Whether purposefully or randomly composed, the juxtapositions between images and objects created by the collage technique have long intrigued artists. Because images can take on new meanings in new contexts, collage can subvert traditional meanings and at the same time multiply meanings, creating works that don't easily settle into single, fixed analyses. Arp made this work in Zurich, the center of the emerging Dada movement. In the aftermath of World War I, Dadaists felt that traditional social systems and the emphasis on reason were responsible for the war and, as a result, they sought to free art from rational and intentional strategies and to create a new anti-art that was concrete and eschewed traditional notions of artistic genius. Closely working with his partner Sophie Taeuber, Arp said, "We painted, embroidered, and made collages. All these works were drawn from the simplest forms and were probably the first examples of concrete art. These works are realities pure and independent with no meaning or cerebral intention. We rejected all mimesis and description, giving free reign to the elementary and spontaneous." Arp's experiments with chance and collage were readily incorporated into other Dadaist techniques and later Surrealism and subsequently influenced a host of post-World War II artists who sought to subvert authorial intention and control. Elevate your photo and collage game with PicCollage. From putting multiple photos in a grid layout, to creating a beautiful holiday card, PicCollage is a photo collage maker that makes it easy to express your creativity. Evocative of a dingy interior, this collage, which includes pasted papers and fabric, remains resolutely abstract, as its elements evade signification. As Motherwell wrote, "One cuts and chooses and shifts and pastes, and sometimes tears off and begins again." Associated with the Abstract Expressionists, Motherwell's work is often considered in the trauma experienced in the wake of World War II. In 2013, art critic Holland Cotter described the collage as a "moody, unkempt concoction of smudged ink, nervy doodles and perspectival geometry, punctuated by a scrap cut from a military map and a sprinkling of curious red stains on a patch of white paper, like blood seeping through a bandage."

With this work, Rauschenberg transformed the concept of two-dimensional collage into the three-dimensional realm. This iconic "combine" (Rauschenberg's preferred the term to assemblage) brings together a range of found objects, including a taxidermied Angora goat, its face daubed with bright paint, wearing a tire around its abdomen, standing on an abstract oil painting, made of two canvases. The effect is both startling and incongruous, as Rauschenberg said, "I wanted something other than what I could make myself and I wanted to use the surprise and the collectiveness and the generosity of finding surprises. And if it wasn't a surprise at first, by the time I got through with it, it was. So the object itself was changed by its context and therefore it became a new thing." Finding the goat in a local shop, Rauschenberg recognized its potential, but then as art historian Caroline Craft wrote, he "uncharacteristically spent four years trying to come up with a satisfactory way of incorporating it into a combine. He made sketches of possible solutions and photographed its various states.... At last, inspired by a suggestion from Jasper Johns, he placed the goat on a horizontal platform as if setting it out to pasture." The pasture includes other collage elements: a tennis ball, heel prints, and the addition of text. Höch said her pioneering technique was prompted by her discovery of postcards sent home by German soldiers in which they cut and pasted their heads on images of musketeers. These juxtapositions made her aware of how photomontage could "alienate" images from their original context. Additionally, her technique was also informed by her work, beginning in 1916, creating embroidery designs for women's magazines, where collage was a common technique. She was highly aware of the artistic potential of traditionally domestic handicrafts, as her 1918 manifesto on embroidery called on women to "develop a feeling for abstract forms." Höch created photomontages for the rest of her career, saying, "there are no limits to the materials available for pictorial collages - above all they can be found in photography, but also in writing and printed matter, even in waste products." As art critic Harriet Baker wrote, her oeuvre challenged "the racist and sexist codes upholding Weimar Germany." Her work influenced her contemporary, the Surrealist Claude Cahun, and later artists such as Cindy Sherman. One of a series of four Blue Nudes (1952), the work is a kind of culmination, evoking his Fauvist painting, The Blue Nude (1907) and the poses of his female figures in Le Bonheur de Vivre ( The Joy of Life) (1905). Matisse first used paper cutouts for his design for Le Chant de Rossignol, a 1919 ballet production, and subsequently employed the technique for preliminary work, but began considering them as autonomous works in the early 1940s, when for health reasons he was confined to his bed and wheelchair.Born and raised in Kenya, Mutu studied anthropology before studying art at Yale University, and her Pin-Up (2001) series, depicting women injured by political violence in Sierra Leone, was her first foray into collage. Mutu uses collage to explore the continued effects of colonialism in her native land as well as the experiences of the diaspora, or those who have left Africa to settle elsewhere. With these twin investigations, Mutu has created a powerful body of work that not only provides striking commentary on our contemporary, globalized era but also probes the formal aspects of the collage technique. Kenyan-American artist Wangechi Mutu made this work in Brooklyn, innovatively using Melinex, a polyester film, for the painting's surface. It was exhibited at Yo.n.I, the artist's 2007 solo exhibition in London, the title explained by art historian Richard Martin as, "a reference to the Sanskrit word yoni that can mean 'divine passage,' 'place of birth' or 'sacred temple.' Many of the paintings in the show integrated cut-out images of plants, flowers and animals - taken from natural history magazines and the internet - within their depictions of human forms, as part of a wider exploration of fertility and reproduction."

This Dada photomontage is composed entirely of newspaper and magazine clippings, showing a vision of Weimar society with its leading establishment and anti-establishment figures and its industrialized chaos. Shown at the 1920 First International Dada Fair in Berlin, the work was a huge success because of its legibility. As critic Brian Knight explains, "Ranged in the top right corner are the forces of 'anti-dada': stern representatives of the late empire, the army and the new Weimar government. Below, in the dada corner, are massed artists, communists and other radicals." The decentered and asymmetrical composition of disparate images reflects the Dada emphasis on, what art historian Peter Boswell called, "fracture and disjunction" and embodies a sense of anarchistic energy. If you’re looking to commemorate special events in your life, these free online photo collage templates cover a gamut of milestones, featuring text and images that suit the occasion. Suppose it’s creating a mood board that you’re after. In that case, there are plenty of sample photo collage designs to choose from, along with aspirational “pegs” and professionally shot images from the extensive Canva media library. For anything else you might need, such as promotional and advertising material, there is surely a perfect photo collage example to serve your purpose. In this work pioneering work of collage, Braque combines faux-wood wallpaper with a Cubist depiction of a fruit dish and glass. The intersecting planes of the drawing and the collage elements upend traditional notions of perspectival space but still suggest a table top and a door, perhaps even suggesting a café. For Braque, Cubism's emphasis on still life was primarily concerned with depicting space, as he said, "What greatly attracted me - and it was the main line of advance of Cubism - was how to give material expression to this new space of which I had an inkling. So I began to paint chiefly still lifes, because in nature there is a tactile, I would almost say a manual space.... It was that space that attracted me strongly, for that was the earliest Cubist painting - the quest for space." While the papier collé still explores how we perceive and feel space, the addition of the glued-on bits of wallpaper emphasize a shallower space that is more an exploration of shapes, their tactility, and how they relate to each other. In this multi-layered work, areas of dark and light paint combined with glued-on bits of fabric, clippings, and candy wrappers create a sense of pictorial depth but also evoke something like a bulletin board covered in notes and cards. Combining detritus and traditional artistic media, Schwitters created an all-over, non-hierarchical composition. The inclusion of fragments, such as the broken pipe extending from the canvas, and a child's flashcard with the French and German words for cherry, blurs the boundaries between painting and ordinary objects. On the card, Schwitters has written the ungrammatical phrase " Ich liebe dir!" ("I love she!"), perhaps invoking his An Anna Blume (1919), a parodic love poem which made him famous.While studying at Columbia in 1940, Motherwell began to associate with Fernand Léger, Piet Mondrian, and leading French Surrealists who had fled the Nazi occupation. He became close friends with the artist Roberto Matta, who taught him Surrealist automatism and introduced him to Peggy Guggenheim, then forming The Art of This Century, her avant-garde gallery. She wanted Motherwell to participate in her 1943 collage exhibition, featuring Braque, Picasso, and Arp. At her and Matta's urging, the young artist created this collage, as he said, "I might never have done it otherwise, and it was here that I found . . . my 'identity.'" A great public success, Motherwell would go on to experiment with collage, making some of his most compelling work, including Pancho Villa, Dead and Alive and Blue and With China Ink (Homage to John Cage), and he continued with the technique throughout his decades-long career. His process involved working with a team of assistants, who would paint large rectangular sheets of paper with gouache, each color mixed to his instructions, and then he would select a sheet and, using long scissors, cut out forms. He would arrange the cutouts, his assistants pinning the composition on his studio walls, and then later gluing them. Art critic Adrian Searle wrote, he "created a universe that filled the room around him, spilling from the walls to the floor." Whether you wish to make one for manifesting or remembering, let Canva’s photo collage templates guide you. We have plenty of photo collage ideas that are on hand to help you put together a visual showcase that you’d love to see on display anywhere. Design a photo montage that beautifully captures many moments in multiple, stunning snapshots. A common technique practiced by decorators, advertising agencies, and hobbyists alike, collage upended the fine-art world when Cubists Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso incorporated bits of newspaper and printed wallpaper into their paintings, subverting traditional definitions of what is important art. Combining painting, real-world objects, images, and ephemera into a single work, collage directly questions the tendency to separate fine art from everyday objects, the delineations between so-called high and low culture, and the status of the artist.

Ink, acrylic paint, paint, crystalline particles, plastic pearls and paper on Melinex You were always on my mind With clippings taken from American mass media, the British Pop artist Eduardo Paolozzi used the technique of photomontage to probe the emerging post-World War II consumer society, which Paolozzi described as an "exotic society, bountiful and generous." New technology and products - a kitchen range, a new car, a Dr. Pepper bottle, and signage -combine with images of an alluring lifestyle - the attractive couple in a pool, the virile man on a motorcycle. For Paolozzi, living in a Britain still recovering from the war, its strict rationing, and economic hardship, these works were "where the event of selling tinned pears was transformed into multi-colored dreams, where sensuality and virility combined to form...an art form more subtle and fulfilling than the orthodox choice of either the Tate Gallery or the Royal Academy' Collage." As an art medium, collages are also very handy. They can serve as a visual collection of special memories that can bring a smile to your face, and they can also act as a vision board for your goals and dreams. This work was part of BUNK! (1947-52), a series of 45 collages that art critic Frank Whitford described as juxtaposing "the weighty and trivial, the artistic and technological." Along with his colleague Richard Hamilton, Paolozzi explored Dadaist and Surrealist precursors and was fascinated with American advertising images from childhood. He compared his technique to 'introducing strange fellows to each other in hostile landscapes...without recourse to standard drawing and painting practice." Moving to Paris for a time, he was influenced by Dada and Surrealism, and also encountered the latest American publications brought over by servicemen. Even in his prints and sculptures, collage was central to Paolozzi's creations throughout his career. Paolozzi's collages would become important examples for later Pop Art throughout the world and postmodern explorations of consumer culture. You can customize your selected designs with ease using Canva’s user-friendly editing tools. Experiment with the font styles, sizes, colors, and placements to develop your typographic art. Play around with the layout and insert additional elements to spruce up your collage. Adjust your pictures’ color levels, saturation, and brightness to show them in their best light, then type in a heartwarming or nostalgic caption for each. With Canva, anything is possible—and all those possibilities are within your reach.Arp, who influenced Schwitters' turn toward collage, described the artist as "a wizard" and his studio as a "horrible beautiful Merz grotto where broken wheels paired with matchboxes, wire lattices with brushes without bristles, rusted wheels with curious Merz cucumbers." From 1923 to 1936 Schwitters used his collage technique to create Merzbau ( Merz Construction), transforming his studio into an immersive environment. As he said, "Merz means to create connections, preferably between everything in this world." As art historian Gwendolen Webster wrote, "The language of Merz now finds common acceptance and today there is scarcely an artist working with materials other than paint who does not refer to Schwitters in some way. In his bold and wide-ranging experiments he can be seen as the grandfather of Pop Art, Happenings, Concept Art, Fluxus, multimedia art and post-modernism." Braque created this example of papier collé, which uses bits of paper instead of found images, while staying in Provence, after discovering a roll of wood-grain wallpaper in a shop window. He began cutting and pasting the paper into his drawings and shared the discovery with his friend and collaborator Picasso, who soon adopted the technique. During this period of time, the two men were working so closely together that Braque described them as "like two mountaineers roped together." Braque's papier collé became foundational for the proliferation of the collage technique. Though he famously mastered subsequent styles, Picasso turned to collage throughout his career, as seen in his Maquette for the cover of the journal Minotaure (1933). Considered one of the most influential artists of the 20 th century, Picasso's collages and collage constructions had a noted impact on subsequent art, not only in the mixing of high and low culture but also in its questioning of what constitutes art in the first place. After viewing an exhibition of Kurt Schwitters' work, Rauschenberg said, "I felt like he made it all just for me," and Schwitters' collages became a primary influence, informing what critics later called Neo-Dada. The combines were not Rauschenberg's first forays into assemblage. While traveling in Italy in the early 1950s, Rauschenberg made some of his first assemblages, incorporating discarded items he collected throughout his travels, but he destroyed most of them by throwing them into the Arno River. By 1954, he began creating his "combines," as they combined elements of painting and sculpture. As the Metropolitan Museum of Art wrote for his 2005 exhibition, "With these mixed-media works of art, Rauschenberg reinvented collage, changing it from a medium that presses commonplace materials to serve illusion into something very different: a process that undermines both illusion and the idea that a work of art has a unitary meaning." In the late 1700s, Mary Delany became famous for her works depicting flower specimens, which made her a favorite of the British court. After careful study of a particular flower, Delany often cut up hundreds of pieces of paper to create her life-like compositions. In 2019, art critic Claudia Massie declared that Delany's "Paper Mosaiks," as she called them, "pop off the walls with a vibrancy that belies the fact they were created 250 years ago from tiny shards of hand-tinted paper by an 'amateur' artist in her seventies."

Marcel Duchamp's concept of the readymade, in which he combined utilitarian objects to create art objects, can also be linked to experiments in three-dimensional collage, or Assemblage. Man Ray explored rayographs, a camara-less photographic technique of making collages, whereby he laid everyday objects directly on photo-sensitive paper and exposed it to light, thus creating ghostly silhouettes that seem both representational and abstract. One of the first examples of Cubist collage, Still Life with Chair Caning depicts a multi-faceted view of a café table, chair, and various items - a knife, a napkin, part of a piece of fruit, and a wine glass. Instead of painting the chair, Picasso attached to the canvas surface a piece of oilcloth printed with a pattern of chair canning to suggest a chair, and used a length of rope to frame the canvas, suggesting a playful take on a table's customary carved edge. At the upper left, one sees the painted letters "Jou," both the French word for "game" and also an evocation of Le Journal, the daily newspaper that seems to be folded up on the table with a pipe resting atop it. While engaging in wordplay and visual punning, Picasso's collage makes viewers question their own perceptions of what constitutes an artwork as well as the relationship between art and ordinary objects. With intuitive tools, a library of curated designs, grid, and layouts, and a little magical assistance, you can easily turn your photos and videos into next level photo grid collages! You can even add videos to make it a video collage! In the 21 st century, college continues to be a vital technique for innovation, as seen in British Conceptual artist John Stezaker's work combining cut-up photographs from the 1950s in startling juxtapositions that challenge artistic and cultural conventions. Kenyan-American artist Wangechi Mutu' The Bride Who Married a Camel's Head (2009) uses collage to examine pressing contemporary concerns, including colonization, gender, and the environment. In his series of fantastical houses, Matthias Jung uses collage to reimagine architecture and its place in the landscape, and Jean-François Rauzier's work exploits digital technology to created altered images of cities and places, creating surreal and illogical compositions.