The art of collage, or how to make fragments speak

01When scissors become brushes

Imagine for a moment what Georges Braque must have felt upon discovering Picasso’s work. The two men, then deep in their cubist collaboration, had spent months deconstructing traditional perspective, fragmenting forms only to reconstruct them. But here, Picasso had taken a step further: he had introduced the real into painting. No need to represent a cane chair—one could simply glue the cane itself. Braque, ever methodical, wasted no time responding to this provocation. A few weeks later, he presented Fruit Dish and Glass, a still life in which a scrap of wood-grain wallpaper replaced the table. In their hands, scissors had become brushes, the detritus of daily life had become artistic materials in their own right.

What strikes one in these early cubist works is their apparent simplicity. Scraps of newspaper, sheet music, metro tickets—nothing that couldn’t be found in a Parisian trash bin of the time. Yet these mundane elements, once assembled, created something radically new. Collage didn’t merely represent the world; it took fragments from it and reorganized them according to its own logic. In Guitar, Sheet Music, and Glass (1912), Picasso layers a musical score, a piece of newspaper, and charcoal lines to evoke a guitar. The instrument is no longer depicted; it is suggested by the juxtaposition of these disparate elements. The viewer is invited to fill in the gaps, to mentally reconstruct the object from these fragmentary clues.

02The scissors’ revolt: when Dada cuts through history

If the cubists had paved the way, it was the Dadaists who would push collage to its political extreme. Berlin, 1919. The war had just ended, leaving behind a crumbling empire and a traumatized society. In this climate of chaos, a group of artists gathered around a simple idea: art must be a weapon. Among them was Hannah Höch, a young woman working as a draftswoman for a women’s magazine. By day, she created sewing patterns and romantic illustrations; by night, she cut up the same magazines to make subversive photomontages.

Her masterpiece, Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany (1919–1920), is a visual manifesto of Dadaist revolt. Across nearly a square meter of paper, Höch assembled hundreds of fragments cut from newspapers and magazines. Politicians’ heads were grafted onto dancers’ bodies, industrial machines stood beside female figures, revolutionary slogans intertwined with beauty product ads. The title itself was a provocation: Höch proposed "cutting" Weimar Germany with a kitchen knife—a domestic object, a symbol of the feminine sphere, turned into a political weapon.

What made Höch’s work so powerful was its ability to expose the contradictions of her time. By juxtaposing images from the popular press, she laid bare the mechanisms of propaganda and gender stereotypes. A Prussian general’s head on a ballerina’s body became a fierce satire of militarism; a woman in a swimsuit from an advertisement transformed into a symbol of female liberation. Höch didn’t just criticize; she offered an alternative. Her photomontages, with their chaotic compositions and distorted scales, presented a world where traditional hierarchies were abolished. In her universe, a dancer could dominate a chancellor, a machine could dance with a child.

03Joseph Cornell’s boxes of dreams

New York, 1936. In a modest house in Flushing, a solitary man spends his nights assembling objects found in flea markets and city bazaars. Joseph Cornell never studied art. He had no gallery representation, no influential patrons. Yet his "shadow boxes"—wooden boxes filled with eclectic objects and sealed with glass—would become one of the most poetic expressions of collage in the 20th century.

Cornell was a compulsive collector. In his studio, cardboard boxes piled up, filled with old postcards, marbles, bird feathers, shards of mirror, antique maps. Each object carried a story, a memory he sought to capture in his assemblages. Medici Slot Machine (1942) is one of his most iconic works. In a wooden box painted midnight blue, he arranged a Renaissance boy’s portrait, marbles, a grid of nails, and a piece of glass. The whole evoked both a slot machine and a medieval reliquary. The boy, frozen in his frame, seemed to watch the viewer with infinite melancholy.

What fascinates about Cornell’s boxes is their ability to suggest rather than show. His assemblages don’t tell linear stories; they create atmospheres, moods. Soap Bubble Set (1936), with its glass tubes and celestial maps, evokes childhood, transience, the dream of escape. Penny Arcade Portrait of Lauren Bacall (1945–46)—a box dedicated to the actress he secretly adored—transformed a simple photograph into a timeless icon. Cornell called his boxes "poetic theaters," where each object became an actor, and the viewer was invited to write their own story.

04Wangechi Mutu, or the anatomy of rebellion

Nairobi, 1992. A young woman studies human anatomy in medical textbooks at the university. These precise drawings, these representations of the human body, would leave an indelible mark on her artistic work. Twenty years later, Wangechi Mutu, now one of the most influential contemporary artists, uses those same medical images to create collages that challenge norms of gender, race, and beauty.

In Histology of the Different Classes of Uterine Tumors (2004–2005), Mutu assembles magazine fragments, medical illustrations, African fabrics, and botanical elements to create hybrid figures, half-women, half-monsters. These creatures, both sensual and terrifying, seem to have stepped straight out of a postcolonial nightmare. Their bodies are covered in scars, tumors, plants growing like metastases. Yet despite their monstrous appearance, these figures exude a strange beauty. They embody resistance, resilience in the face of historical and contemporary violence.

What sets Mutu apart from other collage artists is her use of Mylar—the shiny plastic she employs as a support. The Mylar gives her works an almost organic quality, as if the figures were covered in damp skin. In The End of eating Everything (2013), a collaboration with musician Santigold, a hybrid creature, half-woman, half-bird, seems to emerge from a cloud of pollution. Her body, composed of magazine fragments and paint, distorts before our eyes, as if reality itself were dissolving. The work, both magnificent and unsettling, is a metaphor for our time: a world where the boundaries between nature and culture, human and machine, beauty and ugliness blur more each day.

05Collage in the digital age: when the computer replaces scissors

Paris, 2023. In a small studio in the Marais, an artist spends her days in front of a computer screen. With her mouse, she cuts, layers, distorts images found online. The result? Digital collages that blend pop culture, classical art, and political references. Welcome to the era of collage 2.0.

While the techniques have changed, the spirit of collage remains the same. Today, artists like John Stezaker and Sara Cwynar use digital tools to create works that engage with art history. Stezaker, for example, superimposes portraits of 1950s Hollywood stars onto 19th-century romantic landscapes. The result is both amusing and unsettling: these familiar faces, once distorted by the overlay, become unrecognizable, almost monstrous. In Mask XXXI (2006), an actress from the 1950s has her face covered by a mountain waterfall. The effect is striking: it’s as if nature itself were digesting the star.

The rise of artificial intelligence has opened new possibilities for collage. Artists like Refik Anadol use algorithms to generate works that evolve in real time. In Machine Hallucinations (2021), Anadol fed an AI millions of architectural images. The result is an immersive work where buildings deform, overlap, creating a kind of collective architectural dream. Here, collage is no longer just a technique—it’s a sensory experience.

06Why collage still fascinates us

What explains the enduring appeal of collage? Why, more than a century after the first cubist experiments, does this technique continue to captivate artists and art lovers alike?

Perhaps because collage is the most democratic medium there is. It requires no academic training, no expensive materials. With a pair of scissors, some glue, and a few old magazines, anyone can create a work of art. This accessibility makes it a favored tool for marginalized artists—those whom the traditional art world has long ignored. Hannah Höch, Joseph Cornell, Wangechi Mutu—all used collage to give voice to those history had forgotten.

But collage is also a mirror of our time. In a world saturated with images, where information circulates at breakneck speed, collage offers a way to make sense of the chaos. By assembling disparate fragments, it creates new narratives, alternative realities. It reminds us that beauty can emerge from fragmentation, that order can arise from disorder.

Finally, collage is a metaphor for creation itself. As Picasso once said: "I do not seek, I find." The collage artist doesn’t create from nothing; they find, assemble, transform what already exists. In a world where everything seems to have been said, collage reminds us that there are still stories to tell, images to reinvent, fragments to make speak.