve and remains one of the most widely practiced art techniques in the world. In 2026, the International Collage Exhibition in Warsaw, organized by Retroavangarda, brought together 74 artists from 24 countries at Galeria Dobra at the University of Warsaw Library from July 10 to August 23, 2026. The exhibition, celebrating its fourth edition and the 10th anniversary of Retroavangarda, presented outstanding examples of contemporary collage and explored the medium from artistic, educational, research, and cultural perspectives. Read more at Retroavangarda.
Also in 2026, Satchel Projects in New York presented Composite World, a group exhibition of contemporary collage curated by Paul Loughney from June 4 to July 2. The exhibition brought together seven artists whose work reveals collage's formal and conceptual possibilities, including Andrea Burgay, whose layered compositions explore cycles of destruction and renewal, and Eva Lake, whose photomontages recombine ancient sculpture fragments with midcentury women to examine how identity is constructed through images. Read more at Satchel Projects.
The Vancouver Collage Collective presented Nothing Is What It Was from May 8 to 10, 2026, a World Collage Day exhibition bringing together 35 international artists working in collage and mixed media. The exhibition explored how collage functions as "a way of knowing" in an image economy where meaning is unstable and narrative is editable. Read more at Vancouver Collage Collective.
Picasso's Still Life with Chair Caning (1912) is considered the first modern collage. He continued to make collages throughout the Cubist period, using newspaper, wallpaper, and sheet music. Picasso's collages are notable for their playful combination of materials and their exploration of the boundary between representation and reality. His later work, including Guitar (1913), a cardboard construction that bridges collage and sculpture, pushed the technique into three dimensions.
Braque made the first papier colle, Fruit Dish and Glass (1912), and developed the technique alongside Picasso. Braque's collages are more restrained and analytical than Picasso's, using fewer materials and more subtle compositions. His choice of wood-grain wallpaper was deliberate: it allowed him to introduce the texture and pattern of wood into the collage without painting it, collapsing the distinction between the painted image and the real material.
Hoch was the most important collage artist of the Dada movement. Her photomontages used images cut from magazines, newspapers, and illustrated journals to critique gender roles, mass media, and the political chaos of Weimar Germany. Cut with the Kitchen Knife (1919) is a landmark of political collage. Hoch's work showed that collage could be a tool for social critique, not just a formal experiment. She continued to make collages for five decades, developing a visual language that combined abstraction, figuration, and mass-media imagery.
Schwitters's Merz collages, made from scavenged refuse, established the principle that any material can be art. His collages from bus tickets, labels, and scraps of paper are among the most influential works in the history of the medium. Schwitters's Merzbau, a room-sized architectural collage built into his house in Hanover over many years, was destroyed by Allied bombing in 1943 but has been partially reconstructed at the Sprengel Museum. Read more about his work in our entry on assemblage.
Hamilton's Just what is it that makes today's homes so different? (1956) is one of the first works of Pop Art and a masterpiece of collage. Using images cut from American magazines, Hamilton created an interior scene that both celebrated and satirized consumer culture. The collage's combination of mass-media imagery with fine art composition established a model that Pop artists would use for the next two decades.
Bearden used collage to depict African American life, combining photographs, magazine clippings, and painted paper to create images of urban neighborhoods, jazz musicians, and family scenes. The Block (1971), a 6-foot-long collage now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, shows a Harlem street with multiple scenes of daily life. Bearden's work demonstrated that collage could be a narrative and documentary medium, not just a formal or political one.
Collage is closely related to assemblage, the three-dimensional version of the same principle. It connects to Cubism, the movement that invented collage, and to Dadaism, which embraced collage as a tool for political and cultural critique. It relates to the found object, the individual element from which collages are built. Photomontage, a specific form of collage using photographs, connects to photography as fine art. For broader context, read our post on collage as art from Cubist newspapers to Hannah Hoch, or explore our guide to mixed media art.
Collage is best seen in person, where the physical layers of paper, the textures of different materials, and the evidence of cutting and gluing can be appreciated. Picasso's and Braque's collages are in the collections of MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Musee Picasso in Paris. Hannah Hoch's photomontages are at the Berlinische Galerie and the National Museum of Modern Art in Berlin. Richard Hamilton's work is at the Tate Modern. Romare Bearden's collages are at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Contemporary collage can be seen at galleries and exhibitions worldwide. In 2026, the International Collage Exhibition in Warsaw (through August 23) and Composite World at Satchel Projects in New York (through July 2) are notable group shows. For more on related techniques, read our entries on assemblage and Cubism, or explore our post on collage as art.
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