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Juan Gris, Still Life (Violin and Ink Pot), 1913.
Oil on canvas, 89.5 × 60.5 cm.
Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf.
Pablo Picasso, Musical Instruments, 1913.
Oil, plaster and saw dust on oil cloth, 98 × 80 cm.
The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg.
Pablo Picasso, Still Life with Chair Caning, 1912.
Oil on oilcloth and rope, 29 × 37 cm. Musée National Picasso, Paris.
Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso created a new type of painting: the daily world in the form of real materials. For this, they used fabrics, wax cloth, wallpaper scraps and newspaper shreds. Daily materials became the objects of high art. The so-called papiers collés were created. The interest of Picasso in the tactile and in materials found its first visual climax in May 1912 with Still Life with Chair Caning. Picasso used materials in an unorthodox manner. The printed pattern on the wax cloth conveyed the illusion of a cane chair pipe network. It was not about either painted or real caning. The pasted on paper pretends to be something else than it is. The surrounding rope is a concrete object. Shortly thereafter, Braque found a roll of wallpaper with an oak pattern. He cut pieces out and integrated them into a drawing. These endeavours eventually led to pure surface textures contrasted against one another and thus forming the whole painting.
Braque and Picasso understood their studio to be a place of craftsmanship. Using everyday materials, they experimented with extending art to the ordinary. Primarily in 1912 and 1913, this was done with paper. In order to develop their idea of a ‘popular iconography’ they used cardboard, paper of many shades and patterns, sand, combs, sawdust, metal shavings, ripolin varnish, sheet metal stencils, razor blades, and craft tools. Apollinaire and André Salmon compared the efforts of Braque and Picasso in regard to the readily comprehensible simplicity with the efforts of the poet François de Malherbe in his studies of the slang spoken by the dockers in order to enrich his own language.
The papiers collés were preceded by paper sculptures, first by Braque and later by Picasso. Already by 1911, Braque had created his first paper sculpture. These first paper sculptures by Braque reminded Picasso of the construction scaffolding of the Wright brothers’ double decker aircraft
Pablo Picasso became the genius among the artists of the 20th century. Like no other artist, he made important contributions and innovations to nearly all of the artistic movements of the 20th century. He journeyed to unexplored shores and again and again produced surprising new masterpieces.
Georges Braque, Compote Dish, Bottle and Glass, 1912.
Charcoal drawing and pasted papers, 62 × 46 cm. Private collection.
Félix Édouard Vallotton, Street Corner in Paris, 1895.
Gouache and oil on cardboard, 35.9 × 29.5 cm.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
From classical times until the end of the 18th century, an artwork was evaluated according to its content. The material out of which the artwork was made played a subordinate role. One proceeded from the premise that an idea in its most complete and ideal state is immaterial. To a great extent, material had to be subordinate to the artistic form. Materials were placed in the hierarchical order that was determined by how little they would impinge upon the purity of the artistic premise. Only in the 20th century did the aesthetics relating to materials take hold. Material justice now became one of the criteria for a good work of art. Materials rose in esteem. Out of this also developed the independence of the materials. Materials slowly became an independent medium of art.
Edgar Degas was a forerunner for the appreciation of so-called ‘poor’ materials. At the 1881 Paris Impressionist exhibition of the Salon des Indépendents, he displayed The Small Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer, which he had completed in 1879–80. The flesh-coloured wax figure with a ponytail made of real red hair, and clothed in real clothes, a flax bodice, a white full-length dress and ballroom shoes, shocked the art world. In contrast to those critics who were reminded of the ‘young monster’ of a display at a fair, and specimen preparations for a zoological and physiological museum exhibit, the critic and poet Joris-Karl Huysmans vehemently defended Degas.
All the ideas the public has about sculpture, about cold, lifeless, white apparitions, about these memorable and stereotypical works that have been repeated over the centuries will be toppled. The fact is that Degas has knocked over the traditions of sculpture, just as he has for a long time now shaken the conventions of painting…This statuette is the only really modern attempt that I am aware of in sculpture with her living flesh shaped throughout by working muscles.
A similar view can be taken from the letter Vincent van Gogh wrote at the end of February or beginning of March 1883 to his friend, van Rappard: ‘Tomorrow, I will get some interesting things from this rubbish dump.’ He would dream of the collection of discarded buckets, kettles, baskets, oil cans and wire, and this winter he would really have something to work with.
In 1890, Maurice Denis reflected on the materiality and immaterialness of colour, space and technology: ‘A painting is essentially a tarpaulin surface covered by colours in a certain order.’ An example of this was Felix Vallotton with one of the many examples from 1897, Les Passants (scène de rue). The support for the painting is a reddish brown cardboard box with fine fibre inserts. Its colourfulness and graphic structure stand at several important places in the painting with broad surfaces unpainted and untreated. The beauty of the material has been brought forth.
In the later works of Paul Cézanne, large parts of the canvas also remain untouched. The level of sensitivity regarding the material quality of the painting support is reflected in the way this is used. Pablo Picasso gave the colours their independence in his Blue and Pink Periods. The papiers collés were a logical consequence of this.
The subjects and techniques of anthropology influenced the development of modernist art. The avant-garde pioneers systematically acquired new sources of inspiration and the categorical separation between art, folk art, and anti-art was lifted. Theodor Adorno specifically warned against limiting the insights of the modernist movement to similarities with older art. Only through the deliberate artistic use of techniques and material would the work become more than mere handicraft. It was only when Braque and Picasso first pasted pieces of paper in the papiers collés that the intellectual spark surpassed the effect and dexterity of the previous shapes.
Edgar Degas, Little Dancer Aged 14, 1865–1881, restored between 1921 and 1931. Painted bronze, muslin and silk ribbon in its hair, 98 × 35.2 × 24.5 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
Kurt Schwitters, Merzbild 32A (The Cherry Picture), 1921.
Combination, 91.8 × 70.5 cm. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Two-dimensional paper assumed the role of the three-dimensional means of expression in the papiers collés. The traditional picture frame perspective was dissolved in space. Depending on colour, pattern, or material, the paper surface appeared in the foreground or in the background. The painting developed into a special flat relief. Picasso experimented at first with paper scraps that he had constructed into guitar box sculptures.
Futurism incorporated the flat surface of the papiers collés, the rhythmic repetitions, and the associated dynamic spatial structure. Futurism created a dynamic relief