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Some artists and art critics are far from considering it an art form. Yet the collage not only has a millenary history, we find the first testimonies in China as a direct consequence of the invention of paper but it is in Japan that we have the first testimonies at the beginning of the 10th century and later, in Europe, in the illustrations of anatomy manuscripts.
It will only be in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that we will find the collage declined in a new form of art, embellished with precious stones and gold leaves in the majestic and evocative Gothic cathedrals.
Picasso and Braque finally gave the place that was due to collage in the history of art and in 1912 Picasso began to create using more materials besides his painting: fabrics, newspapers, packs of cigarettes, matchboxes, playing cards while George Braque adopted the collage technique in his charcoal drawings. Despite this, collage "art" is officially spoken of only with John Heartfield who in 1924 used it as a satirical weapon against Hitler and Nazism using photography for the first time.
George Grosz recalls: "When John Heartfield and I invented photomontage in my studio at five o'clock on a May morning in 1916, neither of us had any idea of its enormous potential, nor of the thorny but successful road that would lead us. waited. As often happens in life we had tripped over a gold vein without even realizing it. "
Other pioneers of this versatile art form include Hanna Höch, Paul Citroen, Michael Mejer, Raoul Hausmann as well as great movements such as Bauhaus, Dada and Surrealism.
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