An Art Revolution, Made With Scissors and Glue

What would you say was the most revolutionary new artistic medium of the 20th century? Cinema? Color photography? Video, installation, sharks pickled in formaldehyde?

I want to suggest to you that it was something simpler, more low-tech. Something you probably did in elementary school — and do now, by pinching and swiping your phone.

In the northern stretches of Paris 110 years ago, between sips of absinthe and whispers of war, two young friends were busy reinventing how a picture worked. They’d done it with paint; now they wanted to go further.

All they needed were scissors and glue.

Collage (from the French “coller,” to paste) was invented in 1912 — by either Pablo Picasso or Georges Braque, Cubism’s dynamic duo. But the first artist to exhibit a collage was Cubism’s third wheel: the young Spaniard Juan Gris.

This one is called “Still Life: The Table.” It dates to 1914, and it belongs to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Gris made it from newsprint, wallpaper and several other paper stocks.

What are the boundaries of art? What holds a picture together? How do words and images gain meaning? The Cubists heard all those questions, and sliced them to pieces.

Start by looking at this collage’s most basic elements: an oval, of mostly light colors, set within a darker ground of blue and black.

You can see the various papers, yet the whole thing feels solid, complete, tightly locked up. The composition is sprung like a trampoline.

The scene would be recognizable to any Parisian: a cafe table, laid with drinks and newspaper. Cubism wasn’t a mode of abstraction.

But the picture operates according to its own architecture, and junks the conventions Western artists had used for five centuries to depict physical space.

At right we have a wine bottle: light brown with a white label, standing upright on the collage’s one section of black.

Just to the left is the outline of another wine bottle, this one tilted about 30 degrees off the vertical.

Look up from there and you’ll see a ring of charcoal, set off with scratches of white: the rim, surely, of a stemmed glass.

And here is a glass’s ornamental stem, drawn across several different papers.

The glass stem stands on the same diagonal line as the second wine bottle, while the glass’s rim matches the first bottle’s upright orientation. We have a grid.

Notice that, and you’ll soon catch other rhymes, as if the same scene were imposed twice at skew angles. This book at the bottom, with a real pasted page, on the vertical axis …

… echoes this book, on the diagonal axis, whose pages are mostly chintz wallpaper.

So how many books are on the table, one or two? Something of a trick question. The right answer might be zero — because the “book,” the “table” and all the rest are not observed objects at all.

This is the Cubist revolution: Here, for the first time in Western art since the Renaissance, the world as we see it no longer has primacy. The picture is no longer an act of perception. It’s an act of imagination, with a life and a logic of its own.

Between 1909 and 1911, Picasso and Braque shook painting to its foundations. The canvas became a field of interlocking flat planes. The palette was reduced to a narrow band of muddy browns and mucky tans. Cézanne’s independent spaces had been boiled down to total flatness.

Yet Cubism got so analytical that it nearly lost all legibility. To avoid becoming totally abstract, it needed what Braque called certitudes: recognizable hooks from modern life.

They found them in the cafe, at the hardware store — and, above all, at the newsstand.

Just how does Gris establish those verticals and diagonals? With charcoal, with watercolor — but, primarily, with the edges of the pasted papers that constitute the picture. The surfaces create sight lines.

The bottles and glasses are both unified, through the edges of the papers, and broken apart, through their varieties and colors and textures. They are, at once, whole and in pieces.

Now, with that lattice, you can make out the pair of newspapers on the table:

One running horizontally, the other folded at an angle.

And here, too, there’s a discord between the parts and the whole. Gris has drawn part of the newspaper with black crayon …

… and joined that up with an actual clipping from the Cubists’ favorite newspaper: Le Journal, a daily filled with literary essays, society gossip and true crime.

Pasted at the center is this brown paper with a false wood grain. Gris uses it in two ways: as a symbol for the wood of the cafe table, and as the actual physical ground to draw the bottles and glasses. The paper is both a sign and a support.

But Gris uses the faux-bois as a classic Cubist puzzle piece. The wallpaper, like the newspaper, is an artifact from the “real world,” meant to represent itself as it really is. But that “real” woodgrain is itself an illusion.

“Le vrai et le faux,” reads the headline in the pasted newspaper: the true and the false. A joke compounded by the two cigarettes on the paper’s nameplate, one solid, one sketched.

A nest of deceptions, this collage. Even the table plays a trick on us; between the pasted papers and the drawn edges, it seems to be both an oval and a rectangle.

And the visible world — its cigarettes and its wine bottles, the social space of the cafe, the City of Light itself — has dissolved into a thicket of signs.

It was — as the art historian Christine Poggi would call it — “a defiance of painting.”

These were pictures that infected art, a realm some old-timers still wanted to think of as “pure,” with the detritus of the modern city.

And those pieces, redefined and redeployed, were the mechanisms Gris and his colleagues used to make sense of a culture veering from all its past certainties.

And Gris made that overabundance into his medium.

This headline from Le Journal was from a five-issue series on the latest Parisian fashions, reporting to hundreds of thousands on how to distinguish “real” and “fake” style.

There were games of real and fake beyond the news: like in popular fiction, printed on cheap paper and selling for less than a franc. Paris’s artistic avant-garde gobbled up these dime novels — as models of life and art as a game of deceptions.

Gris, in particular, was a megafan of the best-selling crime serial “Fantômas,” starring a masked criminal and master of disguise. He tore out a page of one volume and pasted it right on the canvas.

“Fantômas” sold 5 million copies. The publisher ground out a dozen books a year. To anyone in the old Paris establishment, they were the definition of cultural trash.

But that establishment was outgunned. A new century had dawned, speedier, scarier. When new media command so much attention, how can an artist depict modern life?

The Cubists answered: slice, suture, reassemble.

The new grammar of collage indicted every assumption about cultural meaning, and let artists state for themselves just what is true and false.

Treat things from the real world as simply arbitrary. Let signs lose their referents. Let words take on new meanings.

Cut out your own place in a world of fragments.

It’s a position Gris doubles down on with one last game of “vrai” and “faux”.

At the table’s bottom right, drawn across two sheets of white and blue, is a key in a lock. A little joke, as if some secret meaning were hidden inside the drawer.

No surprise that there’s nothing inside. But this black is not really nothing.

The black is collaged black paper. There are no shadows here — only scraps from the blaring world outside.

A black sheet, a newspaper scrap, a page from a book, a piece of wallpaper: All of them are empty, but also primed to be repurposed. They are things unhooked from their old uses, now in free oscillation between art and life.

Too much media, too many images, too fast, too fragmentary. As regards the creation of art, the circumstances can feel hopeless sometimes.

But you can still find your way forward in a world broken to pieces. Glue them together a new way, and let the seams show.

Produced by Joshua Barone, Alicia DeSantis, Gabriel Gianordoli, Laura O’Neill and Tala Safie.