Collage: The Making of Modern Art

Almost a century after its invention, collage has never been more popular. It picks up the discarded scraps and residue of everyday experience, turning them into art--a truly modern art, the artistic equivalent of the fragmented nature of contemporary life. Beginning with the seminal moment in 1908 when the young Picasso first took a piece of brown card pasted with a "Magasins au Louvre" label and invented a new kind of picture, Brandon Taylor tells the story of how progressive artists have consistently used the medium to create challenging and provocative works, developing a cut-and-paste aesthetic that would go on to influence other, more traditional art forms such as sculpture and architecture. The whole sweep of the twentieth century is here: cubist, dadaist, and surrealist collage; the experiments of the Russian constructivists and Eastern European avantgardes; the hard-hitting political satires of interwar Germany; the raw, aggressive styles of the United States' East and West coasts in the 1950s; the burgeoning pop aesthetic in 1960s America and Europe. Taylor ends his authoritative account by addressing the question of why the ideas behind collage are so much in harmony with the digital age.