A scrap of oilcloth
In the spring of 1912 Picasso did something small and irreversible. Onto an oval still-life canvas he glued a strip of cheap, machine-printed oilcloth (the kind sold by the yard to line kitchen shelves) patterned to look like the caning of a chair, and ran a length of rope around the edge as a frame. Stop and feel how strange that is: the caning is not painted, not even imitated by hand. It is a factory-made picture of caning, a found scrap, stuck straight onto what would become a canonical work of Western art. For the first time a painter pointed at a piece of the real world and said that’ll do instead of laboriously copying it. Still Life with Chair Caning is usually called the first modern collage, and it sets off a question painting has been arguing about ever since: if a glued scrap can do the job, what exactly is the painter for?
Building up instead of breaking down
That autumn Braque answered with papier collé, pasted paper. He bought a roll of wallpaper printed to imitate oak grain, cut it into strips, and built a picture out of them. Where Analytic Cubism had taken objects apart, this new mode assembled pictures out of ready-made stuff: newspaper, sheet music, cigarette wrappers, stencilled letters, fake wood, fake marble. Call it the difference between an autopsy and a scrapbook. Historians call it Synthetic Cubism. The color comes back, the planes go big and flat and almost poster-like, and the real world (actual newsprint reporting actual Balkan wars) gets pasted bodily into the art.
It looks like a footnote and it is a hinge. Photomontage (pictures built from cut-up photographs), Dada’s cut-ups, Surrealist collage, Pop Art’s soup cans, the whole modern idea that an artist might select and arrange existing images rather than render everything from scratch, all of it walks through the door Picasso and Braque opened in 1912 with a pot of glue and a yard of shelf liner.