The most ingenious were surely designed to dazzle the viewer with the maker's creativity, or their humour. "But it's much more unusual to find ones that have this more imaginative, wacky, surrealist type collage." "Albums which are decorated in some way are fairly common," says Dr Marta Weiss, senior curator of photography at the V&A. Admiring each other's albums in drawing rooms was a popular after-dinner pastime. It became de rigueur to swap cards, with even only vague acquaintances eagerly collecting each other's image for their scrapbooks. Making photocollages in dedicated albums – by cutting up those calling cards and repurposing them within watercolour painted backdrops, to often silly, surreal or even suggestive effect – became quite the fashionable activity for members of the British aristocracy. Paintings of 'rage, rebellion and pain'Īround 1860, Britain was gripped with a craze for cartes de visite – small photographic visiting cards, featuring staged portraits of the owner. Unlocking the hidden life of Frida Kahlo But what if the Cubists, the Dadaists and the Surrealists were actually predated in this innovation by… upper-class Victorian society women? So far, so coherent a journey through 20th-Century art trends. And when photographs were included in such mixed-media works, the results were particularly witty, subversive, or downright unsettling – as seen in the photomontages by Dadaist Hannah Hoch and Surrealist Max Ernst, revolutionary Soviet artists Alexander Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova, British pop artists like Richard Hamilton and Peter Blake, and Linder Sterling's punk collages. Look up the term "collage", and the Tate's website will inform you that this cut-and-paste method for making new work was "first used as an artists' technique in the early 20th Century." Generally, Picasso and Braque get credited with inventing collage, with Picasso's decision to paste oilcloth into his painting Still Life with Chair Caning in 1912 considered a firing shot for an explosion of avant-garde art.
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