The Defiance Of Collage Cubism

This paper selects Picasso’s collages between1912and1914as its subject, aiming to illuminate the formal transformation of Cubist collages on one hand, its reference to and defiance against contemporary mass culture and political context on the other. Picasso’s collage works are acknowledged as the earliest collage creation in the modernist sense; the first chapter revisits the origin of Collage Cubism by virtue of an analysis of the interior formal development of Cubism and the exterior cultural context. In the second chapter, close attention is devoted to Picasso’s early constructions and collages from the perspective of formal analysis. The third chapter turns to the internal tension between Cubist collages and mass culture. When cubists appropriate the daily materials from mass culture to the canvases, their collage creation expresses both a defiance against the modernist "autonomy of art", and an irony of mass culture. This chapter focuses on how Picasso challenged the contemporary museum standards by the mass cultural elements (signals) in his collage creation; special attention is given to the recurring musical elements in his collages. The fourth chapter discusses the large number of newspaper clippings in Picasso’s collages. As an important media discourse inserted to collages works, Picasso’s clippings contain a lot of political and war reports of that period. It is by means of these newspaper collages that Picasso expressed his political stance of anti-war and antimilitarism. The last part of this paper succinctly summarizes the development of collage among the twentieth century visual arts. The diversified collage practices in twentieth century drew much of its inspiration from the collage Cubism, whether in formal composition or subjects selection.