From one collage to another: the roots of cubism’s pasted papers

Résumé 0

Collage is often presented as a radical innovation in modern art history: there was no real precedent to Braque and Picasso first paper’s works in 1912. No artists thought of cutting and pasting papers to make a work of art before them. Nevertheless, when having a broader look at the creative practices of the late nineteen and the early twentieth centuries, it appears that collage was a common technique in domestic leisure: lot of people, especially of the working and middle classes but not only, used ready made material and collage process to make decorative objects. These ordinary creators assemble pine cones, shells or seeds to decorate frames; they create pictures with images cut from newspapers or engravings; children construct toys using every day material or realise stamp drawings…Thus, this conference will show the many ways in which these ordinary practices of creation played a role in the invention of pasted paper by Braque and Picasso. Living in a Montmartre, a very specific neighbourhood of Paris, both poor and rural where this material and technical culture of making was widely spread, they were embedded among this alternative creative culture. They even sometime realized everyday object with recycled material. Subsequently, when looking for a solution to cubist’s problems, such as finding non illusionistic signs to exit the hermeticism of analytical cubism or experiencing the possibility of a stylistic diversity in representation, they founded in ordinary practice of creation an example and a moral backing to their artistic transgression. It was both a repertory of technical innovation and a discovery of a new way of creating: collage and assemblage.While analysing the way Braque and Picasso transformed the meaning and the aesthetics of ordinary creative practices, we would like to highlight the fact that when looking at cubist’s pasted paper as a technique, there is no real specificity of works on paper. They relate to cubist’s paintings and sculptures as they all propose another process to make work of arts (i.e. collage, assemblage) which origin can be rooted in the material and visual culture of the time. Techniques disseminated from everyday life to avant-garde and it is this circulation, more specifically the cubist’s misappropriation of ordinary process of creating into art, that gave birth to the first pasted papers.