Collage by Denise
At the beginning of the twentieth century two famous artists, Picasso and Braque, working in close cooperation, resumed and developed in their own style, an interesting art form. Desiring to add another dimension to their geometrical composition, they started to add "papier collé" to their canvas. From "collé"(glued on) came the new term "collage"(the technique of gluing any kind of paper or other flat material to a painting surface).
This technique of gluing flat material on a surface is an old tradition. In the tenth century, poets illustrated their poems with images and in the sixteenth century artists decorated their illuminated texts in this manner. Panels with gold leaves or other glued material are still decorating today arches and columns in Gothic cathedrals or walls and ceilings in famous palaces.
The term, expressed by an artist at one of Picasso and Braque's exhibits, really stuck and this art form is still quite in vogue at the present time. It helped those two cubist artists and the followers to juxtapose illusion and reality and to give a sort of mystery to their creation.
