Collage
is a technique I have loved doing myself and with the high school students I
taught at La Guardia High School using the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method. From
one point of view it is so simple—all that is needed is paper and glue—yet the
artist Robert Motherwell described collage as “the twentieth century’s greatest
creative innovation.”
Pablo
Picasso and Georges Braque explored the possibilities of this folk craft once used
mainly for scrapbooks, and brought it into the realm of high art. Matisse is
among the artists who have shown that collage is more than just gluing paper. He
said that each piece of paper had to be “augmented,” “given life,” and just last
year people waited in long lines at the Museum of Modern Art to see how Matisse
gave life to paper in his beautiful and dynamic cut-outs.
Why
have people, including students in art classrooms at all levels, loved doing collage?
All art, I learned, has an important message for the life of every person. That
message is in this principle, stated by the 20th century educator
and founder of Aesthetic Realism, Eli Siegel:
“All beauty is a
making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going
after in ourselves.”
Opposites
at the heart of collage are manyness and oneness, separation and junction. Many
disparate, individual pieces of paper—diverse shapes, colors, images, textures—are
arranged and fixed with glue into a single composition. To introduce collage to
my students I showed them several individual pieces of paper—white, brown,
blue, a newspaper clipping, and a sample of wallpaper—and asked: Would a
composition created by gluing just one of these pieces of paper onto a
background, be interesting? As a means of exploring this question, we looked at
Picasso’s Guitar of 1913.
*
Created
from pieces of paper similar to the ones I had shown, this work is described in
Collage, Personalities, Concepts,
Techniques, by authors Harriet Janis and Rudi Blesh, as a “virtuoso
demonstration of the...possibilities of collage.” My students and I studied the
way Picasso cut, organized and combined different pieces of paper to indicate,
for example, the shape of a guitar, and how he used light and dark paper as light
and shadow. I asked the class: Does the newspaper clipping add something to the
shape of the guitar? Does the blue background add something to the wallpaper
pattern? We saw that these single pieces of paper did add something to each other. I am fortunate to be able to tell the
young people I teach that the beauty of a collage depends on its composition—how
its many parts, with all their drama of likeness and contrast, work well together.
In
his great 1949 lecture titled Poetry and
Unity, Eli Siegel explained: “The purpose of composition is to show that
through bringing something together with other things, it will have something
which it would not have had alone.” As we studied Picasso’s collage, my
students were excited to see how each piece he added to the composition, had
something it didn’t have alone. For example, the blue background brought serenity
to the wallpaper and the wallpaper pattern added a rich liveliness to the blue background.
A mistake that I have made, as many students have, is feeling
that our relation to other people and things makes us less, not more. This is
an aspect of contempt, which Aesthetic Realism describes as the desire to get
an “addition to self through the lessening of something else.” All art, I have
learned, opposes contempt. This is definitely true of collage.
As
my students worked on collage compositions they were excited and thoughtful as
they considered how individual shapes and colors of paper added to each other. They
liked learning that collage comes from the French word, coller, meaning to glue; and that pieces of paper could be cut, papier collé, or torn, déchiré. As one cuts and pastes,
separates and joins, collage answers yes
to these questions that are central to life: How can all the many parts and
aspects of our lives work together? Are we more ourselves through seeing our
relation to the world, including people, in all their manyness and diversity? The
technique of collage is loved because it represents a large hope in the life of
every student and teacher.
*Pablo Picasso (Spanish,
1881-1973) Guitar. Céret, March 31,
1913, or later Cut-and-pasted newspaper,
wallpaper, paper, ink, chalk, charcoal, and pencil on colored paper 26 1/8 x 19
1/2" (66.4 x 49.6 cm) The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Nelson A.
Rockefeller Bequest © 2011 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society
(ARS), New York.