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Friday, March 12, 2010

What Inspires Me: Paper Collage

Picasso Posse blogger Erin Cameron teaches art history and writes the clever blog Art Without Pretense (tagline: the trials of a starving art historian). We asked her to share her thoughts on what inspires her about the Picasso exhibition.

Papier collé, literally glued paper, is a subject which has preoccupied me for the last few years. Following a grad course which traced the history of collage from the Cubists into the modern world, I have continued to think about how Picasso’s and Bracque’s experiments have remained relevant.

 In my Intro to Art History classes, the question of collage is something I repeatedly pose to my students. What do they know about it? Have they used collage? Is it outdated? Far from passé, we use collage in many forms today. My students, not at first familiar with Picasso’s Sheet Music and Glass, have all cut and pasted images from magazines and newspapers. Without knowing the terms used by Picasso or Braque, nearly everyone understands the concept of collage. It is one of the most enduring legacies left by Picasso—that any number of separate elements can come together and form a new image with an altered meaning.

Photo top: Courtesy of Erin Cameron; Photo right: Bowl with Fruit, Violin, and Wineglass; Pablo Ruiz y Picasso, 1913. Courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.