Picture made by sticking together pieces of paper or photographs; SYN. montage.
creation of an artistic work by pasting shaped scraps of printed matter and other materials to a surface; such a composition.
Use of materials of any kind—pieces of newspaper, wallpaper, fabric, etc.—stuck on a canvas or other surface, usually in conjunction with a painted or drawn element of design, a technique first used by Cubist and Dadaist artists. The purpose, as in the Cubist still life of Braque and Picasso (the first artists to use collage), was not only decorative, but also to provide a visual stimulant by the contrast or harmony of a real material substance with a painted surface.
The Dadaists extended the idea to any assortment of incongruous objects, fortuitously producing some striking or ingenious effect, such as Kurt Schwitter’s “compositions” of bus tickets and other odds and ends. Max Ernst gave it a surrealist weirdness by fitting together incongruous cuttings from 19th-century wood-engravings, a process which may be compared with the photographer’s “montage”. He also invented “frottage”, which simply meant the addition to a design of a rubbing taken from some uneven surface and reproducing its irregularities and texture.