Clement Greenberg - Collage

·      Collage was a major turning point in the evolution of Cubism and the whole evolution of modernist art in century because of Braque and Picasso and their work between 1907 and 1914, both claim each collage was the first one to be created.

·      Most important – that the men decided and even thought of cutting and pasting as an option

·      Renewed contact with “reality” in growing abstractness in analytical cubism. The adding of the materials made the experience more “real” even though those materials still are representations

·      They were managing to obtain sculptural results through non-sculptural means with the mixture of collage and Analytical cubism

·      Flatness was invading the cubist picture, dissecting everything visible, the artists seemed to be losing control of the work and representation. Began to act more as something that is visually pleasing and not creating description

·      This is now representing even more illusion with trope-l’oeil – to deceive and undeceive; meaning the image would cause the viewer to have to look harder while the artist is giving the viewer as much information as possible for the image to make sense

·      The use of text overlay on the image helped make the interaction of space more defined; the text resting on top of the image causes the subject to be forced forward and backward at once - “more present and more ambiguous at the same time

·      September 1912 Braque pasted wood grain on the canvas instead of painting it, causing the push pull of the foreground and depth of the background to be pushed forward. The flatness of the space becomes asserted but the same time, the imagery creates depth

·      From there synthetic Cubism began, in 1913 or early 1914 and it set up for a different type of work that still challenged the visual space, but the purpose had changed to more representational and less abstraction