Although collage is primarily seen as art for waist-high kids with glue sticks, scissors, and old magazines, a century ago collage was moving toward the main stage in modern art. When Picasso added a pasted-on piece of colored oilcloth to one of his paintings in 1912, and Cubist contemporaries such as Georges Braques and Juan Gris followed suit by adding collage material to their work, collage became serious art. After the Cubists came the Dadaists. Artists like Hannah Hoch, Max Ernst, and Kurt Schwitters raised the stakes: collage was not added, it was the heart and soul of their work. These artists began using materials rarely associated with Art with a capital A to create art that defied tradition. The Dadaists and the many “ists” who came after added what Schwitters called “chance encounter objects”-ticket stubs, receipts, price tags, fabric, diagrams, old photographs, stamps, stickers, labels, and, well, really just about anything that looked “right” and could be glued down-to their work.
