A collage is created by joining various elements.
The term collage , of French origin, refers to an artistic technique consisting of the union of different elements . Collage usually includes various materials and images in the composition of the same work.
For example: “I made a collage with photos of my grandson: it turned out beautiful,” “The artist presented a collage made with native flowers,” “The new book by the Hungarian writer is a collage of poems, short stories and chronicles.”
Great artists who dabbled in collage
A collage, in short, is an assembly of varied components that acquire a tone of unity . This type of work is common in the plastic arts: Max Ernst , Marcel Duchamp , Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse are some of the artists who created famous collages.
Many scholars claim that Picasso was the creator of collage, and point out that the first painting belonging to this technique is Still Life with a Mesh Chair . However, there are also those who oppose this theory, pointing out that the title belongs to Georges Braque; one of her earliest collage works is Tête de femme , published in 1912, the same year as Picasso's painting.
The difficulty in determining the first collage lies in the fact that not all the works of these and other artists of the time were published, nor did they have the same impact. In any case, what really matters is that in a short time this technique sparked great interest in the art world, and thus many of the works that represent it today emerged. Furthermore, its impact reached movements such as Futurism and Dadaism, which were enriched by adopting some of its characteristics.
Although the first association made when hearing the term collage takes us to the field of painting, any artistic manifestation can use analogous techniques to achieve a combination of materials , shapes and textures.
Artists of different styles have dabbled in collage.
The concept in photography and in other areas
The combination of different images in the same visual work is called a collage. It is common to take several photographs and join them into a collage, either on paper or in digital format. Various online applications, in fact, offer the possibility of creating collages. The user must choose which images they want to use and the software provides various templates for arranging the photos in the collage.
Suppose a person wants to develop a collage of their vacation. To meet your goal, you go to a website that allows you to create collages and choose a template with four spaces. Then upload four vacation photos and create the collage in question.
Beyond the visual, any work that presents elements of varied characteristics is known as a collage. A musical album with songs of different styles and a book where the author explores various genres can be called collages.
Collage, collage or collage?
It is important to note that the Pan-Hispanic Dictionary of Doubts , published by the Royal Spanish Academy since 2005, proposes the use of collage graphic adaptation instead of the French voice, and defines the concept as the pictorial technique that consists of adhering various materials on a board or a canvas, and also like the works that are made following said technique.
On the other hand, in the same source we find the adaptation collage , although it recommends the use of the one mentioned in the previous paragraph by analogy with the other additions of French voices to our language with the ending -age , among which we can highlight massage, DIY and baggage .
Regarding its etymology, the origin of the word collage is found in the verb coller of the French language, which translates as " to paste ." This explains why a collage can be created entirely with photographs, everyday objects and pieces of paper of different shapes, sources and materials glued on a surface.