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.