ABSTRACT
The ‘collage’ has had a rich history in the popular arts before the twentieth century, but it entered ‘high’ art in 1912–1913, when Picasso and Braque started pasting pieces of wallpaper, newspaper, sheet music, as well as sand and pins, to a pictorial composition. In Max Ernst’s romans-collages, the collage works as an artistic means, which changes the meaning of engravings, a painterly medium par excellence. “The fooling of the spirit” is generated by the subversion of clear-meaning articulation through a particular association of drawing, pieces of papers and newspapers, and materials of various kinds. Picasso’s spatial experiments with form and meaning formation in his collages from 1912 to 1914 are unique in the avant-garde. The popular understanding of the term ‘collage,’ which presupposes a mix of the most disparate elements, affected the definition of the concept of verbal collage. For contemporary audiences verbal collage refers to a mix and match of unrelated verbal pieces.
