How collage began: from Picasso and Braque to Hannah Höch

When you glue a strip of newspaper, a receipt and a flower from a magazine on top of each other in a journal, you're doing something that counted as a small revolution just over a hundred years ago. Collage is so ordinary now that we forget someone once did it for the first time. Its history is surprisingly fun, and it gives you a few useful ideas for your own pages.

Where the word comes from

Collage comes from French. The verb coller means to stick or to glue, and colle is glue. So the word itself says no more than this: something that has been glued.

The artists who made the technique famous first used a different term: papier collé, glued paper. Only later did collage become the umbrella term for anything you stick onto a surface, whether it's paper, fabric, photos or small objects. If the work clearly sticks out into the space around it, you'd rather call it an assemblage.

The surrealist Max Ernst later remarked dryly that it isn't the glue that makes a collage. He had a point. It's not about the gluing, but about what happens when you put things side by side that don't belong together.

People were cutting and pasting for centuries

Picasso and Braque are often called the inventors of collage, but cutting and pasting is much older. Around the twelfth century, Japanese calligraphers were already writing their poems on sheets made up of torn and coloured paper, sometimes with gold and silver. In China, the art of paper cutting developed.

In Europe, people pasted all sorts of things into albums for centuries. In the eighteenth century, the Englishwoman Mary Delany started making botanical 'mosaicks' from tiny pieces of coloured paper at the age of seventy-two. She made almost a thousand of them. In the nineteenth century, Victorian ladies cut out photographs and pasted them into drawn or painted settings, decades before the Cubists. And valentines, scrapbooks and autograph albums were full of cut-out pictures.

The fact that all this was long seen as a homely pastime rather than art comes up again further on.

Papier collé with Picasso and Braque

In 1912, something happened in painting. Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque were working closely together on Cubism, a way of painting that breaks objects down into planes and shows them from several sides at once.

In the spring of 1912, Picasso made a small still life in which he glued a piece of oilcloth printed with the weave of a cane chair seat. Around the oval canvas he laid a rope as a frame. A real piece of reality in the middle of a painting: that was new.

Later that year, Braque saw wallpaper imitating wood in a shop. He bought a roll, cut pieces out of it and glued them onto a charcoal drawing of a fruit bowl and a glass. This is seen as the first papier collé. Picasso was immediately taken with it. In the months that followed, they made dozens together, using newspaper pages, labels, sheet music, cigarette papers and playing cards.

Why was that so special? A painter had always imitated reality with paint. Now there was a real piece of newspaper on the canvas, with real letters. The newspaper was at once a plane in the composition, a patch of grey, and a reference to that day's news. The play between what something is and what it represents made collage a serious art form.

Dada: cutting as protest

During the First World War, a group of artists came together in Zurich who wanted to ridicule the war, the bourgeois order and art itself. They called themselves Dada. It started in 1916 at the Cabaret Voltaire. Hans Arp let chance play its part: he dropped scraps of paper and glued them down where they landed.

Dada quickly spread to Berlin, and there collage became sharper. Artists cut photos out of newspapers and magazines and put them into a new, often bitter context. They called it photomontage. The Berlin Dadaists didn't see themselves as artists but as engineers: people who assemble what already exists.

Hannah Höch: scissors as a sharp knife

The best-known woman in that circle is Hannah Höch (1889–1978). Together with Raoul Hausmann she developed photomontage, and she is seen as one of its inventors.

Her best-known work has a title that is already a collage: Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser Dada durch die letzte Weimarer Bierbauchkulturepoche Deutschlands, roughly 'Cut with the Dada kitchen knife through the last Weimar beer-belly cultural epoch of Germany'. It's a large, busy work full of cut-out heads of politicians, soldiers and artists, with machines, crowds and loose letters in between.

What stands out is the kitchen knife. Höch deliberately used a domestic image, and for years she worked at a publishing house, where she made needlework patterns for women's magazines. She cut from women's magazines, fashion plates and embroidery patterns and set them beside images of power and technology. In this way she showed how women were portrayed in the media, and she questioned the new woman of the 1920s. Despite her talent, she received less recognition within Dada than her male colleagues.

Kurt Schwitters and Merz

In Hanover, Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948) worked in his own way. He picked up what others threw away: tram tickets, labels, bits of cardboard, string, wire, buttons, packaging. From these he made collages that are calmly and carefully built up, more poetic than aggressive.

He called his work Merz. The word came from a cut-out bank advertisement in which only that part of the word Kommerz was left. For Schwitters, Merz became more than a name. It stood for a whole way of working: anything can be material, and the artist gives it a new place.

He went further and further. In his house in Hanover he spent years building the Merzbau, a collage that grew into a space you could walk through. It was lost in the Second World War and is now known only from photographs and reconstructions.

If you make a junk journal from receipts and packaging, you're closer to Schwitters than you might think.

Femmage: women and the collage tradition

In the 1970s, two American artists, Miriam Schapiro and Melissa Meyer, took a fresh look at that history. They asked why collage only counted as art once Picasso made it. Women had been cutting, pasting, embroidering, collecting and sewing for centuries. They made quilts from fabric scraps, scrapbooks, albums, valentines and decorated boxes.

Schapiro and Meyer gave that practice a name: femmage. A blend of femme, woman, and the ending of collage and montage. They described it in an essay in the late 1970s. Femmage combines paper and image with domestic materials such as fabric, lace, buttons and stitches, and makes everyday life both its subject and its method.

What makes their idea so strong: it puts the scrapper, the quilter and the woman with the scrapbook in the same line as the big names. The difference was never in the technique, but in who was allowed to make art.

From artwork to journal

After the Second World War, collage was used everywhere: in pop art, in mail art, in book illustration and in advertising. With the computer, cut and paste ended up as words in every menu. At the same time, handmade collage lived on, in art and beyond.

The art journal and the junk journal are direct heirs of all these movements. You work with found material, you build up layers, you let edges show, you combine image and text. Only it doesn't hang on a museum wall, but sits in a book you open.

What you can learn from these artists

• Use real things. A ticket, a piece of wallpaper or an envelope tells more than a picture of one. Picasso's piece of oilcloth works because it's real.
• Put opposites side by side. Höch combined the domestic with the political, soft with hard, and that made her work strong. A fashion plate next to a train ticket makes a story.
• Look at your rubbish. Schwitters showed that discarded material has expressive power. Keep a little box for receipts, labels and packaging with nice lettering.
• Let the edges show. Torn and roughly cut edges show that something has been glued, and that's exactly the charm.
• Use words as images. For the Cubists, loose letters and bits of newspaper are grey planes and text at the same time. A few cut-out words can be your journaling.
• Think about context. An image changes meaning through what lies next to it. Try moving things around before you glue.
• Take your own tradition seriously. What you do at the table with scissors and glue, women have been doing for centuries. It isn't just crafting, it's a skill.

Tomorrow, try putting three things side by side that have nothing to do with each other: a label, a photo, a word from the newspaper. Move them around until something happens. That's how it started in 1912, too.