HISTORY OF MONTAGEFrom Andre Verlon’s Montage – Painting

Cubism & Papier Collé

Georges Braque – “Compotier et Verre” (1912)

Cubism & Papier Collé

Pablo Picasso – “Vieux Marc” (1912)

Cubism & Papier Collé

They took the concept of film projecting images at different angles and applied it to canvas. Using a form of collage they incorporated parts of their daily lives into their work such as mentions of a newspaper or movie tickets in their paintings.  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkODKN_m_H4&feature=player_embedded

Cubism, began as an effort to show multiple points of view in a single image, which are the conceptual roots of any montage technique, which aims to show a range of moments in time in a single instance.

Picasso and Braque both took this idea in cubist imagery to a material level, not only incorporating a single material to express an idea, but using scraps of paper like a movie ticket or a newspaper article in a work about those things.

Cubism & Papier Collé

Juan Gris – “Bottle of Anis del Mono ” (1912)

Cubism & Papier Collé

Juan Gris was a contemporary of Braque and Picasso, and was perhaps even bolder in his use of materials in his paintings to contextualize the ideas in the work.

Mirrors, glass and reflective metal were materials he chose for their visual effects in addition to the simple paper and wood scraps of Picasso and Braque.

Gris also used bolder colors and is said to have been the braver of the three in the subject matter he used. His characters were a bit more socially antagonistic and emblematic for the time.

His paintings are more joyous, entertaining, and overtly ludic than those of the first cubists. He achieves this without reducing the new way of seeing to a sterile decorative style, which is why he is so important. In his 1912 painting Man in the Café, the 20th century explodes out of an elegant café-goers smart suit: the fun of the painting is that he is totally recognizable, far more than the people in Picasso’s greatest cubist works, but also manifestly disintegrating and transforming in the frame.

Cubism & Papier Collé

Juan Gris – “Man in the Cafe ” (1912)

Cubism & Papier Collé

Robert Delauny – Simultaneous Windows on the City (1912)

Photomontage

John Heartfield – As in the Middle Ages...So in the Third Reich (1934)

John Heartfield

German photomontagist, draughtsman, typographer and stage designer. After a difficult childhood owing to the persecution of his father for his political beliefs, he studied art at the Königliche Kunstgewerbeschule in Munich from 1907 to 1911, specializing in poster design. In 1912 he took his first job in a printing works in Mannheim, moving to Berlin in 1913, where he and his brother Wieland Herzfelde made contact with avant-garde circles. Heartfield’s experiences in World War I led him to conclude that the only worthy art was that which took account of social realities. He destroyed all his early work.

Photomontage

John Heartfield – As in the Middle Ages...So in the Third Reich (1934)

Photomontage

John Heartfield – Whoever Reads Bourgeois Newspapers Becomes Blind and Deaf: Away with These Stultifying Bandages! (1932)

Photomontage

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy – Militarism (1924)

Lazlo Moholy-Nagy

Moholy-Nagy believed that humanity could only defeat the fracturing experience of modernity - only feel whole again - if it harnessed the potential of new technologies. Artists should transform into designers, and through specialization and experimentation find the means to answer humanity's needs.His interest in photography encouraged his belief that artists' understanding of vision had to specialize and modernize. Artists used to be dependent on the tools of perspective drawing, but with the advent of the camera they had to learn to see again. They had to renounce the classical training of previous centuries, which encouraged them to think about the history of art and to reproduce old formulas and experiment with vision, thus stretching human capacity to new tasks.

Photomontage

Laszlo Maholy-Nagy – Chairs at Margate (1935)

Photomontage

Hanna Höch – The Beautiful Girl 1918

Hanna Höch

German painter and photomontagist. She moved to Berlin in 1912 to study at the Städtischen Kunstgewerbe- und Handwerksschule Charlottenburg. Her course was interrupted by the outbreak of World War I, and she then enrolled at the Lehranstalt des Kunstgewerbemuseums in Berlin, where she studied under Emil Orlik until 1920 The collective activities of the Dada avant-garde movement came to a climax between 1918 and 1922 in exhibitions, demonstrations and multimedia events.

PHOTOMONTAGE, which was its own expressive art form, is attributed to Höch and Hausmann in 1918, partly as a response to the instability of the war years, and partly as an anti-academic alternative to German Expressionism.

Photomontage

Hanna Höch – Balance 1918 Hanna Höch – Strong Armed Men 1918

Photomontage

Alexander Rodtchenko – L’Oeuvre Complet, 1919

Alexander Rodtchenko

One of the most versatile artists of Russia for years 1922 1924 and leader of the Russian avant. He was a painter and graphic artist. He designed posters for the film, for stores factories. In correlation with posters and models book Rodtchenko interest between 1922 and 1924 in collage. He said the painting easel obsolete and turns to technology, and especially photography..

He developed a constructivist art. At the time of the Revolution of 1917 he hosted the Federation of the Union of Painters and works for the EWL magazine in which he holds the coverage.

His work is complemented by many formal research, combining painting, gluing or typography.

Photomontage

Alexander Rodtchenko – Changement 1924

Alexander Rodtchenko – Lengiz books on all subjects – 1925

Cinematic Montage

Serge Eisenstein – Oktober A celebrated dramatization of the 1917 October

revolution, or the Bolshevik Revolution as part of the Russian Revolution.

http://youtu.be/VCNTNnNFNHM

Cinematic Montage

Hans Richter– Ghosts Before Breakfast

Clocks, legs, ladders, hats, and people undergo total irrational happenings in unusual settings. Men have beards magically appear and disappear before the viewer's eyes,

hats fly around in the air, a man's head comes off and floats in the air, tea cups fill up by themselves, objects and

characters move in reverse, men disappear behind a street sign, etc... . All brought together by associative logic, the

flying hats perform this function by continually reappearing to the sequence of shots to tie the film together as a whole. This film digs into the viewer's mind for inner experience in

thought and idea.

http://youtu.be/oeosT_6vG7g