Chapter 4 | WORKS OF ART
In the early 20th century, a group of young artists called themselves Dada. They fiercely opposed what they considered the complacent bourgeois taste. They deliberately created anti-art, partly to shake up the (art) world in politically turbulent times. Their collages are often deliberately chaotic and garish.
Terry Gilliam, director of the famous English comedy series Monty Python, often used surreal collages as a starting point for very funny animations.
The Swiss artist Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948) made collages of all kinds of (waste) materials. Schwitters was in this collage probably mainly concerned with colour: earth tones (such as sand) with accents of red and blue and a touch of green.
The pop art artist Richard Hamilton (1922-2011) made an iconic collage about the attractive everydayness of a modern living room in the 1950s. The depth effect/perspective in this precisely executed collage is very ingenious.
Some artists like to deceive our eyes. The last image is a so called ‘Trompe l’oeuil’ (eye deceiver): it looks like a collage but it is painted entirely, in such a skillful way that it really looks like a collage, including the torn edges around the female figure.
