collage art essay

Collage Art – A History of Collage as an Artistic Medium

Appearing at the beginning of the 20 th century, Collage Art began as a form of novelty art. This style explored the incorporation of many different materials that were often glued together, to create a cutting-edge style of craft art that had never been seen before. The aesthetic surrounding Collage Art was described as being pieced together, which enabled the production of utterly unique creations. Viewed under the guise of mixed media, Collage Art typically explored the highs and lows that encompassed the elements of formal art.

Table of Contents

• 1 The History of Collage Art: An Introduction
• 2.1 Precursors of Collage Art
• 2.2.1 Cubism
• 2.2.2 Dadaism
• 2.2.3 Surrealism
• 2.3 Collage as Commentary
• 3.1 Henri Matisse (1869 – 1954)
• 3.2 Pablo Picasso (1881 – 1973)
• 3.3 Georges Braque (1882 – 1963)
• 3.4 Hans Arp (1886 – 1966)
• 3.5 Kurt Schwitters (1887 – 1948)
• 3.6 Hannah Höch (1889 – 1978)
• 4.1 Architecture
• 5 The Legacy of Collage Art
• 6.1 Collect and Create Your Own Source Material
• 6.2 Organize Your Composition Prior to Gluing It Down

The History of Collage Art: An Introduction

Becoming a distinctive part of Modern Art in the early 20 th century, Collage Art described the technique of assemblage that was used within this artistic creation of a new style. Despite the roots of Collage Art being traced back hundreds of years, this art form made a dramatic resurgence and was said to exist as an art form of novelty due to its one-of-a-kind aesthetic. Starting in the Modernist period, before being propelled into the contemporary art world, Collage Art has endured many changes as more artists began to explore it.

Taken from the French word coller , which means to either stick together or glue, the term “collage” described the process that was taken when creating Collage Art. Collage within art was first coined by Cubist artists Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, who were the first pioneers of this movement. Existing as the first two artists who worked with different mediums in an attempt to make art, Braque and Picasso began their cutting-edge assemblages around 1910.

The first example of Collage Art appeared within Braque’s 1912 artwork titled Fruit Dish and Glass , where he glued down imitation wood-grained wallpaper. Following in Braque’s footsteps, Picasso began to add newsprint to his oil paintings which made reference to the current events that were taking place, as well as gluing rope around the edge of some canvases. Pioneers of the Collage Art movement, both Braque and Picasso composed their works from glued bits of colored paper, newspaper, and found objects.

A variety of materials, such as paper, cloth, paint, found objects, magazine and newspaper clippings, and sections of other artworks and text were incorporated together before being glued onto a canvas or board to create an entirely new composition. This style essentially brought forth the production of a different form of art, which allowed new types of artworks to be created. These materials were considered to be such a bold intermingling of artistic elements that the return of the collage medium was thought to revolutionize modern art.

Collage Art has been referred to as one form of mixed media art, as many different types exist. The process of collage was viewed as a mixture of both elevated and diminished elements that existed within formal art, with this mixture referring to the traditional definition of art as well as art that was produced for mass consumption and commercial use. Thus, Collage Art existed as a newer form of Modern art due to its combination of elements, which saw many artists employing this popular medium.

From its early roots in both Dadaism and Modernism, Collage Art existed as a medium that was as diverse as it was politically motivated. Due to its emergence after World War One, Art Collage allowed artists to experiment with existing materials such as newsprint, magazines, tickets, propaganda, and photographs in order to create new works of art. These materials were ripped apart and reassembled into visually powerful fusions that interacted together in such a unique way that added to the avant-garde process that encompassed Collage Art.

Through incorporating a variety of materials within an artwork, Collage Art successfully subverted traditional definitions of what was important art. The incorporation of these materials allowed collage artwork to frankly question society’s tendency to detach fine art from ordinary objects through juxtaposing elements of high and low culture within works. Whether these compositions were purposeful or random, the comparison created by the contrast of different elements has long captivated the attention of artists.

Since images have the ability to take on new meanings within different contexts, the art of collage was able to easily overturn traditional meanings that were typically associated with art, as well as imply multiple meanings simultaneously. In doing so, Collage Art created works that did not simply fit into a single and rigid analysis. The style of collage held much artistic potential, which in turn made the movement incredibly accessible for all types of artists.

Many innovative artists ranging from the modernism and contemporary era have made use of collage to query the supposedly traditional duty of the artist within the works they created. Through using found and mass-produced objects, images, and materials that were not made by the artists themselves, Collage Art was able to undermine the customary importance that was placed on an artist’s hand in the making of their original work.

Thus, Collage Art was adopted to undermine the idea of importance when composing unique and avant-garde works.

Collage Art Influences and Style

Collage describes the technique of creating an artwork through combining and gluing together a wide range of materials onto a surface like a canvas or board. However, the style of collage differs depending on the techniques and materials that an artist uses. For example, photomontage made exclusive use of photos in their artworks; decoupage involved gluing cut colored paper or images onto an object; assemblage referred to a three-dimensional collection of objects, and papiers collés described collages that were made only from bits of paper.

Precursors of Collage Art

The techniques associated with Collage Art were first used in China around 200 BC when paper was invented. The initial style of collage began to slowly come into fashion within 10 th century Japan when calligraphers started to utilize glued paper and texts on surfaces when writing poetry. During the 15th and 16th centuries within Europe, collage techniques were used in Gothic cathedrals when applying gold leaf panels, as well as gemstones and other valuable metals that were applied to religious imagery and icons.

Collage was also seen as a method of art undertaken by hobbyists for a period of time, as this style was used in items of memorabilia, such as photo albums, and books within the 19 th century. However, many institutions have attributed the history of collage and its official beginning within the art sphere to be dated around 1912, when both Picasso and Braque began to experiment with this style in their artworks.

Associated Movements

Within the development and history of Collage Art, many other artistic movements had significant influence. The techniques of collage, which took inspiration from the Cubism movement, became a principal element within both the Dada and Surrealist periods of art . In addition to these areas of art, collage was later represented in the Neo-Dada and Pop Art movement , as different collage techniques were used to explore various subject matters.

Within the contemporary sense, collage artwork was said to begin with Cubist painters Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso. Cubist collages began experimenting with fragments of different and completely unrelated subject matter to achieve a deconstructed appearance and form. Despite Cubism being mainly associated with paintings, the techniques that Braque and Picasso experimented with within their works allowed them to create collages that were essentially Cubist in nature.

Cubism was able to pair perfectly with the Collage Art movement, as it allowed artists to selectively piece together a picture of their choice from a range of different elements. Due to this style, collage artwork had the ability to refrain from appearing flat, unlike traditional two-dimensional painting. Thus, Cubist collages differ significantly from previous Cubist works, as the added element of collage was able to draw out areas of dimensionality and perspective.

Materials that were frequently utilized in collages by Cubist artists were painted cut-outs, patterned paper, and newsprint. Picasso demonstrated the use of these elements within his 1913 artwork titled Bottle of Vieux Marc, Glass, Guitar and Newspaper , in which he played around with these materials on his artwork. In addition to this work, Braque represented the typical materials used in his Violin and Pipe artwork that he created in 1913.

The Dada movement was inspired by the cutting-edge work that was produced by Picasso and Braque, with artists practicing within this group beginning to play around with collage in the 1920s. Dadaists strayed away from the favored still-life subject matter of Cubism and instead opted to create collages that integrated a wide range of imagery. In doing so, the subject matter in Dada collages typically tended to represent reimagined portraits and figures that were ingrained in fantasy.

The Dada movement arose due to the political turmoil that had engulfed Europe after the First World War, with these anxieties manifesting themselves in the Dadaist collages that were created. Notable artists like Hans Arp, who arrived in Paris in 1914 to avoid being drafted into the German military, saw Picasso and Braque’s collages which ultimately inspired him to create his own. By 1915, Arp was exhibiting his Dadaist collage works in a gallery in Zurich.

Dadaists integrated more materials in their collages than their Cubist colleagues. Through combining a variety of elements, artists who created collages within the Dada movement were celebrated for their creative use of presumably worthless and frequently disregarded objects. These items often included magazine cut-outs, candy wrappers, tickets, and various three-dimensional ornaments. Through transforming transient ideas and materials into more refined pieces, Dadaists were able to call into question traditional perceptions of art.

In the wake of the Dada movement, Surrealism also stepped away from the still-life focus of Cubism in favor of experimenting with the elements of collage. Artists began to make extensive use of collage within their works to create fictitious, unusual, and dream-like scenes. Surrealists adapted the cut-and-paste technique of collage to produce works that seemed to be a product of one’s subconscious, which allowed truly unique pieces to be created.

These Surrealist collages made use of materials such as illustrations, photographs, colored paper, and paint to expand on the strange subject matter that was adopted within Dadaist collages. Thus, pieces that were reminiscent of strange dream sequences were created. This was seen in the works of Surrealist artists André Breton and Joseph Cornell, who made use of chaotic collage techniques to create coherent yet completely imaginary scenes.

Collage techniques that formed in the Dada era, such as photo-collage, relief assemblage, and overpainting, heavily influenced the development of Surrealist collages. Due to this influence, “collage” no longer solely implied works created with paper and glue. Surrealist artists began expressing an enchantment with text, which they began to incorporate within their collages. The first notable collages examples of this visual and verbal blend are demonstrated in the works of Max Ernst , who used collage in the late 1920s.

Collage as Commentary

The reason that the style of collage differs so significantly from other artistic styles is that it allowed artists the opportunity to add commentary to their work through the inclusion of common images and objects. In doing so, dimension was added to collages, which had the ability to further demonstrate the idea that was being carried forth.

Within contemporary art , many artists displayed a sudden interest in materials such as magazine and newspaper cut-outs, printed words, photographs, dirty cloths, and even metal pieces. This was due to the fact that the inclusion of these elements was able to successfully convey the criticisms and comments that the works implied, which was not previously possible in merely painted works.

The method of collage made the historical and political contexts of the work inseparable from one another, due to the fact that collages typically incorporated mass-produced images within their works. Thus, collage artwork existed as an influential means of social commentary, as its ability to question society’s assumptions and biases made it a worthwhile art form that was explored within a variety of other movements.

Notable Collage Artists and Their Collage Examples

Throughout Collage history, many significant collages painting pieces and works were made, which went on to greatly impact the direction of this cut-and-paste method of art creation. Some of the movement’s more well-known artists have been listed below, along with their iconic collage works that helped shape the techniques within the movement.

Henri Matisse (1869 – 1954)

Known for his various cut-out collages, Henri Matisse exhibited techniques of collage long after the initial success of the movement. During the late 1940s, Matisse made a significant change in his approach to his artistry and began working with paper during the last decade of both his career and life. Labeling his new creations as “cut-outs”, his seemingly simplistic works managed to evoke great complexity as he used gouache paint to stick down different pieces of colored paper in sequences that would often resemble elements of the natural world.

Within his cut-out types of collages, Matisse was most inspired by flowers, plants, animals, figures, and even abstract images. When creating his works, he arranged his cut-outs into energetic and colorful compositions that gradually grew in scale the more he continued to work. This style of artistic creation allowed Matisse to transcend the boundaries associated with traditional easel painting, as it gave him complete freedom to create art in whatever way he wanted to.

One of his notable cut-outs works that displayed his compositional style is his 1953 artwork titled The Sheaf. Matisse cut out a variety of colorful fronds that were thought to mimic a vivid fireworks display, which he then pasted onto a white background. This work, along with his other cut-out works, demonstrated some of Matisse’s most expressive creations from his career, as he was able to directly translate his intense emotions into pieces of paper simply by rearranging and pasting them in different compositions.

Within his later artworks, Matisse was able to explore spatial ambiguity through his simple interpretation of forms and shapes. Additionally, Matisse explored the illusion of depth within art through the colorful and lively artworks he created, as the intense hues of the paper he used managed to somewhat avoid coming across as simply two-dimensional.

Pablo Picasso (1881 – 1973)

Said to be one of the two original pioneers of the Art Collage styles, Pablo Picasso began to experiment with this technique around 1912. Inspired by the works created by Georges Braque , Picasso commenced an intense phase of collage-making, where he was said to have created almost a hundred collages in a short period. His early collage compositions made use of artificial wood-grain paper, text, pieces of cloth, instruments, and other objects.

Picasso created his collages with extreme precision to the point where he was likened to a doctor dissecting a cadaver. An example of one of the first Cubist collages made, as well as one of Picasso’s most notable collages, is Still Life with Chair Caning , created in 1912. Within this work, Picasso depicted various views of a café table holding different items, such as a napkin, a knife, a piece of fruit, and a wine glass.

What makes this work so interesting is that instead of painting a chair, Picasso stuck down a piece of oilcloth that was printed with the pattern of the chair caning. Additionally, he used a length of rope to frame the canvas. Both elements were utilized for their suggestive nature, as the cloth implied a physical chair, while the rope was a humorous take on the usually carved edge of a table.

By including the letters “Jou” at the top of his work, Picasso managed to seamlessly incorporate both wordplay and visual elements into his work. In doing so, his collages forced viewers to examine their own perceptions of what constituted an artwork, as well as the relationship that existed between formal art and common objects. Within his later works, Picasso mastered the style of collage as his pieces famously mixed high and low culture, which had a notable impact on the subsequent development of art within the 20 th century.

Georges Braque (1882 – 1963)

Creating Collage artwork at the same time as Picasso, Georges Braque is considered to be the other original pioneer of Collage Art. Within his seminal works, he combined pieces of fake wood wallpaper into his Cubist depictions of objects. After buying a roll of wood-grain wallpaper that he found in a shop window, Braque began to cut and paste this paper into his various drawings. It was this technique that he shared with Picasso, which prompted him to begin experimenting with collage alongside Braque.

Braque’s most influential example of collage art is his 1912 artwork titled Fruit Dish and Glass. Within this work, he stuck down pieces of the faux-wood wallpaper he found. In doing so, Braque created intersecting areas of collage elements and drawing within his work, which successfully called into question the formal ideas of perspective and space within art. Despite combining two seemingly juxtaposing elements, Braque’s work still suggested pieces of a tabletop and door.

Within Braque’s collage work, he explored the perception of space, which is what his Cubist works and the movement as a whole emphasized. While his addition of glued-on bits of wallpaper emphasized a shallower space to investigate the idea of space, this collage element allowed a greater exploration of the feeling of shapes and how they related to one another. Thus, the artistic methods Braque’s demonstrated in his collages became fundamental within the growth and expansion of the collage technique as a whole.

Hans Arp (1886 – 1966)

Another influential artist within the Collage Art movement was Hans Arp . His collages were essentially Dadaist in nature, as he was profoundly affected by the insanity and trauma of war. In the aftermath of the First World War, Dada artists felt that traditional social systems and the focus they placed on reason were responsible for the war, and because of this, they sought to create art that was free from all rational reason and deliberate tactics. Thus, the collages that Arp created embodied this way of thinking.

One of Arp’s most notable collage works, created in Zurich between 1916 and 1917, was Untitled (Collage with Squares Arranged according to the Law of Chance) . This abstract collage was made up of a drawing that Arp had previously been working on but later disregarded. He then tore the pieces of blue and white paper into squares of various sizes, which he let fall to the floor. Once the paper had landed in arbitrary places, Arp pasted each scrap where it was to create a work that rested upon the random chance of gravity.

Through leaving the creation of this collage completely up to chance, Arp adhered to the new anti-art style that was established which avoided the traditional ideas of artistic talent. Arp’s Untitled collage was resolutely devoid of any further essence, as it simply consisted of torn scraps of paper that did not express any story or picture. However, it can be argued that Arp did not fully abandon control within this work, as the grid-like arrangement of his collage points to a form of structure that was subtly incorporated into the work.

Kurt Schwitters (1887 – 1948)

A significant contribution to the development of Collage Art was made by Kurt Schwitters , who began working on his influential collages in 1918. These works were made from paper and were constructed from rubbish that Schwitters had found on the street. His aim within his collage art was to create works that were able to embrace all different types and styles of art.

Existing as another Dada artist, Schwitters produced collages and assemblages under the title of “Merz”, which was a concept he formulated. This concept included works that combined all possible materials for purely artistic reasons, as he argued that common and found objects such as wood and plasterboard were equivalent to paint and other formal artistic elements. Thus, one of Schwitters’ most well-known works, created in 1921, included a variety of elements and was titled Merz Picture 32A, The Cherry Pie.

Within this multilayered artwork, Schwitters created this collage from different pieces of debris and objects that he had collected on the streets of his hometown in Germany. Schwitters’ method of collection differed vastly from the actual creation of this work, as he purposely chose a spot and meticulously glued and nailed down each item to a painted board. Areas of light and dark were created through the cut-outs, fabrics, and candy wrappers that were used, as the combination of these materials helped create a sense of pictorial depth.

When considering Merz Picture 32A, the chaotic nature of the different elements used by Schwitters helped evoke the idea of a bulletin board full of notes and cards . The inclusion of the child’s flashcard with the cherry helped blur the boundary that existed between ordinary objects and painting, in addition to adding to the transparent title of the work. Thus, Schwitters managed to create a collage that was completely disorganized and confusing, which subscribed to the Dada notions of the time.

Hannah Höch (1889 – 1978)

An influential female artist who experimented within the Collage Art movement was Hannah Höch, who created some of the most iconic works from the collage period. Höch started to create collages as a young girl and brought her child-like techniques of sticking the wrong head on the wrong body into her works as an adult. Within her works, Höch investigated gender roles and politics, as she created a commentary that challenged the way society was structured and viewed itself.

Her most well-known work was created in 1919 and was titled Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany . Höch’s work was very politically charged, as she repositioned images and text from the mass media to criticize the shortcomings of the Weimar German Government in the aftermath of the First World War.

Within her artwork, a seamless fusion is demonstrated between Höch’s ideas and techniques, as she made use of newspaper cut-outs to call into question the sexist and racist rules that supported Weimar Germany at the time. Höch’s work shows an image of Weimar society with its chief establishment and anti-establishment figures in and amongst industrialized disorder. This work was later exhibited at Berlin’s First International Dada Fair in 1920 and was a great success due to its transparency.

Höch created these photomontages for the remainder of her career, as she believed that there was no true limit on the types of materials that could be used to make up a collage. Through pioneering a form of art that made use of fashion magazine cut-outs, illustrated journals, and photography, Höch demonstrated that art could be made up from the ordinary chaos of modern life. Her work challenged racism and the place of women in 20 th century society, which later influenced contemporary artists such as Cindy Sherman.

Collage Art in Other Forms

The development of Collage Art allowed the techniques that were created and refined to cross the boundaries of visual arts into other artistic spheres. Some of the most well-known areas, amongst many others, where elements of collage have been incorporated include architecture, music, and film.

Architecture

Although the pioneers of modern architecture used techniques that were closely related to collage, the theoretical concept of collage only became widely discussed after architects Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter published Collage City in 1978. While they were not advocating for collage in the graphic sense, Rowe and Koetter attempted to challenge the uniformity of Modernism through using the non-linear and disorganized ideals of collage.

Thus, collage within architecture was seen as a metaphor to revitalize the design practice.

The style of collage has also made its way into the development of music. In the last half of the 20 th century, the strides that were made in terms of the advancements in recording technology allowed innovative artists to start experimenting with the techniques of cutting and pasting within music production.

A notable group who made use of collage styles within their music was The Beatles. During the 1960s, English producer George Martin worked extensively with the band and created collages of the recordings from their albums. Additionally, in 1967 the cover for their Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band made great use of collage techniques.

Musical collages developed significantly throughout the latter part of the 20 th century and by the 1990s and 200s, collage techniques became quite common within music. The most popular music styles that utilized a form of collage were rap, hip-hop, and electronic music.

Collage within film is best demonstrated when fictional scenes are interspersed with footage that has been sourced from a variety of locales, such as newsreels. The combination of different types of footage into a film carried various degrees of significance, which were dependent on the approach that the director took when filming. Collage within film can also encompass the physical collaging of materials onto the film strips. This technique was typical of Canadian filmmaker Arthur Lipsett, who was widely known for his collage film works.

The Legacy of Collage Art

Due to the many techniques and styles that made up the Collage Art movement, it is still easy to wonder: what is a collage in its entirety? Thus, it was said that collages painting and artworks were predominantly used to address a variety of issues, due to the technique’s ability for vast social commentary. Often within collage, artists would leave hints within their artworks that alluded to social and political concerns, as collage gave artists the chance to comment on issues through the use of familiar objects and images.

The legacy of Art Collage can be seen through the many young artists that have continued to work in this medium and have produced artworks. Collage Art had the ability to tell the story of each different artistic generation through the commentary it creates, which allows for truly fascinating works to be created. Within the contemporary area, collage has been viewed as the base of the digital experience due to its vast experimentation with layering and interjecting of different mediums to make up one work.

Tips for Making Your Own Collage

Have you ever wondered what is a collage and if anyone can make one? While this type of art creation may seem daunting at first due to its chaotic and disorganized nature, the art of collage is entirely possible for anyone to experiment with. However, before constructing your own collage, here are two tips to consider when starting out with this cut-and-paste style.

Collect and Create Your Own Source Material

When making your own collage, it will be beneficial to start developing a library of different collage materials for you to choose from. In doing so, you will be able to peruse through what you already have when starting a new collage before having to go out to buy new items.

Some old items that can be kept to utilize within collages at a later stage include old books, photographs, clothing, and recycled paper. Additionally, you can also choose to create your own unique source materials when working on your collage. This can be done by painting pieces of paper and then cutting them up into any shape you want.

Organize Your Composition Prior to Gluing It Down

Before you permanently attach your materials to your backing, it would be wise to take some time out to plan your composition. Collage differs from two-dimensional mediums as allows you to arrange your elements in any way that you want to within your artwork. Take advantage of this medium’s flexibility by experimenting with different compositions before committing to the final look.

If you are a beginner to this medium, it is suggested to focus on one or two of the basic elements at first so as not to be overwhelmed. These elements include line, color, form, shape, or texture. If you find that your composition has too many elements, try restricting the number of materials you are working with until you are satisfied with the outcome.

Throughout Collage history, the works that were created were deeply referential of the political climate that existed at the time. Thus, the style of collage proved to be a suitable medium for social commentary, as it allowed artists to abandon the formal elements that had previously governed art in order to create works that honestly represented modern society. In essence, Collage Art blatantly questioned the ideals that made up an artwork, whilst offering a reflection on the change and upheaval that characterized the 20th century.

Isabella studied at the University of Cape Town in South Africa and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts majoring in English Literature & Language and Psychology. Throughout her undergraduate years, she took Art History as an additional subject and absolutely loved it. Building on from her art history knowledge that began in high school, art has always been a particular area of fascination for her. From learning about artworks previously unknown to her, or sharpening her existing understanding of specific works, the ability to continue learning within this interesting sphere excites her greatly.

Her focal points of interest in art history encompass profiling specific artists and art movements, as it is these areas where she is able to really dig deep into the rich narrative of the art world. Additionally, she particularly enjoys exploring the different artistic styles of the 20 th century, as well as the important impact that female artists have had on the development of art history.

Learn more about Isabella Meyer and the Art in Context Team .

Cite this Article

Isabella, Meyer, “Collage Art – A History of Collage as an Artistic Medium.” Art in Context. April 8, 2021. URL: https://artincontext.org/collage-art/

Meyer, I. (2021, 8 April). Collage Art – A History of Collage as an Artistic Medium. Art in Context. https://artincontext.org/collage-art/

Meyer, Isabella. “Collage Art – A History of Collage as an Artistic Medium.” Art in Context , April 8, 2021. https://artincontext.org/collage-art/ .

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The Most Famous Artists and Artworks

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Discover the most famous artists, paintings, sculptors!

Definition Examples of Collage Essays

Glossary of Grammatical and Rhetorical Terms

• An Introduction to Punctuation
• Ph.D., Rhetoric and English, University of Georgia
• M.A., Modern English and American Literature, University of Leicester
• B.A., English, State University of New York

In composition studies , a collage is a discontinuous essay form made up of discrete bits of discourse — description , dialogue , narrative , explanation, and the like. 

A collage essay (also known as a patchwork essay, a discontinuous essay, and segmented writing ) generally forgoes conventional transitions , leaving it up to the reader to locate or impose connections between the fragmented observations.

In his book Reality Hunger (2010), David Shields defines collage as "the art of reassembling fragments of preexisting images in such a way as to form a new image." Collage, he notes, "was the most important innovation in the art of the twentieth century."

"To use collage as a writer," says Shara McCallum, "is to map onto your essay . . . the semblance of continuities and discontinuities associated with the art form" (in Now Write! ed. by   Sherry Ellis).

Collage Essays in Academics

Academicians, linguists, and scholars have attempted to define what a collage essay is—its elements and components—as these examples show.

David Bergman and Daniel Mark Epstein

• " Collage is a term derived from art and refers to a picture made up of pieces of found objects: scraps of newspaper, bits of old cane backing, a gum wrapper, lengths of string, tin cans. A collage can be made entirely of found objects, or it can be a combination of the objects and the artists's own drawing. [Writers] perform a similar act. But instead of gathering scraps of newspaper and string, they arrange scattered pieces of language : clichés , phrases they have heard, or quotations ." ( The Heath Guide to Literature . D.C. Heath, 1984)

Peter Elbow

• "Many feature stories in daily and especially Sunday newspapers drift into the collage form—or example, a neighborhood in Brooklyn written up in a series of bits that present rather than explain: portraits of people and of terrain, street corner scenes, mini-narratives, dialogues, and reminiscent monologues . . . . "You might make a collage essay on the causes of the French Revolution that consists entirely of stories, portraits, and scenes. You would have to choose and arrange your fragments in such a way that they tell why the French Revolution happened as it did. Or you might have one that consists entirely of dialogues: between nobles, peasants, middle-class city dwellers, and thinkers of the period; between people who came before and those who came afterwards. Of course you may have to revise and polish some of these fragments to make them as good as possible—perhaps even write some more bits to give at least a minimal coherence." ( Writing With Power: Techniques for Mastering the Writing Process , 2nd ed. Oxford University Press, 1998)

Carl H. Klaus

• "[T]he serial arrangement of pieces in a discontinuous essay results in a composition the whole of which can only be taken in gradually and therefore can only be held entirely in mind by a special act of will. Indeed, the fragmented mode of presentation tacitly invites one to consider each segment in and of itself, in relation to every other segment and in relation to the entire set of pieces, resulting in a complex network of understandings gradually arrived at rather than a whole work immediately perceived. . . . "'Discontinuous'—it works so well to denote the visible and substantive breaks in a segmented piece that it seems to be the most accurate descriptive term. But it might have negative connotations—like many words beginning with 'dis'--so I've been pondering a more neutral term, such as 'paratactic,' from the Greek ' parataxis ,' which refers to the placement of clauses or phrases side by side without any type of conjunction . . . . Though it's hardly so chic and culturally relevant a term as ' collage ,' parataxis is certainly more akin to what happens in essays such as [George] Orwell's 'Marrakech,' [E.B.] White's 'Spring,' [Annie] Dillard's 'Living Like Weasels,' and [Joyce Carol] Oates's 'My Father, My Fiction,' all of which contain discrete sentences, paragraphs, or longer units of discourse placed side by side without any connective or transitional material between them." ( The Made-Up Self: Impersonation in the Personal Essay . Univ. of Iowa Press, 2010)

Winston Weathers

• "In extreme form, collage/montage can mean something as radical as William Burroughs's famous cut-up method, whereby texts written in traditional grammar are arbitrarily cut up, horizontally and vertically, and converted into near-unintelligible scraps of text. The scraps are then shuffled (or folded in) and joined randomly. . . . "Less radical, and more usable, are methods of collage that use larger and more intelligible units of composition, each unit—like the crot —communicative within itself simply being joined in the collage to other communication units, perhaps from different time periods, perhaps dealing with different subject matter, perhaps even containing different sentence/ dictional style, texture, tone. Collage at its best actually countermands much of the discontinuity and fragmentation of the alternate style by revealing, by the time a composition ends, a synthesis and wholeness that might not have been suspected at any station along the way." ("Grammars of Style: New Options in Composition," 1976. Rpt. in Style in Rhetoric and Composition: A Critical Sourcebook , ed. by Paul Butler. Bedford/St. Martin's, 2010)

Collage Essays in Literature

Authors such as E.B. White and Joan Didion have penned examples of collage essays, and others, such as writer and filmmaker David Shields, have explained what this kind of essay is and what it contains.

• Morning is so closely associated with brisk affairs, music with evening and day's end, that when I hear a three-year-old dance tune crooned upon the early air while shadows still point west and the day is erect in the saddle, I feel faintly decadent, at loose ends, as though I were in the South Seas—a beachcomber waiting for a piece of fruit to fall, or for a brown girl to appear naked from a pool. * * * Asterisks ? So soon? * * * It is a hot-weather sign, the asterisk. The cicada of the typewriter, telling the long steaming noons. Don Marquis was one of the great exponents of the asterisk. The heavy pauses between his paragraphs, could they find a translator, would make a book for the ages. * * * Don knew how lonely everybody is. "Always the struggle of the human soul is to break through the barriers of silence and distance into companionship. Friendship, lust, love, art, religion--we rush into them pleading, fighting, clamoring for the touch of spirit laid against our spirit." Why else would you be reading this fragmentary page—you with the book in your lap? You're not out to learn anything, certainly. You just want the healing action of some chance corroboration, the soporific of spirit laid against spirit. Even if you had read only to crab about everything I say, your letter of complaint is a dead give-away: you are unutterably lonely or you wouldn't have taken the trouble to write it. . . . ("Hot Weather." One Man's Meat . Harper & Row, 1944)

Joan Didion

"At three-thirty that afternoon Max, Tom, and Sharon placed tabs under their tongues and sat down together in the living room to wait for the flash. Barbara stayed in the bedroom, smoking hash. During the next four hours a window banged once in Barbara's room and about five-thirty some children had a fight on the street. A curtain billowed in the afternoon wind. A cat scratched a beagle in Sharon's lap. Except for the sitar music on the stereo there was no other sound or movement until seven-thirty, when Max said, 'Wow.'" ("Slouching Towards Bethlehem." Slouching Towards Bethlehem . Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968)

David Shields

• 314 Collage is a demonstration of the many becoming the one, with the one never fully resolved because of the many that continue to impinge upon it. . . . 328 I'm not interested in collage as the refuge of the compositionally disabled. I'm interested in collage as (to be honest) an evolution beyond narrative. . . . 330 Everything I write, I believe instinctively, is to some extent collage. Meaning, ultimately, is a matter of adjacent data. . . . 339 Collage is pieces of other things. Their edges don't meet. . . . 349 The very nature of collage demands fragmented materials, or at least materials yanked out of context . Collage is, in a way, only an accentuated act of editing : picking through options and presenting a new arrangement . . .. The act of editing may be the key postmodern artistic instrument. . . . 354 In collage, writing is stripped of the pretense of originality and appears as a practice of mediation, of selection and contextualization, a practice, almost, of reading . ( Reality Hunger: A Manifesto . Knopf, 2010)

Examples of Collage Essays

• "Lying Awake" by Charles Dickens
• "A 'Now': Descriptive of a Hot Day" by Leigh Hunt
• "Suite Américaine" by H.L. Mencken
• How Is Collage Used in Art?
• What Is a Sentence Fragment in Writing?
• What is Identification in Rhetoric?
• The Collage Art of Photomontage
• polysyndeton (style and rhetoric)
• Parataxis (grammar and prose style)
• Guidelines for Using Semicolons, Colons, and Dashes
• Recycling Old Paper Into Beautiful Handmade Paper
• What Is a Personal Essay (Personal Statement)?
• Defining Synthetic Cubism
• Examples of Images in Poetry, Fiction, and Nonfiction
• List (Grammar and Sentence Styles)
• Definition and Examples of a Transition in Composition
• Writing a Lead or Lede to an Article
• A Definition Plus Helpful Examples of Particles in English Grammar
• What Are the Different Types and Characteristics of Essays?

Summary of Collage

A common technique practiced by decorators, advertising agencies, and hobbyists alike, collage upended the fine-art world when Cubists Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso incorporated bits of newspaper and printed wallpaper into their paintings, subverting traditional definitions of what is important art. Combining painting, real-world objects, images, and ephemera into a single work, collage directly questions the tendency to separate fine art from everyday objects, the delineations between so-called high and low culture, and the status of the artist. Adopted by subsequent artists, collage became a dominant technique in the Dada, Surrealist, Pop Art, and Neo-Dada movements, each using the technique to explore different subject matters. Because collage often incorporates mass-produced images, the practice is often inseparable from its historical and political context, making it a mode of powerful social commentary. Contemporary artists continue to explore the richness of collage in their efforts to question assumptions, biases, and pressing political crises.

Key Ideas & Accomplishments

• Whether purposefully or randomly composed, the juxtapositions between images and objects created by the collage technique have long intrigued artists. Because images can take on new meanings in new contexts, collage can subvert traditional meanings and at the same time multiply meanings, creating works that don't easily settle into single, fixed analyses.
• From the French meaning "to glue," collage describes the technique of composing an artwork by gluing a wide range of materials - including pieces of paper, fabric, newspaper clippings, and sometimes readymade objects - to a surface. Art historians make technical differentiations between collage techniques based on the materials an artist uses. Papiers collés are collages made only with bits of paper; decoupage, which means cutting, consists of cutting out colored paper or images and then gluing them to an object; photomontage uses photographs and images from mass-media sources, while assemblage is a three-dimensional accumulation of objects.
• Many avant-garde artists, from the earliest days of modernism to contemporary postmodernism, use collage to question the traditional role of the artist. By using found, often mass-produced, images and objects that the artists themselves don't make, collage undermines the traditional importance placed on the presence of the artist's hand in an original work of art. Additionally, often relying on chance to create compositions, many artists use collage to subvert the importance placed on the artist's creative genius in composing works.

Key Artists

The Important Artists and Works of Collage

Fruit Dish and Glass

Artist: Georges Braque

In this work pioneering work of collage, Braque combines faux-wood wallpaper with a Cubist depiction of a fruit dish and glass. The intersecting planes of the drawing and the collage elements upend traditional notions of perspectival space but still suggest a table top and a door, perhaps even suggesting a café. For Braque, Cubism's emphasis on still life was primarily concerned with depicting space, as he said, "What greatly attracted me - and it was the main line of advance of Cubism - was how to give material expression to this new space of which I had an inkling. So I began to paint chiefly still lifes, because in nature there is a tactile, I would almost say a manual space.... It was that space that attracted me strongly, for that was the earliest Cubist painting - the quest for space." While the papier collé still explores how we perceive and feel space, the addition of the glued-on bits of wallpaper emphasize a shallower space that is more an exploration of shapes, their tactility, and how they relate to each other. Braque created this example of papier collé , which uses bits of paper instead of found images, while staying in Provence, after discovering a roll of wood-grain wallpaper in a shop window. He began cutting and pasting the paper into his drawings and shared the discovery with his friend and collaborator Picasso, who soon adopted the technique. During this period of time, the two men were working so closely together that Braque described them as "like two mountaineers roped together." Braque's papier collé became foundational for the proliferation of the collage technique.

Charcoal and cut-and-pasted printed wallpaper with gouache on white laid paper; subsequently mounted on paperboard - The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Still Life with Chair Caning

Artist: Pablo Picasso

One of the first examples of Cubist collage, Still Life with Chair Caning depicts a multi-faceted view of a café table, chair, and various items - a knife, a napkin, part of a piece of fruit, and a wine glass. Instead of painting the chair, Picasso attached to the canvas surface a piece of oilcloth printed with a pattern of chair canning to suggest a chair, and used a length of rope to frame the canvas, suggesting a playful take on a table's customary carved edge. At the upper left, one sees the painted letters "Jou," both the French word for "game" and also an evocation of Le Journal , the daily newspaper that seems to be folded up on the table with a pipe resting atop it. While engaging in wordplay and visual punning, Picasso's collage makes viewers question their own perceptions of what constitutes an artwork as well as the relationship between art and ordinary objects. Though he famously mastered subsequent styles, Picasso turned to collage throughout his career, as seen in his Maquette for the cover of the journal Minotaure (1933). Considered one of the most influential artists of the 20 th century, Picasso's collages and collage constructions had a noted impact on subsequent art, not only in the mixing of high and low culture but also in its questioning of what constitutes art in the first place.

Oil and oilcloth on canvas, rope - Musée Picasso, Paris

Untitled (Collage with Squares Arranged according to the Law of Chance)

Artist: Hans Arp

This abstract collage consists of blue and white torn squares in various sizes arranged on a grey background. Made of heavyweight paper, bits of the paper's fiber soften the edges of some of the squares, giving it more a hand-made feel while at the same time the loose grid of shapes feels more mechanical and mathematical. The artist Hans Richter described how Arp, after tearing up a drawing he'd been working on, "let the pieces flutter to the floor of his studio.... Sometime later he happened to notice these same scraps of paper as they lay on the floor, and was struck by the pattern they formed. It had all the expressive power that he had tried in vain to achieve.... Chance movements of his hand and of the fluttering scraps of paper had achieved what all his efforts had failed to achieve.... He accepted this challenge from chance as a decision of fate and carefully pasted the scraps down in the pattern which chance had determined." Arp made this work in Zurich, the center of the emerging Dada movement. In the aftermath of World War I, Dadaists felt that traditional social systems and the emphasis on reason were responsible for the war and, as a result, they sought to free art from rational and intentional strategies and to create a new anti-art that was concrete and eschewed traditional notions of artistic genius. Closely working with his partner Sophie Taeuber, Arp said, "We painted, embroidered, and made collages. All these works were drawn from the simplest forms and were probably the first examples of concrete art. These works are realities pure and independent with no meaning or cerebral intention. We rejected all mimesis and description, giving free reign to the elementary and spontaneous." Arp's experiments with chance and collage were readily incorporated into other Dadaist techniques and later Surrealism and subsequently influenced a host of post-World War II artists who sought to subvert authorial intention and control.

Torn-and-pasted paper and colored paper on colored paper - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany

Artist: Hannah Höch

This Dada photomontage is composed entirely of newspaper and magazine clippings, showing a vision of Weimar society with its leading establishment and anti-establishment figures and its industrialized chaos. Shown at the 1920 First International Dada Fair in Berlin, the work was a huge success because of its legibility. As critic Brian Knight explains, "Ranged in the top right corner are the forces of 'anti-dada': stern representatives of the late empire, the army and the new Weimar government. Below, in the dada corner, are massed artists, communists and other radicals." The decentered and asymmetrical composition of disparate images reflects the Dada emphasis on, what art historian Peter Boswell called, "fracture and disjunction" and embodies a sense of anarchistic energy. Höch said her pioneering technique was prompted by her discovery of postcards sent home by German soldiers in which they cut and pasted their heads on images of musketeers. These juxtapositions made her aware of how photomontage could "alienate" images from their original context. Additionally, her technique was also informed by her work, beginning in 1916, creating embroidery designs for women's magazines, where collage was a common technique. She was highly aware of the artistic potential of traditionally domestic handicrafts, as her 1918 manifesto on embroidery called on women to "develop a feeling for abstract forms." Höch created photomontages for the rest of her career, saying, "there are no limits to the materials available for pictorial collages - above all they can be found in photography, but also in writing and printed matter, even in waste products." As art critic Harriet Baker wrote, her oeuvre challenged "the racist and sexist codes upholding Weimar Germany." Her work influenced her contemporary, the Surrealist Claude Cahun, and later artists such as Cindy Sherman.

Collage of pasted papers - Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Berlin

Merz Picture 32 A, The Cherry Picture

Artist: Kurt Schwitters

In this multi-layered work, areas of dark and light paint combined with glued-on bits of fabric, clippings, and candy wrappers create a sense of pictorial depth but also evoke something like a bulletin board covered in notes and cards. Combining detritus and traditional artistic media, Schwitters created an all-over, non-hierarchical composition. The inclusion of fragments, such as the broken pipe extending from the canvas, and a child's flashcard with the French and German words for cherry, blurs the boundaries between painting and ordinary objects. On the card, Schwitters has written the ungrammatical phrase " Ich liebe dir !" ("I love she!"), perhaps invoking his An Anna Blume (1919), a parodic love poem which made him famous. Though he began his career as a Post-Impressionist, moving to a more Expressionist style, Schwitters took a radical new direction when he developed what he called Merzzeichnungen , or Merz drawings. As he said "Everything had broken down and new things had to be made out of the fragments; and this is Merz. It was like a revolution within me." He began incorporating trash collected from the streets into his works, saying, "I could not, in fact, see the reason why old tickets, driftwood, cloakroom tabs, wires, and parts of wheels, buttons and old rubbish found in attics and refuse dumps should not be a suitable material for painting as the paints made in factories." Arp, who influenced Schwitters' turn toward collage, described the artist as "a wizard" and his studio as a "horrible beautiful Merz grotto where broken wheels paired with matchboxes, wire lattices with brushes without bristles, rusted wheels with curious Merz cucumbers." From 1923 to 1936 Schwitters used his collage technique to create Merzbau ( Merz Construction ), transforming his studio into an immersive environment. As he said, "Merz means to create connections, preferably between everything in this world." As art historian Gwendolen Webster wrote, "The language of Merz now finds common acceptance and today there is scarcely an artist working with materials other than paint who does not refer to Schwitters in some way. In his bold and wide-ranging experiments he can be seen as the grandfather of Pop Art, Happenings, Concept Art, Fluxus, multimedia art and post-modernism."

Cut-and-pasted colored and printed paper, cloth, wood, metal, cork, oil, pencil, and ink on board - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Joy of Living

Artist: Robert Motherwell

Evocative of a dingy interior, this collage, which includes pasted papers and fabric, remains resolutely abstract, as its elements evade signification. As Motherwell wrote, "One cuts and chooses and shifts and pastes, and sometimes tears off and begins again." Associated with the Abstract Expressionists, Motherwell's work is often considered in the trauma experienced in the wake of World War II. In 2013, art critic Holland Cotter described the collage as a "moody, unkempt concoction of smudged ink, nervy doodles and perspectival geometry, punctuated by a scrap cut from a military map and a sprinkling of curious red stains on a patch of white paper, like blood seeping through a bandage." While studying at Columbia in 1940, Motherwell began to associate with Fernand Léger, Piet Mondrian, and leading French Surrealists who had fled the Nazi occupation. He became close friends with the artist Roberto Matta, who taught him Surrealist automatism and introduced him to Peggy Guggenheim, then forming The Art of This Century, her avant-garde gallery. She wanted Motherwell to participate in her 1943 collage exhibition, featuring Braque, Picasso, and Arp. At her and Matta's urging, the young artist created this collage, as he said, "I might never have done it otherwise, and it was here that I found . . . my 'identity.'" A great public success, Motherwell would go on to experiment with collage, making some of his most compelling work, including Pancho Villa, Dead and Alive and Blue and With China Ink (Homage to John Cage) , and he continued with the technique throughout his decades-long career.

Oil, gouache, pasted fabric, pasted papers, crayon, charcoal, and ink on paperboard - Dedalus Foundation, New York

Artist: Eduardo Paolozzi

With clippings taken from American mass media, the British Pop artist Eduardo Paolozzi used the technique of photomontage to probe the emerging post-World War II consumer society, which Paolozzi described as an "exotic society, bountiful and generous." New technology and products - a kitchen range, a new car, a Dr. Pepper bottle, and signage -combine with images of an alluring lifestyle - the attractive couple in a pool, the virile man on a motorcycle. For Paolozzi, living in a Britain still recovering from the war, its strict rationing, and economic hardship, these works were "where the event of selling tinned pears was transformed into multi-colored dreams, where sensuality and virility combined to form...an art form more subtle and fulfilling than the orthodox choice of either the Tate Gallery or the Royal Academy' Collage." This work was part of BUNK! (1947-52), a series of 45 collages that art critic Frank Whitford described as juxtaposing "the weighty and trivial, the artistic and technological." Along with his colleague Richard Hamilton, Paolozzi explored Dadaist and Surrealist precursors and was fascinated with American advertising images from childhood. He compared his technique to 'introducing strange fellows to each other in hostile landscapes...without recourse to standard drawing and painting practice." Moving to Paris for a time, he was influenced by Dada and Surrealism, and also encountered the latest American publications brought over by servicemen. Even in his prints and sculptures, collage was central to Paolozzi's creations throughout his career. Paolozzi's collages would become important examples for later Pop Art throughout the world and postmodern explorations of consumer culture.

Printed papers on paper - Collection of the Tate, United Kingdom

Blue Nude II

Artist: Henri Matisse

This découpage depicts a nude, her legs intertwined, her right arm curved around her head, and her left arm relaxed, hanging down to her side. The intense blue gouache of the painted, cut-out shapes creates a sense of weight, so the silhouette seems like a relief carved out of color. Matisse described the correlation of color and volume by saying, "To cut to the quick in color reminds me of the direct cutting of sculptors." The technique reflects Matisse's lifelong preoccupations with line and color, as he said, "My choice of colors...is based on observation, on feeling, on the very nature of each experience. I... merely try to find a color that will fit my sensation," and "my line drawing is the purest and most direct translation of my emotion." One of a series of four Blue Nudes (1952), the work is a kind of culmination, evoking his Fauvist painting, The Blue Nude (1907) and the poses of his female figures in Le Bonheur de Vivre ( The Joy of Life ) (1905). Matisse first used paper cutouts for his design for Le Chant de Rossignol , a 1919 ballet production, and subsequently employed the technique for preliminary work, but began considering them as autonomous works in the early 1940s, when for health reasons he was confined to his bed and wheelchair. His process involved working with a team of assistants, who would paint large rectangular sheets of paper with gouache, each color mixed to his instructions, and then he would select a sheet and, using long scissors, cut out forms. He would arrange the cutouts, his assistants pinning the composition on his studio walls, and then later gluing them. Art critic Adrian Searle wrote, he "created a universe that filled the room around him, spilling from the walls to the floor."

Gouache on paper, cut and pasted mounted on canvas - Fondation Beyeler, Basel, Switzerland

Artist: Robert Rauschenberg

With this work, Rauschenberg transformed the concept of two-dimensional collage into the three-dimensional realm. This iconic "combine" (Rauschenberg's preferred the term to assemblage) brings together a range of found objects, including a taxidermied Angora goat, its face daubed with bright paint, wearing a tire around its abdomen, standing on an abstract oil painting, made of two canvases. The effect is both startling and incongruous, as Rauschenberg said, "I wanted something other than what I could make myself and I wanted to use the surprise and the collectiveness and the generosity of finding surprises. And if it wasn't a surprise at first, by the time I got through with it, it was. So the object itself was changed by its context and therefore it became a new thing." Finding the goat in a local shop, Rauschenberg recognized its potential, but then as art historian Caroline Craft wrote, he "uncharacteristically spent four years trying to come up with a satisfactory way of incorporating it into a combine. He made sketches of possible solutions and photographed its various states.... At last, inspired by a suggestion from Jasper Johns, he placed the goat on a horizontal platform as if setting it out to pasture." The pasture includes other collage elements: a tennis ball, heel prints, and the addition of text. After viewing an exhibition of Kurt Schwitters' work, Rauschenberg said, "I felt like he made it all just for me," and Schwitters' collages became a primary influence, informing what critics later called Neo-Dada. The combines were not Rauschenberg's first forays into assemblage. While traveling in Italy in the early 1950s, Rauschenberg made some of his first assemblages, incorporating discarded items he collected throughout his travels, but he destroyed most of them by throwing them into the Arno River. By 1954, he began creating his "combines," as they combined elements of painting and sculpture. As the Metropolitan Museum of Art wrote for his 2005 exhibition, "With these mixed-media works of art, Rauschenberg reinvented collage, changing it from a medium that presses commonplace materials to serve illusion into something very different: a process that undermines both illusion and the idea that a work of art has a unitary meaning."

Oil paint, paper, fabric, printed reproductions, metal, wood, rubber shoe-heel, and tennis ball on two conjoined canvases with oil on taxidermied Angora goat with brass plaque and rubber tire on wood platform mounted on four casters - Moderna Museet, Stockholm

Prevalence of Ritual/Conjur Woman No. 1

Artist: Romare Bearden

This collage depicts an African American woman, dressed in a long black robe and wearing a white turban as she faces the viewer with an intense and powerful gaze. A recognizable bird sits on her right shoulder, and a black avian shape on her other shoulder resembles a raven. The environment is composed of cutout images of foliage, dense overgrowth, and suggestions of a dilapidated house, its door and steps evoked behind her. Bearden's collage makes reference to his childhood fear of local conjure woman - a powerful figure who was known for her herbal remedies, various spells, and spiritual authority - who lived near his family in North Carolina. This image is one of 21 small color collages that Bearden created out of pieces of cloth, magazine photographs, paper, and other materials. He then photocopied and enlarged the collages into black and white images that he called Projections (1964). He also felt the series was steeped in "the prevalence of ritual," writing, "I feel this continuation of ritual gives a dimension to the works so that the works are something other than mere designs." Jazz improvisation influenced Bearden's composition strategies. He explained, "In many ways it's like putting a symphony together, or a piece of music." Reproduced in black and white on a monumental scale, Bearden transformed collage into a medium equal to the large scale Abstract Expressionist works of the time. As art historian Mary Schmidt Campbell writes," Bearden's exhibition of Projections was widely hailed as a breakthrough. In choosing collage, Bearden intentionally selected a medium in which he could substitute the ready-made with the imaginative re-construction of the visual world. The works that followed are the product of a life that ran parallel to America's own struggle with old ways of seeing and knowing." Bearden was to describe the series' depiction of the South as "a homeland of my imagination." In a New York Times obituary following Bearden's death, C. Gerald Fraser described him as "the nation's foremost collagist." The National Gallery of Art held a major retrospective of Bearden's work in 2003, and the Smithsonian Traveling Exhibition Service's Romare Bearden: A Black Odyssey toured the country in 2014-2015.

Gelatin silver print (Photostat) - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

You were always on my mind

Artist: Wangechi Mutu

This work depicts two heads in profile against a gray, cloudy background that darkens around the edges, creating a diaphanous glow surrounding the heads. The smaller head emerges as if from the mind of the larger head, which, painted in a pink and gray marbled effect, includes small cut-out images - an eye, a man wearing Middle Eastern clothing. The arm and hands of the larger head are also composed of cut-outs. Glitter and plastic beads are glued to the neck, and the twig-like forms emerging from the back of the head are made of wood-patterned plastic. The cut-outs are often organic - images of crustaceans in the arm and of fish and coral in the upper head - suggesting that these images and the world they represent are also "always on the mind" of the larger figure. Kenyan-American artist Wangechi Mutu made this work in Brooklyn, innovatively using Melinex, a polyester film, for the painting's surface. It was exhibited at Yo.n.I , the artist's 2007 solo exhibition in London, the title explained by art historian Richard Martin as, "a reference to the Sanskrit word yoni that can mean 'divine passage,' 'place of birth' or 'sacred temple.' Many of the paintings in the show integrated cut-out images of plants, flowers and animals - taken from natural history magazines and the internet - within their depictions of human forms, as part of a wider exploration of fertility and reproduction." Born and raised in Kenya, Mutu studied anthropology before studying art at Yale University, and her Pin-Up (2001) series, depicting women injured by political violence in Sierra Leone, was her first foray into collage. Mutu uses collage to explore the continued effects of colonialism in her native land as well as the experiences of the diaspora, or those who have left Africa to settle elsewhere. With these twin investigations, Mutu has created a powerful body of work that not only provides striking commentary on our contemporary, globalized era but also probes the formal aspects of the collage technique.

materials - Collection of the Tate, United Kingdom

Predecessors

By the 12th century, both the Chinese and Japanese routinely glued brightly colored pieces of paper to various objects, sometimes applying a layer of lacquer to seal the surface for more permanent effect. The technique spread to medieval Europe, where additional materials, such as shells, gemstones, or gold foil, were incorporated into compositions. By the 18 th century, decoupage, from the French "to cut out," had become a popular pastime among the European aristocracy, including Madame de Pompadour, Marie Antoinette, and Beau Brummell. An 18th-century letter described the trend: "We are here in the height of a new passion for cutting up colored engravings.... These cuttings are pasted on sheets of pasteboard then varnished. We make wall panels, screens, and fireboards of them."

In the late 1700s, Mary Delany became famous for her works depicting flower specimens, which made her a favorite of the British court. After careful study of a particular flower, Delany often cut up hundreds of pieces of paper to create her life-like compositions. In 2019, art critic Claudia Massie declared that Delany's "Paper Mosaiks," as she called them, "pop off the walls with a vibrancy that belies the fact they were created 250 years ago from tiny shards of hand-tinted paper by an 'amateur' artist in her seventies."

Using paper clippings to create a variety of inventive and imaginative works became a dominant cultural trend by the Victorian era. Though the Royal Academy of Art did not recognize the art form, decoupage artists nonetheless often had a popular following, and their work feels more contemporary than ever. As Maisie wrote of the Victorian decoupage, "Presages of modernism abound. Photomontage is used extensively to create space-defying group portraits or deceptive illusions. A scrapbook of sliced-up words and portraits by Mary Watson, from 1821, reads like the chance poetry practiced 100 years later, and looks like some punky contructivist graphic." Simultaneously, by the end of the 1800s, popular magazines frequently combined images and fragments of images for advertisements. Culturally, the use of clippings for scrapbooks, cards, and decorative screens was ubiquitous by the dawn of the 20 th century, though the practice was considered akin to a hobby, craft, or affiliated with the domestic realm, as seen in its widespread employment in women's fashion magazines.

Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque

While decoupage had a long history in Western folk art and decorative crafts, it was not until the experiments of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso in the early 20 th century that collage entered the lexicon of fine art. The two artists met in 1907 and worked closely with each other and together developed what would come to be known as Cubism. They experimented with still lifes and landscapes, breaking the composition into complex multifaceted perspectives.

By 1912, more interested in the flat compositional aspects of the pictorial plane, Picasso and Braque began to explore collage, papier collé , and three-dimensional assemblages. In May 1912, Picasso incorporated a strip of oilcloth printed with a chair caning pattern into a painting and used a rope to frame the oval shaped canvas, and the resulting Still Life with Chair Caning (1912) pioneered collage as a fine art and launched a new phase of Cubism. In the summer of 1912, Braque and Picasso worked together in the South of France, when Braque, while wandering through Avignon, noticed a roll of wallpaper with a wood grain displayed in a shop window. Braque cut and pasted pieces of the paper into his Fruit Dish and Glass Sorgues (1912). After sharing the papier collé with Picasso, he said, "I felt a great shock and it was an even greater shock to Picasso when I showed it to him." A month later Picasso created Violin and Sheet of Music (1912), and for the next two years the artists' new Synthetic Cubism, as it came to be known, incorporated bits of paper from daily life into paintings and drawing, exploring the convergence of high and low, art and life, and the flatness of the picture plane.

While Picasso and Braque took diverging paths in life and art after World War I, their discoveries were adopted widely by artists. Fascinated by Synthetic Cubism's use of papier collé , Juan Gris began experimenting with the technique in 1914. Incorporating paper with wood grain print, wallpaper scraps, and bits of newspaper, Gris created surfaces with multiple textures that played on the materiality of the work of art and the flatness of the canvas. He said of his papier collés , "I try to concretize that which is abstract.... My art is an art of synthesis.... I consider that the architectural side of painting is mathematical, the abstract side, I want to humanize it."

Dada and Collage

Following World War I, Dada emerged as one of the more radical European art movements. Declaring the Cubist emphasis on aesthetic formalism a dead end, Dadaism embraced and radically transformed collage. Hannah Hoch pioneered the avant-garde use of photomontage, a technique that, rather than using clippings of paper, employed images cut from mass media publications. In contrast, Hans Arp emphasized random chance to arrange torn squares of paper in abstract collages. Kurt Schwitters pioneered collages that he called Merz drawings, saying "merz" was a word he invented to mean "the combination of all imaginable materials for artistic purposes." Schwitters collected the detritus of everyday life, from candy wrappers to movie tickets to three-dimensional items, and composed entire works from these apparently "worthless" bits of ephemera to challenge the traditional values and perceptions of art and importantly moved ideas of collage into the realm of assemblage sculpture and installation.

Marcel Duchamp's concept of the readymade, in which he combined utilitarian objects to create art objects, can also be linked to experiments in three-dimensional collage, or Assemblage. Man Ray explored rayographs, a camara-less photographic technique of making collages, whereby he laid everyday objects directly on photo-sensitive paper and exposed it to light, thus creating ghostly silhouettes that seem both representational and abstract.

Rather than emphasizing still life as the Cubists had, Dadaists expanded the subject matter of collage to create portraits, multi-figure scenes, and social panoramas that pointed out the absurdity of political systems and figures. Dada collage had an extensive influence on Pop Art and post-World War II movements, including Assemblage, Happenings, and Performance Art.

Surrealism and Collage

Coming out of Dada, Surrealism also took up collage in its exploration of automatism and stream of consciousness in creating works. In many ways, collage as a medium was able to encapsulate André Breton's description of Surrealist dislocation, which he took from the writer Comte de Lautréamont: "the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table. " Max Ernst experimented with various forms of collage to create eerie, dream-like compositions. He explained, "The collage technique is the systematic exploitation of the accidentally or artificially provoked encounter of two or more foreign realities on a seemingly incongruous level - and the spark of poetry that leaps across the gap as these two realities are brought together." For the Surrealists, the juxtapositions created by collage created exciting new meanings, provided a way to explore the unconscious workings of the mind, and tap into new subject matter.

In the early 1950s, Neo-Dada marked a shift away from traditional painting in the postwar art world as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Allan Kaprow turned away from Abstract Expressionism to emphasize the use of mass media, found objects, and performance. Their works often employed the technique of collage to challenge the distinctions between art mediums and to question artistic conventions. Influenced by Kurt Schwitters, Rauschenberg created Untitled (Man with White Shoes) (1954) by combining parts of old furniture, a taxidermied hen, various photographs, shoes, and gestural mark-making. Though it looks like a fairly straightforward encaustic painting, Johns' Flag (1954-5) was in fact a collage of newsprint, taken from advertisements and non-political articles, and strips of fabric. Neo-Dada's exploration of collage and Assemblage was consequential for contemporary experiments in Performance Art as well as Pop art.

British Pop Art began in 1947 with Eduardo Paolozzi's collages, more accurately described as photomontages since they were composed of images cut from mass media magazines. Along with Richard Hamilton and Peter Blake, he explored, critiqued, and sometimes celebrated post-war consumer culture. Hamilton's Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing? (1956) is at once a parody and celebration of postwar domestic interiors, filled with new consumer goods and technology that promised a brighter future. American Pop artists such as Andy Warhol, and Roy Lichtenstein also drew on popular imagery, primarily emphasizing consumer and celebrity culture. James Rosenquist's painting President Elect (1960-61) combined partial images of a stale piece of cake, an automobile, and a smiling President John F. Kennedy to question the role of advertising in culture and how one takes in and processes the bombardment of images experienced everyday in the growing consumer culture.

Concepts and Trends

The nature of collage allows it to be incredibly versatile. Once artists began incorporating parts of everyday life into their paintings and compositions, there were no strictures on which materials they used, and as a result, various tendencies, or techniques, in collage developed and proliferated.

Collage and Sculpture: Assemblage

Braque pioneered collage construction sculptures with painted cardboard, but these works were lost during World War I, and so his contribution to this technique was overshadowed by Picasso, whose 1912 Maquette for Guitar is one of the earliest surviving three-dimensional Cubist collages. Throughout his career, Picasso made similar constructions, exploring new materials, such as wood, as seen in his Bull (1958) and metal, as in his Chair (1961).

Later artists adopted and innovated three-dimensional collage, and the technique informed assemblages and works that blurred the boundaries between sculpture and painting. Kurt Schwitters developed his Merzbau ( Merz Construction ) (1923-37) from a column composed of newspaper clippings, detritus, and cardboard into a multi-room installation in his studio, creating an early immersive environment. Influenced by Schwitters, Robert Rauschenberg created what he called "combines," hybrids of painting and sculpture that incorporated everyday materials, as seen in his Canyon (1959).

In the 1940s, Louise Nevelson began creating works that have been variously described as sculptures, assemblages, and wood collages. Using readymade materials, such as crates, parts of discarded furniture, and architectural elements, she made large rectangular works, often painted in monochrome, exemplified by Sky Cathedral (1958).

Canvas Collage

Canvas collage involves gluing pieces of painted canvas patches to another canvas, Many Abstract Expressionists, including Lee Krasner and Conrad Marca-Reilli, employed this technique. In the early 1950s, frustrated with her painting process, Krasner tore up much of her current painting and drawing, but in the months ahead, she began creating new pieces out of these shards, gluing them onto other canvases and adding additional painted passages, as seen in Milkweed (1955). Marca-Relli's created canvas collages, in which he glued cutout pieces of painted canvas onto much larger canvases so that the interlocking curves and angles would emphasize what he called "the architecture of the human figure." Created on a monumental scale, his work influenced several of the Neo-Dada artists.

Photomontage

The German Dadaist Hannah Höch broke new ground with her photomontages, collages composed not of bits of plain paper but of various photographic images taken from mass media publications. The photomontage technique derived from fin de siècle popular culture when postcards and prints often combined images, and as art historian Kathy Halbreich noted, the Dadaists "enjoyed the mechanical - and proletarian - connotations associated with the term and used it to distinguish their work from Cubist collages, or papiers collés , whose formalist abstraction they considered a dead end." George Grosz, along with other Dadaists employed the technique, usually combining clippings of newspaper photographs and texts.

As Halbreich further noted, since the Dada movement "the term photomontage has often come to have a more restricted meaning: a seamless, composite image achieved either by manipulating negatives in the darkroom or re-photographing a collage of photographs, techniques favored by such disparate artists as John Heartfield and the Russian Constructivists, on the one hand, and the Surrealists, on the other." As a result, photomontage has become considered an independent art form, though artists have continued to explore the boundaries between photomontage and collage, as seen in Romare Bearden's Projections , which are enlarged black and white photostatic copies of his color collages.

Décollage, a French word meaning to take off or lift-off, was first credited to Leo Malet, a Surrealist detective novelist, in the Dictionnaire Abrege du Surrealisme (1938) and defined as "the procedure that consists in tearing off parts of a poster in order to reveal fragments of the poster or posters...to disorient and lead astray." However, the term became primarily associated with Nouveau Réalisme, a 1950s French art movement, that included Raymond Hains, Jacques Mahé de la Villeglé, François Dufrêne, and the Italian artist Mimmo Rotella. Billboard posters, glued over one another and often torn or fragmented, were a common sight in urban environments. Of the posters in Rome, Rotella said, "I was literally spellbound, and even more so because at that time I was convinced that painting was finished, that something new had to be unearthed, something alive and modern." Artists tore away layers and fragments of these posters and then glued them onto a surface, as Rotella said, "leaving them exactly the way they were, exactly the way I saw them." Also called the torn poster technique, décollage both referenced society and evoked abstract, textured art works. Wolf Vostell, a German artist, connected the term to an airplane crashing during lift off, meaning that art should break down past signifiers to create new realities. In 1962 he launched De-coll/age: Bulletin Aktueller Idee , an experimental art and theory magazine, and in 1963 created his Nein 9 Decollagen (1963), lifting images from the television screen to place them in a new context.

Later Developments

The formal and critical power of various collage techniques continues to reverberate throughout the art world. By the 1960s, Duchamp's readymades and Schwitters's concept of Merz had profound consequences on the development of Assemblage and, later, Installation Art. And while not strictly engaged in collage, a collage aesthetic also informed much of the work of Photorealists like Audrey Flack, whose work often juxtaposes disparate, painted images, and the artists of the Pictures Generation, like Richard Prince, who appropriated mass-media imagery to create photomontages.

In the 21 st century, college continues to be a vital technique for innovation, as seen in British Conceptual artist John Stezaker's work combining cut-up photographs from the 1950s in startling juxtapositions that challenge artistic and cultural conventions. Kenyan-American artist Wangechi Mutu' The Bride Who Married a Camel's Head (2009) uses collage to examine pressing contemporary concerns, including colonization, gender, and the environment. In his series of fantastical houses, Matthias Jung uses collage to reimagine architecture and its place in the landscape, and Jean-François Rauzier's work exploits digital technology to created altered images of cities and places, creating surreal and illogical compositions.

As artists continue to explore and push collage into new realms, the 2019 exhibition Cut and Paste: 400 Years of Collage held at the National Galleries of Scotland brought together modern and contemporary collages with works from the Victorian era and earlier, showcasing the deep history of the technique and attesting to the long, abiding fascination with collage's potential for play, discovery, critique, and questioning.

Useful Resources on Collage

• Trains, snakes, and guitars: The collages of Romare Bearden (1980) Our Pick SFMOMA

• Sunday at the Met - Robert Rauschenberg: Combines (2006) Conversation with Robert Rauschenberg and Calvin Tomkins
• Picasso and Braque PIONEERING CUBISM Our Pick By William Rubin
• Robert Motherwell: Early Collages By Susan Davidson, Megan Fontanella, Brandon Taylor, et al.
• Cut and Paste: 400 Years of Collage Our Pick By Patrick Elliot, Freya Gowrley, and Yuval Elgar
• Kurt Schwitters: A Journey Through Art By Gwendolen Webster, Roger Cardinal, and Kurt Schwitters
• Robert Rauschenberg: Combines By Paul Schimmel and Robert Rauschenberg
• Cut With the Kitchen Knife: The Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Hoch By Maud Lavin and Hannah Hoch
• Paolozzi and Wittgenstein: The Artist as Philosopher Edited by Diego Mantoan, Luigi Perissinotto
• Manning on Decoupage By Henry Manning
• Nancy Spero. Codex Artaud XXIII. 1972
• Henri Matisse The Cut-Outs Our Pick MOMA
• Modern Storytellers: Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, Faith Ringgold By Stella Paul / Metropolitan Museum
• Romare Bearden National Gallery of Art
• Hannah Höch By Heidi Hirschl Orley / Museum of Modern Art
• Robert Rauschenberg: Combines Our Pick 11 October 2006 - 15 January 2007, Gallery 2, level 6 / Centre Pompidou
• The meanings in Robert Rauschenberg's Monogram Phaidon / December 6, 2016
• Robert Rauschenberg Foundation
• Merzzeichnung: Typology and Typography By Michael White / Tate Papers / Autumn 2010
• More Than 30 Acclaimed Collages By Legendary Black Artist Romare Bearden Reunited For First Time In Nearly 40 Years By Natasha Gural / Forbes / August 8, 2019
• Powerful Images, Built on Contradictions By Martha Schwendener / New York Times / July 27, 2012
• Exploring the Cutting-Edge History and Evolution of Collage Art By Kelly Richman-Abdou / Mymodernmet / July 14, 2017
• Robert Rauschenberg Combines Our Pick The Metropolitan Museum of Art / 2005
• The Prevalence of Ritual: On Romare Bearden's Projections Our Pick By Mary Schmidt Campbell / Paris Review / September 6, 2018
• Top 10 Collage Artists: Hannah Höch to Man Ray By Harriet Baker / Anothermag / January 14, 2014
• Henri Matisse: drawing with scissors By Hilary Spurling / The Guardian / March 29, 2014
• Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs review - 'how rich, how marvellous, how alive' By Adrian Searle / The Guardian / April 14, 2014
• Surreal Hyper-Detailed Photos - Jean Francois Rauzier By Alice Yoo / My Modern Met / January 14, 2010
• The women who invented collage - long before Picasso and co. Our Pick By Claudia Massie / Spectator / July 6, 2019
• A Painter's Cut-and-Paste Prequel By Holland Cotter / New York Times / October 3, 2013
• Read all about it: Newspapers as art in exhibit By Stanley Meisler / Los Angeles Times / October 16, 2012
• Hannah Höch: art's original punk By Brian Knight / The Guardian / January 9, 2014
• The Photomontages of Hannah Höch Our Pick MOMA catalog
• John Stezaker: 'cutting a photograph can feel like cutting through flesh' By Sean O'Hagan / The Guardian / March 27, 2014
• Welcome To The Radical World Of Contemporary Collage By Priscilla Frank / Huffington Post / October 8, 2015
• Four audio clips Robert Motherwell (2013, 1943, and 1946)
• Robert Rauschenberg. Monogram. 1955-1959 (undated) Museum of Modern Art

Related Artists

Related Movements & Topics

Content compiled and written by Rebecca Seiferle

Edited and revised, with Summary and Accomplishments added by Valerie Hellstein

Articles and Features

The history of collage in art.

By Shira Wolfe

September 1912. Pablo Picasso has just returned to Paris after an intensive working period with Georges Braque in Sorgues. The exchanges between the two artists in this period were later to be described by Braque as ones that ‘nobody but us would ever be able to understand.’ Braque wanders past an Avignon wallpaper store, and spots some wood-grain wallpaper. He immediately goes in to buy it. Back in the studio, he starts pasting rectangular patches onto the surfaces of several large charcoal drawings. The drawings and the paper intersect and interact in a way that will bring a totally new direction to the art of both Braque and Picasso. The tension of the combined tactility and visuality creates a rupture, a jolt. “After having made the first papier collé , I felt a great shock, and it was an even greater shock for Picasso when I showed it to him,” recalls Braque later.

Back in Paris, after having seen Braque’s papier collé (from the French word coller , meaning “to glue”), Picasso immediately embarked on a phase of collage – he created nearly a hundred papiers collés in short succession. In one of Picasso’s earliest collage works, Guitar and Sheet Music , he pasted and layered paper, creating shading and structure. The early collages are also filled with fragments from popular songs, fake wood-grain paper, and snippets of bodies, faces, instruments and other objects. Picasso was in the process of studying and dissecting objects like a surgeon dissecting a corpse.

It didn’t take long before other artists in Paris caught on to this new exciting development that Braque and Picasso were immersed in. The Spanish artist Juan Gris, a deeply committed two-dimensional artist, used collage to continue to develop his two-dimensional art. His papiers collés have been described as some of the most pictorially complex of his time. Futurist artists quickly took over the collage style as well. In the art of Boccioni, it became a method of enriching the surface, while Carrà included ready-made elements in his ‘free word’ pictures. Then there was Balla, who used collage to craft visually mobile versions of three-dimensional constructions.

Constructivism and Suprematism

In Russia too, the art scene was buzzing with talk of Picasso and Braque’s collages. Here, significantly, the revolutionary experiments undertaken in art were a collaboration between writers and visual artists. The word was the primary terrain of exploration, and was an important element in the collage work of the artists. Malevich’s Woman at a Poster Column from 1914 uses collage elements to shift the coordinates of the image. Various words find their way into the painting, later referred to by Malevich as “phonic masses.” He wrote the following about these phonic masses: “We can tear the letter from its line… give it the possibility of free movement. Lines suit only the world of bureaucracy and domestic correspondence… We came to the distribution of letter-sounds in space, just like Suprematism in painting. These phonic masses will be suspended in space and will produce for our consciousness the possibility of reaching even further from Earth.”

The political madness of the First World War produced DADA . Stylistically, in their combinatory methods of pasted paper, the Dadaists shared many similarities with the Cubists. Hans Arp, for one, had come to Paris in 1914 to avoid the military draft in Germany and must have seen Picasso and Braque’s papier collés there. By November 1915, Arp had fled Paris to neutral Zurich and was exhibiting collage works at Gallerie Tanner. In the catalogue, he explained that the works were “structures of lines, forms and colours that attempt to achieve the infinite and the eternal – beyond the human realm. They are a denial of human egotism.” A significant contribution was made by Kurt Schwitters, who started making his Merz works in 1918 – paper pictures and shallow relief constructions with all kinds of detritus he found on the street. Schwitters’s aim was to create works of art that embraced all different branches of art. It is John Heartfield who claimed to have invented photomontage, saying that he was already cutting and pasting photos in the trenches in 1915. He called himself “Der Monteurdada.” Heartfield and Raoul Hausmann named their process “photomontage” because they refused to play the part of the artist. They regarded themselves as engineers and their work as constructions which they assembled. Hannah Höch’s klebebilder are some of the most iconic works of the collage style from that period. As a child, Höch was already making paper collages. It could be said, then, that she rediscovered the method in 1918 when she discovered montaged oleographs on a trip in the Baltics with Hausmann. After this, she started creating her photomontages, using the child-like technique of replacement – the wrong head on the wrong body, reshuffling images, etc. With her works, she explored gender roles and politics, calling into question the very way society viewed itself.

For the Cubist artists, papier collé had opened onto construction and design. The Dadaists and their techniques of relief assemblage, overpainting and photo-collage influenced Surrealism . For the Surrealist artists, “collage” no longer had to do exclusively with paper and glue. The Surrealists were enchanted with text. Max Ernst blended the visual and the verbal in his collage novels from the late 1920s. In 1930, Louis Aragon organised an exhibition dedicated solely to collage at the Galerie Goemans. It included works by Arp, Braque, Dali, Duchamp, Ernst, Gris, Magritte, Man Ray, Miró, Picabia, Picasso and Tanguy. Man Ray and Picabia were included in this exhibition, even though they did not actually make collage but did work with the collage principle. Aragon argued that Man Ray’s rayographs should be linked to collage as a philosophical operation. Yves Tanguy, in the mid-20s, was working with a papier decoupée technique – cutting out shapes and figures –, while Max Ernst observed about Magritte that his paintings were “collages painted by hand.” And then, there was Joan Miró. Miró had always been reluctant to describe his works as “paintings.” Already in paintings like Un oiseau pursuit une abeille et la baisse (1927), the viewer is caught between reading and looking. It is the collage-type effect which produces the gap between these two. Soon after, in 1928, he started a series called Spanish Dancer , three works in which he suddenly abandoned literal painting and instead stuck all kinds of objects to a non-canvas surface. It was as though Miró’s paintings had been anticipating collage, and collage was helping him find his freedom from the rigid understanding of what art was and could be.

Matisse Cutouts

In the late 1940s, in the last decade of his life, Henri Matisse made a significant shift in his artistic methodology and turned to cut paper as his primary medium, using scissors as his tool. His new creations were called cut-outs. Using gouache paint, Matisse would colour sheets of paper and cut these sheets into different shapes and sizes. Often, they were inspired by the natural world – flowers and plants – and at other times they were abstract. Then, he arranged those different cut-outs into lively compositions. They started out modest in size, but over time they grew in scale, becoming as large as murals. The cut-out medium allowed Matisse to finally make the kind of monumental works he had wanted to make for a long time, transcending the confines of easel painting and working with a new type of free reign. The paper cut-outs could be pinned into place, easily rearranged, and seamlessly fused colour with his signature arabesque lines. His line drawing, he had once said, most directly translated his emotions. Now, with the cut-outs, his saw himself as drawing with scissors.

“[Ann Ryan's] small, dense abstractions were looking inward at the time of large-scale Abstract Expressionism. Yet she was still creating her own monumental abstractions in her head, she had a monumental vision on a very intimate scale.” - Pavel Zoubok

Collage in post-war new york.

1922, Peggy Guggenheim had married the Surrealist Laurence Vail in Paris, who was also a maker of collage. She became acquainted with many Surrealists and hosted the “Exhibition of Collages, Papiers-collés and Photomontages” at her Guggenheim Jeune gallery in London in 1938, installed by Roland Penrose of the London Gallery. The exhibition included works by Picasso, Arp, Ernst, Schwitters, Taüber-Arp, Vail and others. In 1941, Guggenheim, Ernst, the Bretons, and other Surrealists sailed for New York to flee the war.

By 1942, Guggenheim had already opened her Art of This Century gallery in New York. It became the place where some of the most audacious, avant-garde art of the times was shown. In 1942, Laurence Vail and Joseph Cornell exhibited collage works there and Marcel Duchamp showed his Box-Valise . Joseph Cornell is particularly interesting as a complex, shy figure who lived all his life with his mother and never had a formal art education. Yet, his Surrealist assemblage works housed in shallow wooden boxes were to make him one of the most important artists of the 20 th century working in collage and assemblage. Despite his reclusive nature he cultivated many friendships with great artists including Marcel Duchamp, Lee Miller, Susan Sontag and Yayoi Kusama.

If The Art of This Century gallery already provided a space for the European émigré avant-garde artists, it also became the concentrated hub around which cutting-edge New York abstract artists began to gather. In 1945, Guggenheim invited Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock and William Baziotes to submit collage works for an exhibition entitled “Exhibition of Collage.” For Motherwell, collage was a way to evade representation and to incorporate bits of the everyday world into his pictures. He referred to collage as “both placing and ellipsis.” Guggenheim said of Pollock that he didn’t have a particular feel for collage, but that she was surprised at the violence with which he attacked his material. Pollock’s wife Lee Krasner , on the other hand, experienced an entire phase of collage during which she truly came into her own. It was around the time that Pollock was lost in his alcoholism and unable to paint that she retreated to her little studio and found solace in the cutting, tearing, and pasting of her collage work. Remarkably, Krasner often used shreds from her old, discarded paintings, and even Pollock’s ones as well. Of her collage-work, she once said: “My collages have to do with time and change.”

Exhibiting alongside Krasner in 1951 was the collage artist Ann Ryan. Ryan had seen a Kurt Schwitters show in 1948 and became deeply inspired. Collage-specialist Pavel Zoubok of Pavel Zoubok Fine Art describes her as taking on Schwitters’s role in her time. Incredibly, Ryan rarely worked on a larger scale than postcard size. As Zoubok explains: “Her small, dense abstractions were looking inward at the time of large-scale Abstract Expressionism. Yet she was still creating her own monumental abstractions in her head; she had a monumental vision on a very intimate scale.” Other Abstract Expressionists who engaged with collage at the time include Grace Hartigan, Franz Klein and Robert Goodnough.

California Collage

Initially, after the end of the Second World War, artists on the West Coast had little exposure to European modern art and the New York art world. Californian art was therefore, in a sense, free to develop fully of its own accord. Collage and assemblage became important elements of this development. Clay Spohn, for example, who had studied under Fernand Leger in Paris in the 1920s, made mixed media-works and assemblage from all kinds of found objects – scrap metal and other cast-off materials. Los Angeles after 1945 became a melting pot of cultures, and artists like Bertold Brecht and Man Ray even lived there for some time, bringing a touch of Europe and its avant-garde with them. It is around that time in LA that Wallace Berman started making his quasi-religious assemblages revolving around the relationship with his wife.

In San Francisco, Beat culture was making waves with figures like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. Beat was all about the magic of unnoticed things, it was about “finding” and “experience.” Therefore, it shared many affinities with the collage practice from the visual arts. Most of the Beat collage artists like Wally Hedrick and Jay DeFeo had never even heard of or seen works by Schwitters, Höch, Heartfield or Picasso. Thanks to Man Ray’s presence in LA in the ‘40s, the French Surrealists were more available. Other California artists immersed in the collage medium include Bruce Connor and Ed Kienholz, whose raw, angry and politically charged collage and assemblage work helped pave the way for Pop Art collage.

Collage in Pop Art

Pop Art emerged in the UK with the 1950s Independent Group. Eduardo Paolozzi and Richard Hamilton, both members of the group, made ample use of the collage method. Paolozzi created collage-type scrapbooks while Hamilton juxtaposed all sorts of materials. His collage Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing? from 1956, often referred to as the first work of Pop Art, presents an interior scene with all kinds of different objects, made up from various materials. My Marilyn from 1965 is made from oil paints and photographic sheets on panel. In the States, at the peak of the Vietnam war, Martha Rosler started creating photomontages reminiscent of John Heartfield, critiquing the military conflict and the complacency of the American consumer. Meanwhile, Rosalyn Drexler collaged pictures from B-movies and tabloids directly onto her canvases, and then painted over them in a very neat, flat style. Collage fit perfectly with Pop Art’s quick, sharp, often witty mirroring of the times.

The Continuation of Collage

This detailed and eclectic timeline of collage offers a deep insight into the important periods and artists in the history of collage art. Unfortunately, it is beyond the scope of this article to discuss all the contributors to this artistic method. Yet it has become clear that collage has been telling the story of each different artistic generation and the world they experienced in fascinating ways. In the words of Pavel Zoubok: “Collage is the most representative of where we’ve been for the last 100 years.”

Today, many young artists continue to work with collage. It is a language of its own, a specific way of thinking, seeing, working and being. Zoubok explains: “When culture becomes increasingly hands-off, we as human beings go back to hand-crafted work because humans have a visceral, primal need for tactility and connection and feeling rooted in some way, in a culture, a tradition, or a geographical location. Young artists return to this world where they tear, rip, paste, work with their hands.”

Zoubok continues to note that collage can be understood as the foundation of the digital experience – its layering and interpolation are rooted in collage culture. He explains: “Hybrid art making and thinking are the foundation of how contemporary aesthetics and contemporary life works.”

Read our next chapter on collage to discover five extraordinary contemporary collage artists around the world working with the medium in innovative ways.

Special thanks to Pavel Zoubok for the invaluable insight and information he provided during the research stages of this article.

Relevant sources to learn more:

• Brandon Taylor: Collage – The Making of Modern Art
• http://pavelzoubok.com

Relevant related articles:

5 Contemporary Collage Artists Adding New Layers – Artland

Art Movement: Cubism – Artland

Art Movement: DADA – Artland

Art Movement: Surrealism – Artland 

Art Movement: Pop Art – Artland

Art Essay Examples

Art Essay Examples to Get You Inspired - Top 10 Samples

Published on: May 4, 2023

Last updated on: Jan 30, 2024

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In this blog, we provide a range of art writing examples that cover different art forms, time periods, and themes. Whether you're interested in the classics or contemporary art, we have something for everyone. These examples offer insight into how to structure your essay, analyze art pieces, and write compelling arguments.

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Good Art Essay Examples

In the following section, we will examine a selection of art essay examples that are inspiring for various academic levels.

College Art Essay Examples

Let’s take a look at college art essay examples below:  

The Intersection of Art and Politics: An Analysis of Picasso's Guernica

The Role of Nature in American Art: A Comparative Study

University Art Essay Examples

University-level art essay assignments often differ in length and complexity. Here are two examples:

Gender and Identity in Contemporary Art: A Comparative Study

Art and Activism: The Role of Street Art in Political Movements

A Level Art Essay Examples

Below are some art paper examples A level. Check out: 

The Use Of Color In Wassily Kandinsky's Composition Viii

The Influence of African Art on Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles D'avignon

A Level Fine Art Essay Examples

If you're a student of fine arts, these A-level fine arts examples can serve as inspiration for your own work.

The Use Of Texture In Vincent Van Gogh's Starry Night

Exploring Identity Through Portraiture: A Comparative Study

Art Essay Examples IELTS 

The Impact of Art on Mental Health

The Effects of Technology on Art And Creativity

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AP Art Essay Examples

A Comparison of Neoclassical and Romantic Art

An Examination Of The Effects Of Globalization On Contemporary Art

Types of Art Essay with Examples

Art essays can be categorized into different types. Let's take a brief look at these types with examples:

Art Criticism Essay : A critical essay analyzing and evaluating an artwork, its elements, and its meaning.

The Persistence of Memory" by Salvador Dali: A Critical Analysis

Art History Essay: A comprehensive essay that examines the historical context, development, and significance of an artwork or art movement.

The Renaissance: A Rebirth of Artistic Expression

Exhibition Review: A review of an art exhibition that evaluates the quality and significance of the artwork on display.

A Review of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Exhibition

Contemporary Art Essay: An essay that explores and analyzes contemporary art and its cultural and social context.

The Intersection of Technology and Art in Contemporary Society

Modern Art Essay: An essay that examines modern art and its significance in the development of modernism.

Cubism and its Influence on Modern Art [insert pdf]

Art Theory Essay: An essay that analyzes and critiques various theories and approaches to art.

Feminist Art Theory: A Critical Analysis of its Impact on Contemporary Art [insert pdf]

Additional Art Essay Example

Let’s take a brief look at some added art essay samples:

Artwork Essay Example

Artist Essay Example

Advanced Higher Art Essay Example

Common Art Essay Prompts

Here are some common art essay topics that you may encounter during your coursework:

• Describe a piece of artwork that has inspired you.
• A comparative analysis of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa and Michelangelo's David.
• Analyze the cultural significance of a particular art movement.
• Discuss the relationship between art and politics.
• Compare and contrast two works of art from different time periods or cultures.
• The representation of identity in art
• The Evolution of Artists' Paintings:
• From Traditional to Contemporary Art
• The representation of identity in Frida Kahlo's self-portraits.
• The significance of oil on canvas in the history of art.
• The significance of the Mona Lisa in the Italian Renaissance

Art Essay Topics IELTS

Here are some art essay topics for IELTS students. Take a look: 

• The value of art education.
• The role of museums in preserving art and culture.
• The impact of globalization on contemporary art.
• The influence of technology on art and artists.
• The significance of public art in urban environments.

Tips For Writing a Successful Art Essay

Here are some tips for writing a stand-out art essay:

• Develop a clear thesis statement that guides your essay: Your thesis statement should clearly and concisely state the main argument of your essay.
• Conduct thorough research and analysis of the artwork you are writing about : This includes examining the visual elements of the artwork, researching the artist, and considering the historical significance.
• Use formal and precise language to discuss the artwork: Avoid using colloquial language and instead focus on using formal language to describe the artwork.
• Include specific examples from the artwork to support your arguments: Use specific details from the artwork to back up your analysis.
• Avoid personal bias and subjective language: Your essay should be objective and avoid using personal opinions or subjective language.
• Consider the historical and cultural context of the artwork: Analyze the artwork in the context of the time period and cultural context in which they were created.
• Edit and proofread your essay carefully before submitting it: Ensure your essay is well-organized, coherent, and free of grammatical errors and typos.
• Use proper citation format when referencing sources: Follow the appropriate citation style guidelines and give credit to all sources used in your essay.
• Be concise and focused in your writing: Stick to your main thesis statement and avoid going off-topic or including irrelevant information.
• Read your essay aloud to ensure clarity and coherence: Reading your essay out loud can help you identify inconsistencies or any other mistakes.

The Bottom Line!

We hope that the art essay examples we've explored have provided you with inspiration for your own essay. Art offers endless possibilities for analysis, and your essay is a chance to showcase your unique opinions.

Use these examples as a guide to craft an essay that reflects your personality while demonstrating your knowledge of the subject.

Short on time? Let CollegeEssay.org help you! All you have to do is to ask our experts, " write college essay for me " and they'll help you secure top grades in college.

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Artjournalist

How to Make a Paper Collage

Here are all the basics you need to know to make a collage!

Making a paper collage can be a lot of fun so today’s post is going to share everything you need to know on how to make collages!

I’ve been making collages since I was in high school – in fact my bedroom walls were COVERED from floor to ceiling with collages my friend and I worked on making together one summer.

We used sheets of poster board and spent hours cutting up images from all kinds of magazines. It was so much fun and anytime friends would come over they’d usually just look at all the stuff on the walls + get lost reading + noticing things. It was a very cool space!

The love for paper collage has still never left me, and I still use a lot of the basic collaging techniques in my art a LOT.

If you’re new to the world of collage, this post will cover everything you need to know to get started – consider it a crash course in Collages for Beginners 101!

Types of Collages You Can Make

There are a lot of different collages you can make – and like all kinds of art – there really are NO rules!

That being said, there are different kinds of collages that you might want to explore to use as inspiration and help you find your style.

For example, my cityscape collage looks like a city. (Well, it’s supposed to anyways lol – it’s a little wrinkly but I actually like that effect on it!)

Whether you want your collage to be pictorial or mosaic style, surrealist, a photo montage, decoupage, surrealist or something else entirely, there are tons of options to explore!

Here’s an example of a collage that is just an assemblage style of collage:

This collage shown above is one I made using all sorts of things, including a wrapper from some packaging and even a tag from something.

It’s not a fine work of art or anything like that, but it sure is fun to make collages like this – and also a great way to use things you would ordinarily just throw away.

Supplies & Materials for Collage

Before we get into making collages, you need to first gather up all your supplies and materials. Fortunately, you don’t need a lot of supplies, and most likely you already have what you need right on hand.

I could write an entire blog post just about glue, but there are basically two glues I use in making collages: my trusty old glue stick and Liquitex matte gel medium .

Generally, I use the glue stick to put things down on the page and I use the Liquitex matte gel medium anytime I want to get rid of the high gloss/shine on cut out images or if I want things to really be attached well.

Make sure you use a reputable brand like Liquitex or Golden – I made the mistake of using a cheap off brand of matte medium and it was a disaster, all of my images were cloudy!

So that’s glue: A good archival glue stick {I love Uhu glue stics and Elmer’s Craft Bond archival safe glue sticks} and Liquitex matte GEL medium . {Don’t get the fluid medium unless you want lots of bubbling or wrinkles + a lot of discipline to use very little + spread thinly – that can be a creativity killer if it’s not the effect you want!}

Papers for Collage

The next thing you need are papers for collage. There are all sorts of things you can use:

• Old Book Pages
• Painted Papers
• Tissue Paper

Honestly, the possibilities are endless – if it’s flat and you can glue it, you can probably use it! You can see all sorts of more ideas for things that are flat and glueable in my post The Ultimate Junk Journal Scavenger Hunt – it also serves as a huge list of things you can collect and use for collage!

An Important Note on Images You Use in Collages

I love using magazine and book pages for making collages, but something you should consider is whether or not you plan on ever selling collages you create on how and where you source your images.

There’s a lot of intricacies and debate on whether something falls under fair use, the first sale doctrine, or is considered to be copyright and trademark infringement, so if you have ANY plans to ever reproduce a collage or sell it or and not use it for just your own personal use, always be sure you are using images that are okay for this!

While there are many free stock photo sites and royalty free stock photo sites to explore, your best bet for photos that are 100% absolutely safe to use are either images you took yourself. Free stock photos aren’t always a safe bet on whether or not they can be used.

A Substrate: Something to Collage On

The last thing you need is a base to use for your collage, which in the art world is known as a substrate. {You can sound like a very fancy professional artist when you use this word!}

Here are some of the things you can use as a substrate:

• Cardboard – easy to find!
• Cardstock – great for small collages + will help reduce wrinkling
• Posterboard – inexpensive and easy to find
• Foam Board – sturdier than posterboard but prone to denting
• Hardboard – sold at home improvement stores, very heavy so best for small projects
• Any Kind of Wood – sold at art stores and home improvement stores – pine will typically be a good budget friendly and light weight option
• Canvas Panels – Sold at art stores everywhere. I recommend the panels over stretched canvases because they will be a sturdier surface.

If this is your first collage, don’t worry too much about what you use at first as a substrate, the important thing is you have something to glue your images and collage papers down to!

You could even make collages in a three-ring binder or a composition notebook like I do for my many gluebooks!

Scissors & Other Cutting Tools

What can I say about scissors? They are useful to have, but you can always rip the paper instead.

There are tons of different types of scissors you can use and really at the end of the day it just comes down to your own personal preference and what feels good in your hands. I like 6″ scissors for cutting paper the best, but will sometimes use smaller scissors too if I’m fussy cutting stuff out.

If you want to fussy cut out different images from magazines or photos, you can also use an X-acto knife and cutting mat for more precision, but be careful – those knives are sharp! Always turn the paper and not the knife when cutting!

Generally, I only use scissors or rip the paper, because X-acto knives are dangerous (at least for someone clumsy like me!) – and also because that would mean having to be somewhere I could cut it. I like the freedom to be super portable + make a collage anywhere anytime – even if its my kitchen table while I wait for dinner to cook!

Now that we have all of our supplies figured out, we’re ready to make a collage!

How to Make a Collage Step by Step

Step 1: choose what kind of collage you want to make.

There are so many different ideas for collages, you could use our list of drawing ideas for inspiration or even pick a theme from our list of planner theme ideas .

You could also just opt to make a collage based on colors, like all yellow or all blue, or even make a rainbow collage.

If you want to make a collage to look like an image {I call it painting with paper} – you’ll want to sketch out your idea on your substrate to make sure you get the right colors in the right place.

Of course, there’s no rule that a collage has to be planned – you can simply sit down with some magazines, scissors, papers, and glue and go to town!

Step 2: Cut Out Your Images

Cutting out your images can be a fun project all in itself. I usually keep a shallow basket nearby for all of my collage cut-outs, but of course you can choose whatever organizational system that works for you.

If you’re making an image where it makes sense to sort out papers by different colors, you may want to use small bins or baskets to keep the colors separated.

Of course, you don’t have to be organized, you can always cut/tear/rip out whatever images you want to use as you go along. This is what I typically do for collages where I need certain colors, because I’d probably go crazy with little baskets of scraps for every color + shade.

Step 3: Arrange Your Papers on the Substrate

You should always arrange the biggest parts of the collage first. This might be the background of the collage, or it might mean using the largest images.

Before you glue anything down, it’s a good idea to make sure everything will fit where you want it to. This gives you a chance to see how everything looks without worrying about it permanently being stuck in place too soon.

Of course, again, there are no rules – so if you enjoy the process of just slapping things down and seeing how it ends up {which even I will admit is a lot of fun sometimes!} – then skip this step and go to step 4.

Step 4: Glue Everything Down

Once you have a good idea of where everything is going, you’re ready to start gluing. Gluing things down with a glue stick is easy enough, but if you’re using Liquitex matte gel medium to glue down, you’ll want to make sure you don’t overdo it with the medium – a little goes a really long way.

I usually use a foam brush for my Liquitex matte gel medium, it can also sometimes be useful to use a credit card or a brayer to get out any possible bubbles. You only have to apply the Liquitex matte gel medium to the bottom of the paper you are gluing down, you do not want to use too much and risk bubbles!

Sometimes I will go over the items I glue down with matte gel medium, but only if I want to be able to see brush strokes or get rid of high gloss and glare on the images I am using.

Step 5: Optional: Seal Your Collage

The last and final step is to seal your collage if you wish. I usually use Liquitex varnish, Liquitex Matte Medium or Krylon spray varnish for this if I’m planning to hang it on a wall (although lots of my collages live in a journal and in that case I never do that!)

Be sure if you are using varnish that you only applying a VERY thin coat. You don’t need a lot and too much will cause bubbling, especially if the papers were thin.

Again, use a foam brush unless you like the look of painted brush strokes because the strokes will show as a texture on your collage. {And the look of painted brush strokes can be a nice thing, but not everybody wants that effect!}

You could alternatively use a matte spray varnish to seal your work. I’ve used both Mod Podge and Krylon brand, and anything Liquitex or Golden brand will never disappoint.

It’s really up to you and your own preferences, along with what is readily available to you. I’ve experimented with a few different options and the spray varnish or the matte gel medium are just what I prefer…though again, I must admit for smaller just-for-my-own-fun-and-experimentation mixed media art collage pieces I’m not hanging on a wall or selling or giving to other people I often don’t varnish them at all.

The basics of collage are something we usually learn at a pretty young age, as I’m sure we can all recall some sort of collage projects we did in school – but now that we are grown-ups we can use better supplies + make cooler things with them!

I hope you enjoy making collages as much as I do – and of course they are a great way to use up your stash and make a lot of fun things! It’s also an awesome option to explore for journaling if writing or drawing + painting aren’t something you like to do that much.

I am working on adding more collages + the techniques I use to our site here at Artjournalist – and of course have lots more collage ideas + techniques I can’t wait to share, so if you haven’t subscribed to my YouTube channel yet or joined our Facebook group please do so you won’t miss any of it!

One of things I really want to talk about in-depth soon is composition for collage – because again, there are so many options and sometimes it can be overwhelming, so hopefully some of my tricks + tips for that will help!

Have any tips for making a collage? Share them in the comments below!

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Home Essay Samples

Essay Samples on Art

While it may seem easy to compose essays about art, it’s not really so because you have to offer background information in your introduction part and explain why some exhibition or a school of thought is important. This should go to your first paragraph because your purpose is to inspire your readers and provide enough background information. When you already have a prompt that must be followed, determine what kind of essay must be written. It can be a descriptive essay, which is great for a description of the works of art or photography. Some other cases may require working with an explanatory tone where you have to explain why an artist has chosen certain palettes or what has been an inspiration. See various free art essay examples below for inspiration. It also helps to learn how to structure your writing and implement quotes or footnotes that are used to highlight the images. Remember to focus on the ways how to cite images and multimedia elements, depending on the chosen style. Your writing should address every image that you have by checking twice with the grading rubric to ensure that you use the sources that may have already been specified.

What Does Creativity Mean to You

Creativity, an intricate tapestry of imagination and innovation, holds a unique significance for each individual. It is a concept that transcends the boundaries of convention, sparking curiosity and igniting the flames of inspiration. In this essay, we embark on a journey to unearth the meaning...

Censorship of Art and Artists: The Complex Discourse

The intersection of creativity and expression often finds itself entangled in a contentious debate: the censorship of art and artists. This complex issue has sparked discussions across societies and cultures, raising questions about freedom of speech, cultural preservation, and the power dynamics between creators and...

Why I Want to Study Architecture: the Power of Design

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The Impact of Technology on Art: A Modern Renaissance

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Exploring Feminist Literary Criticism: Unveiling Mona Lisa Smile

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• Literary Criticism

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Debate Surrounding Graphic Novel and Relation to Literature

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Depicting Trauma: Symbolism in Graphic Novels

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Understanding Graphic Novels: Context and Analysis for Reading

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Jhene Aiko: Exploring the Artistry and Emotions in her Music

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The Uniqueness of Australian Artwork: Exploring Artists' Perceptions

Australian artists provide a unique way of displaying the Australian landscape. John Olsen is one of these artists, who uses symbolism to create a sense of movement. This is conveyed through his spontaneous linear line work as seen in Onkaparinga Hill, blue wren and fox...

Artistic World of Peter Doig: an Insight Into His Life and Work

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Being an Artist: My Passion, Place of Freedom and Courage

I remember constantly wondering if there was a way that I could make my life meaningful or if it even had meaning. I was just a thirteen year old starting to figure out her own self. My life revolved around wanting to please the people...

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Sculpture From Dura Europas: the Head of a Bearded God

One of the artworks in the Yale art gallery is the Head of a Bearded God. This sculpture of bearded man that looks old and wise. This piece has curly hair, bushy eyebrows, and very wide/big eyes. The piece is is classified as a sculpture,...

Kashimiri Papier Mache Art: a Unique Dying Art Form

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The Art of the Meddah: Exploring Turkish Forms of Storytelling

Culture is the conglomeration of the beliefs and art forms of societiesm across places, along a long-time frame. And quite evidently, the Republic of Turkey has an extremely long history and a resultantly rich diversity in its culture. Throughout its history, the Turkish land was...

The Way Technologies Transform Already Existing Art Forms

Compelling games are not the consequences of accidents, any more than are riveting novels, movies, or music. Creators for all these medias draw on well-established set of strategies and techniques to create a particular emotional experience. Musicians, for example, may create tension through reiteration and...

How Shemistry Influenced the History and Presentation of Art

Chemistry is everywhere in our life. Of course, chemistry is also closely related to art. There are many forms of art, such as oil painting, gouache, watercolor and so on. These painting forms are inseparable from products such as pigments and watercolors, which are based...

Critical Understanding of the Sculptural Art of Alexander Calder

Calder was an American sculptor from Pennsylvania. His father, Alexander Stirling Calder was a sculptor and his mother a painter. Him and his family were constantly on the move around the country throughout Calder’s childhood due to his dads work. And through this Calder was...

Discussion on the Relationship Between Intelligence and Creativity

The relationship between intelligence and creativity has been subjected to research for many years. Unfortunately, there is yet no consensus on how these constructs are related. The connection between intelligence and creativity is that they are functions of the brain that handle data to determine...

• Intelligence

Do Schools Kill Creativity: the Issues of Music Education

In the TEDx video entitled, 'Do schools kill creativity?' Sir Ken Robinson discusses what he believes to be the main problem with our education system, providing a series of funny anecdotes and facts appropriate for his argument. After watching this video about 'Do schools kill...

Creative and Critical Thinking: Combining the Achievements of Thought

Creative, one word that can be interpreted in many ways whether in thoughts which is include ways of thinking and actions and also in verbal form. Critical, on the other side refers to the ability to analyse information objectively and make a reasoned judgment. It...

• Critical Thinking

Culture, Art and Creativity: the Way They Are Related

Art is a reflection of your thinking, your ideas, and your surroundings, the artist adopts his or her surroundings and then by using their imagination, outside thinking and their perspective they present a new face of it in front of the world. Art and creativity...

• Cultural Anthropology

Accessing the World of Theatre: Musicals and Music Theatre

Goodwin (2019) states music theatre is a type of stage performance using music from various forms such as ballets, operas, cabarets, and contemporary music. Musical theatre uses different techniques (e.g. music, dance, songs, acting as well as spoken dialogue) to tell a story to the...

Drawing for Architecture: A Key to Understanding Complex Designs

Architecture the word from Latin is called “architectura” originally from the Greek “arkhitekton”. Architectural drawing has never been taken for granted. All things we design and sketch are from our thinking to our hands. Therefore, drawings are the main development to architectural projects. When designing,...

Architecture: Bridging Vision into Reality

Architecture can be defined in various ways, but if I were to define it, I would simply use these following words, ‘Architecture is an abstract language that bridges a vision into reality.’ I think everyone would agree that architecture is best paired with great effort...

• Interior Design

The Development of Nationalism & Regionalism in Australian Architecture

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• Modern Architecture

Architecture: A Means to Improve People's Quality of Life

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• Quality of Life

Architecture and its Role in Nation Building: A Critical Review

Brief introduction on architecture and how its spaces are perceived The universal definition of architecture as a synthesis of ‘art’ and ‘science’ is inadequate in the present democratic, globalized, and information world of the 21st century. Many modern good-looking buildings with sound structures have been...

Romanticism Paintings Analysis: The Raft of Medusa and Liberty Leading the People

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The Ideas Behind The Persistence of Memory and Pillars of Society

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• Salvador Dali

The Persistence of Memory, Starry Night and Analysis of Other Paintings

Dreams are something that everyone is or was able to have at one point in their life. Dreams are defined as, 'a series of thoughts, images, and sensations occurring in a person's mind during sleep.' Many artists create their artworks from their dreams or other...

• Vincent Van Gogh

The System Of Education: If I Could Change The World

If I could change the world, I would completely change the system of education. It hasn't changed for hundreds of years, and the current system was designed in the Industrial Age. This means, that children in school have to obey every order and do only...

• Importance of Education

Expressive Art: Is Graffiti Art Or Vandalism

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Why Is Art Important For Human

Art is not a necessary part of survival. So why does it matter? Oftentimes art is overlooked and viewed as an unimportant skill or ability to have. However, art has many qualities that one can benefit from. It is a stress reliever that allows people...

The Doll`s House" By H. Ibsen: Nora Helmer Character Analysis

Nora Helmer is a good wife and mother. She does all she can for her family, especially her husband. Considering all the things she does, and the lengths she went to to make sure her husband could regain his health, it was not enough in...

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Why Is Graffiti Are Not Vandalism

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My Take On Comedy: From Tartuffe To Sylvia And Cards Against Humanity

Defining comedy is extremely difficult. When something happens that makes you laugh, whether that is in a play or in real life, it’s difficult to pin down why you laughed, to begin with. I find myself defining comedy as a series of events that went...

Attitudes Towards Consumerism in Contemporary Art

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One of the Most Common Forms of Theatre

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The Practice of Art Forgery and Monet's Aesthetic Flaws

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The Role of Creative Industries in the United Kingdom

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African Art: West African Sculpting 

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Claude Monet and Modern Art Today

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Typography: From Billboards to Street Signs

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Rebellious Aspect to Monet’s Personality

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Edgar Degas and His Way of Critics

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The Book Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Calico

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Black Swan is About Destructive Nature of Ballet

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Role of Cultural and Religious Pluralism

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John Berger: Understanding His Artwork

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History of Medieval And Byzantine Art Movements

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The Power Of Photography: Capturing Emotions With Camera

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Jackson Pollock as an Influential America Artist

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The Portrayal of the Culture of Death and Afterlife in Art

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Art Nouveau and Modernist Movements in Art

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The Famous Michelangelo Merisi Da Caravaggio

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Art of Theatre and French Figure Joan of Arc

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The Beauty and Skill of Ansel Adams’ Photography

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Holi Festival and Vibrant Celebration of Colors

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The Struggle of the Graphic Designers and Social Media

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Some Interesting Facts About Salvador Dali

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Salvador Dali's Biography: Main Topics

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Caravaggio’s Artwork Judith Beheading Holofernes

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Breaking The Parametr In Red Wheelbarrow: Analysis

The most conspicuous element of modernist poetry is the invention and experimentation of new forms of representation. It featured movements such as imagism and symbolism and moved consciously away from naturalism and realism. Ezra Pound was one of the first to delve into this new...

The Importance Of Paying Attention To Detail In Architecture

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Depiction Of Revolution In Les Miserables And Musical Theatre

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The Concepts Of Love And Hate With Loyalty In "Romeo And Juliet"

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Romeo And Juliet: The Decision Between Choice And Fate

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Societal Views On Graffiti: Street Art Or Vandalism

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Portrayal Of Love And Hate In Shakespeare's Romeo And Juliet

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Graffiti And Street Art As An Act Of Vandalism

It is difficult to apply a single definition to what is considered Art. Whether it can or should be defined has been constantly debated. “The definition of art is controversial in contemporary philosophy. Whether art can be defined has also been a matter of controversy....

Passionate Pursuit: Being Passionate About Art

Different pieces of artwork inspire people all around the world. Artists use a wide variety of techniques to make their work unique. While creating new pieces of art, it is common to look at other artists' work for inspiration. While evaluating their artwork you can...

Andy Warhol's Album Artwork: Don't Judge A Book By Its Cover

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The Role Of Other Characters In Death Of Romeo And Juliet

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The Presentation Of Love In Romeo And Juliet

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The Importance Of Different Types Of Love In Romeo And Juliet

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The Use Of Hyperbole And Symbolism In "The Doll's House"

A Doll's House delves into the lives of a young couple living in Victorian era Norway. The play follows Nora through her journey, from her previously unexamined life of domestic, wifely comfort, to questioning the very foundation of everything she used to believe in. Having...

Realism In A Doll's House Play

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20th Century Art: Representational Abstract Art

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The Opposite Concepts Of Realism Versus Idealism

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The Abstract Art And Pop Art Artists And Movements

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Romanticism & Realism: Changing Landscapes 

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The Abstract Art And Expressionism In World War 2

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The Definition Of Fate And Free Will In Macbeth

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11 Most Famous Collage Artists

The majority of early collage artists would have had strong roots in the Dada art movement.

However, it’s origins are somewhat earlier and has long been attributed to Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque.

Collage art has allowed artist to break free from the more traditional 2D forms on canvas and not only add an extra dimension but also texture and a never ending array of materials from which to work from.

Famous Collage Artists

1. hannah hoch.

Hannah Hoch was a German artist who was born in 1889 and lived until 1978. She was well-known for creating political photomontage and collage artwork.

In these pieces, she took text and images from popular media and turned them into statements about the failings of the Weimar German government.

She focused her criticism specifically on gender issues and has become known as a pioneering feminist artist.

One of her more recognized pieces is Das schone madchen (The Beautiful Girl) which she made in 1920. This served as a reaction against the introduction of a certain kind of advertising that furthered ideals of beauty and came from the Western world.

Her partner was the artist, Raoul Haussman, who also was in this field of art. Like other artists following the Dada style , Hoch explored new modes of creation.

2. Man Ray

Man Ray (born Emmanuel Radnitzky in 1890) created artwork in the Surrealist and Dada styles. He moved from Paris to New York in 1922 after he already began making Dada art.

He came up with the idea for rayographs as a play on his name and photographs after he experimented with camera-less photography.

He wanted to turn art on its side with this as a reaction to the modern media culture that came about after World War I. His work was an experimentation with “chance and spontaneity”.

One example of Ray’s spontaneous creative nature is his piece titled The Rope Dancer Accompanies Herself with Her Shadows.

This was made using colored paper scattered randomly on the floor to come up with a color-block composition. It made great use of shadows, negative space, and favoring accident over purposeful compositional decisions.

Man Ray was an instrumental part of putting together the early exhibition programs at The Museum of Modern Art.

3. Peter Blake

Sir Peter Thomas Blake, who was born in 1932, is a British pop artist . He became most known for his work on the sleeve design of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by the Beatles.

He also worked on two albums for The Who, the cover of Band Aid’s single “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”, as well as the Live Aid concert poster.

Blake painted with inspiration from images that he saw in popular culture. He used this to create collages that were bright, exciting, and “popped” from the canvas.

Because of Blake’s services to the world of art, he was knighted at Buckingham Palace in 2002. He is considered to be the godfather of the British Pop Art and Young British Artists movement.

Today, he’s retired from the art world yet he still does a great deal of artwork.

4. Eileen Agar

Eileen Agar was born in Argentina in 1899 and died in London in 1991. One of her most notable achievements was helping to ensure the spread of Surrealism to Britain from Paris in the 1930s.

Agar has sometimes been defined by male company she kept instead of her artistry.

However, she has been considered one of the most influential artists in the Surrealist movement with her adventurous streak.

She kept up her work well into her eighties and enjoyed exploring natural and organic forms as well as having a germinal power of imagination.

Agar chose to work with not only collage but also painting, sculpture, and photography. She also wrote a memoir titled A Look at My Life in 1988 that gave insight into the somewhat lost bohemian side to pre-war London and Paris.

This book helped to keep her work in people’s minds and it continued to be displayed and discussed now for years after her death.

5. Kurt Schwitters

Kurt Schwitters is a poet, painter, and mixed-media artist who is most associated with the Dada movement.

He is well-known for creating assemblage and collage artwork. These pieces were made with imagery and text that Schwitters took from print media that were turned into layered, dynamic compositions.

In fact, he is remembered mostly for the masterful sense of composition he employed as well as his innovative mixed-media work.

Also Read: Famous Mosaic Artists

Schwitters began his studies at the Dresden Academy of Art in Germany. He first showed in 1918 in Berlin and at that point, was introduced to Dada artists Hannah Hoch, Raoul Hausmann, and Jean Arp.

He brought together materials that he found on the streets in Hannover in order to make assemblages. He did this in an effort to show that German culture was mostly in ruins.

These early works he called Merzbilder. Though Schwitters was in line with Dadaism, he was unlike other Berlin Dadaists because he was mainly interested in making art instead of engaging in political activism.

6. Raoul Hausmann

Raoul Hausmann was born in Austria in 1886 and he was introduced to art by his father, a painter. This would prove to be fateful as he became well-known for his work on photographs, photomontages, and collages.

He also wrote many pieces that discussed the Berlin Dada group during the 1920s.

A quote that reflects his view on art (and life) is “What is important is that our optical awareness rids itself of classical notions of beauty and opens itself more and more to the beauty of the instant”.

Hausmann’s early work came about after he moved to Berlin with his family in 1900. He worked in the Arthur Lewin-Funcke’s studio just a few years later and was introduced by Richard Huelsenbeck to the tenets of Dada in 1917.

At that point, much of his artwork was a representation of German Expressionism. After this, he exhibited his art alongside his lover, Hannah Hoch. He also wrote many essays and fled to Spain with his partners.

Hausmann’s works are currently in The Museum of Modern Art in New York City, along with the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C and the Tate Gallery in London.

7. Joseph Cornell

Joseph Cornell was born in 1903 in Nyack, New York. Though he went to school for science (he did not graduate), he became a textile salesman in 1921.

He explored New York City and saw a great deal of cultural resources that inspired him. Christian Science also would come to be a big influence on his work.

Also Read: New York Artists

Much of Cornell’s artwork has been said to be poetic, romantic, surrealistic, and lyrical.

Amazingly, he taught himself much about art and developed a sophisticated technique with his collages, box constructions, and also with the experimental films that he created during the 1930s.

He took inspiration from the humanities, sciences, and arts to put together collages that he made using found materials.

These works were based on his daily life experiences and the three-dimensional items that he found in theaters, books shops, antique fairs from New York as well as from people he knew around the United States and Europe.

Today, a collection of this work is at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, in a section designated as the Joseph Cornell Study Center.

8. John Stezaker

John Stezaker was born in 1949 in Worcester UK. He creates collages using photographs in order to re-examine some aspects of photographic images including as a symbol of modern culture and documentation of truth.

He brings together images from postcards, books, and magazines to use as “readymades”. Stezaker’s work has elegant juxtapositions that turn the original images into a means to portray his own unique, witty meanings.

One of his more popular artwork projects, the Marriage series, focuses on portraiture as a means of conveying public identity and a part of history.

In the series he brought together publicity photos of some classic movie stars. He did this in order to disorder the familiar to provoke uncanny sensations.

He also created unified characters with photographic elements of males and females as a way to showcase a kind of disjointed harmony that detracts from and complements the whole. These pieces are a good representation of Surrealism.

Stezaker has had his work shown in exhibitions in the UK, USA, and other countries around the world.

9. Nancy Spero

Nancy Spero was born in Ohio in 1926, though she did live in New York City for many years of her life. She worked with and married artist Leon Golub.

Her career as an artist and activist lasted for about fifty years. In her artwork, she dealt with elements of cultural, political, and social concerns.

As part of this, she created pieces that depicted apocalyptic violence and wars while also including the more celebratory cycles of life and ecstatic rebirth.

Some of the more famous works that Spero created include her paintings and collage on paper Notes in Time on Women (from 1979) and The First Language (from 1981).

Notes in Time on Women was turned into a digital scroll for the online magazine Triple Canopy in 2010 (the year after her death). Many of her pieces were placed in retrospective exhibitions at some top museums.

10. Jesse Treece

Jesse Treece is a collage artist who takes newspaper comic strips, architectural drawings, pieces of art Hayao Miyazaki and Salvador Dali , images from the 1960s and 1970s, and bits of dystopian science fiction books to create his work.

His pieces have been said to surprise and excite regardless of the current trends as his artwork is original and unique.

According to a quote from Jesse Treece himself, he just got started with one collage without too much thought, it snowballed and now it’s turned into an obsession after he felt the most satisfied with his work out of anything he’d created.

Treece is considered to be an instrumental player in the underground collage art movement. He was listed in AnOther Magazine’s top collage artist throughout the world.

He’s mostly self-taught though he has taken some art classes that were more on the casual side.

Treece excels when it comes to bringing together aspects of science and nature, beautiful and disturbing, and various other contradictions so that it makes a new picture to give food for thought.

11. Richard Hamilton

Richard William Hamilton CH (24 February 1922 – 13 September 2011) was a collage artist and painter from England.

Man, Machine, and Motion (Hatton Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne, 1955) and his 1956 collage What is it about today’s houses that makes them so different, so appealing?, created for the Independent Group’s This Is Tomorrow show in London, are regarded by critics and historians to be among the early works of pop art.

The Tate Gallery has a comprehensive collection of Hamilton’s work throughout his entire career. The Kunstmuseum Winterthur acquired a significant donation of Hamilton’s prints in 1996, making it the world’s biggest repository of the artist’s prints.

Tate Modern hosted a major retrospective of his work till May 2014.

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• College essay

How to Write a College Essay | A Complete Guide & Examples

The college essay can make or break your application. It’s your chance to provide personal context, communicate your values and qualities, and set yourself apart from other students.

A standout essay has a few key ingredients:

• A unique, personal topic
• A compelling, well-structured narrative
• A clear, creative writing style
• Evidence of self-reflection and insight

To achieve this, it’s crucial to give yourself enough time for brainstorming, writing, revision, and feedback.

In this comprehensive guide, we walk you through every step in the process of writing a college admissions essay.

Table of contents

Why do you need a standout essay, start organizing early, choose a unique topic, outline your essay, start with a memorable introduction, write like an artist, craft a strong conclusion, revise and receive feedback, frequently asked questions.

While most of your application lists your academic achievements, your college admissions essay is your opportunity to share who you are and why you’d be a good addition to the university.

Your college admissions essay accounts for about 25% of your application’s total weight一and may account for even more with some colleges making the SAT and ACT tests optional. The college admissions essay may be the deciding factor in your application, especially for competitive schools where most applicants have exceptional grades, test scores, and extracurriculars.

What do colleges look for in an essay?

Admissions officers want to understand your background, personality, and values to get a fuller picture of you beyond your test scores and grades. Here’s what colleges look for in an essay :

• Demonstrated values and qualities
• Vulnerability and authenticity
• Self-reflection and insight
• Creative, clear, and concise writing skills

Prevent plagiarism. Run a free check.

It’s a good idea to start organizing your college application timeline in the summer of your junior year to make your application process easier. This will give you ample time for essay brainstorming, writing, revision, and feedback.

While timelines will vary for each student, aim to spend at least 1–3 weeks brainstorming and writing your first draft and at least 2–4 weeks revising across multiple drafts. Remember to leave enough time for breaks in between each writing and editing stage.

Create an essay tracker sheet

If you’re applying to multiple schools, you will have to juggle writing several essays for each one. We recommend using an essay tracker spreadsheet to help you visualize and organize the following:

• Deadlines and number of essays needed
• Prompt overlap, allowing you to write one essay for similar prompts

You can build your own essay tracker using our free Google Sheets template.

College essay tracker template

Ideally, you should start brainstorming college essay topics the summer before your senior year. Keep in mind that it’s easier to write a standout essay with a unique topic.

If you want to write about a common essay topic, such as a sports injury or volunteer work overseas, think carefully about how you can make it unique and personal. You’ll need to demonstrate deep insight and write your story in an original way to differentiate it from similar essays.

What makes a good topic?

• Meaningful and personal to you
• Uncommon or has an unusual angle
• Reveals something different from the rest of your application

Brainstorming questions

You should do a comprehensive brainstorm before choosing your topic. Here are a few questions to get started:

• What are your top five values? What lived experiences demonstrate these values?
• What adjectives would your friends and family use to describe you?
• What challenges or failures have you faced and overcome? What lessons did you learn from them?
• What makes you different from your classmates?
• What are some objects that represent your identity, your community, your relationships, your passions, or your goals?
• Whom do you admire most? Why?
• What three people have significantly impacted your life? How did they influence you?

How to identify your topic

Here are two strategies for identifying a topic that demonstrates your values:

• Start with your qualities : First, identify positive qualities about yourself; then, brainstorm stories that demonstrate these qualities.
• Start with a story : Brainstorm a list of memorable life moments; then, identify a value shown in each story.

After choosing your topic, organize your ideas in an essay outline , which will help keep you focused while writing. Unlike a five-paragraph academic essay, there’s no set structure for a college admissions essay. You can take a more creative approach, using storytelling techniques to shape your essay.

Two common approaches are to structure your essay as a series of vignettes or as a single narrative.

Vignettes structure

The vignette, or montage, structure weaves together several stories united by a common theme. Each story should demonstrate one of your values or qualities and conclude with an insight or future outlook.

This structure gives the admissions officer glimpses into your personality, background, and identity, and shows how your qualities appear in different areas of your life.

Topic: Museum with a “five senses” exhibit of my experiences

• Introduction: Tour guide introduces my museum and my “Making Sense of My Heritage” exhibit
• Story: Racial discrimination with my eyes
• Lesson: Using my writing to document truth
• Story: Broadway musical interests
• Lesson: Finding my voice
• Story: Smells from family dinner table
• Lesson: Appreciating home and family
• Story: Washing dishes
• Lesson: Finding moments of peace in busy schedule
• Story: Biking with Ava
• Lesson: Finding pleasure in job well done
• Conclusion: Tour guide concludes tour, invites guest to come back for “fall College Collection,” featuring my search for identity and learning.

Single story structure

The single story, or narrative, structure uses a chronological narrative to show a student’s character development over time. Some narrative essays detail moments in a relatively brief event, while others narrate a longer journey spanning months or years.

Single story essays are effective if you have overcome a significant challenge or want to demonstrate personal development.

Topic: Sports injury helps me learn to be a better student and person

• Situation: Football injury
• Challenge: Friends distant, teachers don’t know how to help, football is gone for me
• Turning point: Starting to like learning in Ms. Brady’s history class; meeting Christina and her friends
• My reactions: Reading poetry; finding shared interest in poetry with Christina; spending more time studying and with people different from me
• Insight: They taught me compassion and opened my eyes to a different lifestyle; even though I still can’t play football, I’m starting a new game

Brainstorm creative insights or story arcs

Regardless of your essay’s structure, try to craft a surprising story arc or original insights, especially if you’re writing about a common topic.

Never exaggerate or fabricate facts about yourself to seem interesting. However, try finding connections in your life that deviate from cliché storylines and lessons.

Admissions officers read thousands of essays each year, and they typically spend only a few minutes reading each one. To get your message across, your introduction , or hook, needs to grab the reader’s attention and compel them to read more..

Avoid starting your introduction with a famous quote, cliché, or reference to the essay itself (“While I sat down to write this essay…”).

While you can sometimes use dialogue or a meaningful quotation from a close family member or friend, make sure it encapsulates your essay’s overall theme.

Find an original, creative way of starting your essay using the following two methods.

Option 1: Start with an intriguing hook

Begin your essay with an unexpected statement to pique the reader’s curiosity and compel them to carefully read your essay. A mysterious introduction disarms the reader’s expectations and introduces questions that can only be answered by reading more.

Option 2: Start with vivid imagery

Illustrate a clear, detailed image to immediately transport your reader into your memory. You can start in the middle of an important scene or describe an object that conveys your essay’s theme.

A college application essay allows you to be creative in your style and tone. As you draft your essay, try to use interesting language to enliven your story and stand out .

Show, don’t tell

“Tell” in writing means to simply state a fact: “I am a basketball player.” “ Show ” in writing means to use details, examples, and vivid imagery to help the reader easily visualize your memory: “My heart races as I set up to shoot一two seconds, one second一and score a three-pointer!”

First, reflect on every detail of a specific image or scene to recall the most memorable aspects.

• What are the most prominent images?
• Are there any particular sounds, smells, or tastes associated with this memory?
• What emotion or physical feeling did you have at that time?

Be vulnerable to create an emotional response

You don’t have to share a huge secret or traumatic story, but you should dig deep to express your honest feelings, thoughts, and experiences to evoke an emotional response. Showing vulnerability demonstrates humility and maturity. However, don’t exaggerate to gain sympathy.

Use appropriate style and tone

Make sure your essay has the right style and tone by following these guidelines:

• Use a conversational yet respectful tone: less formal than academic writing, but more formal than texting your friends.
• Prioritize using “I” statements to highlight your perspective.
• Write within your vocabulary range to maintain an authentic voice.
• Write concisely, and use the active voice to keep a fast pace.
• Follow grammar rules (unless you have valid stylistic reasons for breaking them).

You should end your college essay with a deep insight or creative ending to leave the reader with a strong final impression. Your college admissions essay should avoid the following:

• Summarizing what you already wrote
• Stating your hope of being accepted to the school
• Mentioning character traits that should have been illustrated in the essay, such as “I’m a hard worker”

Here are two strategies to craft a strong conclusion.

Option 1: Full circle, sandwich structure

The full circle, or sandwich, structure concludes the essay with an image, idea, or story mentioned in the introduction. This strategy gives the reader a strong sense of closure.

In the example below, the essay concludes by returning to the “museum” metaphor that the writer opened with.

Option 2: Revealing your insight

You can use the conclusion to show the insight you gained as a result of the experiences you’ve described. Revealing your main message at the end creates suspense and keeps the takeaway at the forefront of your reader’s mind.

Revise your essay before submitting it to check its content, style, and grammar. Get feedback from no more than two or three people.

It’s normal to go through several rounds of revision, but take breaks between each editing stage.

Also check out our college essay examples to see what does and doesn’t work in an essay and the kinds of changes you can make to improve yours.

Respect the word count

Most schools specify a word count for each essay , and you should stay within 10% of the upper limit.

Remain under the specified word count limit to show you can write concisely and follow directions. However, don’t write too little, which may imply that you are unwilling or unable to write a thoughtful and developed essay.

Check your content, style, and grammar

• First, check big-picture issues of message, flow, and clarity.
• Then, check for style and tone issues.
• Finally, focus on eliminating grammar and punctuation errors.

Get feedback

Get feedback from 2–3 people who know you well, have good writing skills, and are familiar with college essays.

• Teachers and guidance counselors can help you check your content, language, and tone.
• Friends and family can check for authenticity.
• An essay coach or editor has specialized knowledge of college admissions essays and can give objective expert feedback.

The checklist below helps you make sure your essay ticks all the boxes.

College admissions essay checklist

I’ve organized my essay prompts and created an essay writing schedule.

I’ve done a comprehensive brainstorm for essay topics.

I’ve selected a topic that’s meaningful to me and reveals something different from the rest of my application.

I’ve created an outline to guide my structure.

I’ve crafted an introduction containing vivid imagery or an intriguing hook that grabs the reader’s attention.

I’ve written my essay in a way that shows instead of telling.

I’ve shown positive traits and values in my essay.

I’ve demonstrated self-reflection and insight in my essay.

I’ve used appropriate style and tone .

I’ve concluded with an insight or a creative ending.

I’ve revised my essay , checking my overall message, flow, clarity, and grammar.

I’ve respected the word count , remaining within 10% of the upper word limit.

Congratulations!

It looks like your essay ticks all the boxes. A second pair of eyes can help you take it to the next level – Scribbr's essay coaches can help.

Colleges want to be able to differentiate students who seem similar on paper. In the college application essay , they’re looking for a way to understand each applicant’s unique personality and experiences.

Your college essay accounts for about 25% of your application’s weight. It may be the deciding factor in whether you’re accepted, especially for competitive schools where most applicants have exceptional grades, test scores, and extracurricular track records.

A standout college essay has several key ingredients:

• A unique, personally meaningful topic
• A memorable introduction with vivid imagery or an intriguing hook
• Specific stories and language that show instead of telling
• Vulnerability that’s authentic but not aimed at soliciting sympathy
• Clear writing in an appropriate style and tone
• A conclusion that offers deep insight or a creative ending

While timelines will differ depending on the student, plan on spending at least 1–3 weeks brainstorming and writing the first draft of your college admissions essay , and at least 2–4 weeks revising across multiple drafts. Don’t forget to save enough time for breaks between each writing and editing stage.

You should already begin thinking about your essay the summer before your senior year so that you have plenty of time to try out different topics and get feedback on what works.

Most college application portals specify a word count range for your essay, and you should stay within 10% of the upper limit to write a developed and thoughtful essay.

You should aim to stay under the specified word count limit to show you can follow directions and write concisely. However, don’t write too little, as it may seem like you are unwilling or unable to write a detailed and insightful narrative about yourself.

If no word count is specified, we advise keeping your essay between 400 and 600 words.

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A Creative Collage Lesson for All Students

There are so many reasons to love the art of collage, from the freedom it allows to the powerful stories that can be told through it. In the classroom, I love the fact that students can mix personal items and traditional materials to create something new and uniquely meaningful. And the fact that students don’t feel intimidated when they are encouraged to collage? It’s priceless!

I use collage techniques in many of my lessons. But over the years, one lesson stands out as the most successful: Collage to Canvas.

This lesson not only has students experimenting with the art of collage, but it also has them thinking deeply about composition. It’s a great primer to get them experimenting with visual storytelling. Although I use this lesson with my secondary students, it could certainly be scaled down for elementary kiddos.

I begin the lesson by discussing the art of collage. We discuss how collage means assembling different colors, textures, shapes, and materials to create a new concept.

Then, I share the various types of materials that can be used.

Here are just some of the items I like to provide and have students gather: 

• Transparencies
• Tape Transfers
• Manipulated Paper
• Handmade Paper
• Drawings/Sketches
• Photographs
• Personal Items
• Odds and Ends

It’s also a good idea to provide some examples by sharing master collage artists. Artists I’ve used in the past include Georges Braque, Picasso, Kurt Schwitters, Romare Bearden, Radcliffe Bailey, Richard Hamilton, and Robert Rauschenberg. These artists and their works lay the foundation for a wonderful class discussion. When students see this work, they become inspired to begin creating their own collages.

Here are the 7 remaining project steps.

Step 1: set a theme.

There are many themes teachers can use when collaging with their students, but for this specific lesson, I stick with the theme of “self.” I tell students they will be creating a type of “self-portrait” collage. Instead of a traditional portrait, however, they will use colors, textures, magazine images, text, fabrics, photos, and maybe even a few special items from home. The only other parameter I give is that the final collage must be smaller than 6″ x 8.”

Step 2: Brainstorm

After the theme has been set, I give students a “think sheet” to help them dive deep into what makes them unique and help them brainstorm useful imagery to locate. This acts as a type of mental map for their art piece. You can grab a copy to use with your students below!

Download Now!

Step 3: Collect Imagery

I usually allow students a few days to search for imagery. They have so much fun with this step! Be sure you don’t limit your students to magazine imagery only. My students search for imagery and other items on the Internet, in old photo albums, at their homes, on nature walks, and in other unexpected places. They hold their items in an envelope until they have at least twenty-five things with which to experiment.

Step 4: Create Collage

After students have a variety of items to work with, it’s time to create their “self” collages! Many students choose to collage onto a flat surface, like posterboard or cardboard. However, I don’t limit them to these materials because often they find objects to collage on top of which adds to their visual stories. For example, one year a student collaged on her flip-flops, and another year a student collaged on a paper fan that belonged to her grandmother.

Step 5: Sketch

Once these awesome collages are complete, students take a 3” x 3” sticky note, fold it in half and cut a small viewfinder out of it. This viewfinder is then placed on top of the collage so students can find new compositions within their collage. Students move their viewfinders around, and I often have them sketch out a minimum of six new compositions.

Step 6: Paint

Students are so excited to see these new compositions and find the gems of imagery that appear when they look closely. From this point, they can either choose one or several combined areas and recreate them on a large, 16” x 20” canvas board using acrylic paint.

Students have about a week to paint this new composition onto their canvas board, creating an exciting piece based on their collage work!

Step 7: Combine Work

As a final step, I have my students combine their collages and paintings into one display. My students mount their paintings onto poster board and consider how they want to add their collage. Some students decide to put the collage to the side while others will glue the collage onto the canvas, it’s completely up to them.

This is one of my students’ favorite projects because they have so much freedom to create an artwork with such personal meaning. From the simple task of collaging, many of these pieces end up being award-winning artworks!

How do you incorporate the art of collage into your curriculum?

Do you have your students create “self” art beyond the traditional self-portrait?

Magazine articles and podcasts are opinions of professional education contributors and do not necessarily represent the position of the Art of Education University (AOEU) or its academic offerings. Contributors use terms in the way they are most often talked about in the scope of their educational experiences.

Debi West is one of AOEU’s adjunct instructors and a former AOEU Writer and NBCT art educator. She loves sharing with others and enthusiastically stands behind her motto, “Together we ART better!”

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Choose Your Test

Sat / act prep online guides and tips, 177 college essay examples for 11 schools + expert analysis.

College Admissions , College Essays

The personal statement might just be the hardest part of your college application. Mostly this is because it has the least guidance and is the most open-ended. One way to understand what colleges are looking for when they ask you to write an essay is to check out the essays of students who already got in—college essays that actually worked. After all, they must be among the most successful of this weird literary genre.

In this article, I'll go through general guidelines for what makes great college essays great. I've also compiled an enormous list of 100+ actual sample college essays from 11 different schools. Finally, I'll break down two of these published college essay examples and explain why and how they work. With links to 177 full essays and essay excerpts , this article is a great resource for learning how to craft your own personal college admissions essay!

What Excellent College Essays Have in Common

Even though in many ways these sample college essays are very different from one other, they do share some traits you should try to emulate as you write your own essay.

Visible Signs of Planning

Building out from a narrow, concrete focus. You'll see a similar structure in many of the essays. The author starts with a very detailed story of an event or description of a person or place. After this sense-heavy imagery, the essay expands out to make a broader point about the author, and connects this very memorable experience to the author's present situation, state of mind, newfound understanding, or maturity level.

Knowing how to tell a story. Some of the experiences in these essays are one-of-a-kind. But most deal with the stuff of everyday life. What sets them apart is the way the author approaches the topic: analyzing it for drama and humor, for its moving qualities, for what it says about the author's world, and for how it connects to the author's emotional life.

Stellar Execution

A killer first sentence. You've heard it before, and you'll hear it again: you have to suck the reader in, and the best place to do that is the first sentence. Great first sentences are punchy. They are like cliffhangers, setting up an exciting scene or an unusual situation with an unclear conclusion, in order to make the reader want to know more. Don't take my word for it—check out these 22 first sentences from Stanford applicants and tell me you don't want to read the rest of those essays to find out what happens!

A lively, individual voice. Writing is for readers. In this case, your reader is an admissions officer who has read thousands of essays before yours and will read thousands after. Your goal? Don't bore your reader. Use interesting descriptions, stay away from clichés, include your own offbeat observations—anything that makes this essay sounds like you and not like anyone else.

Technical correctness. No spelling mistakes, no grammar weirdness, no syntax issues, no punctuation snafus—each of these sample college essays has been formatted and proofread perfectly. If this kind of exactness is not your strong suit, you're in luck! All colleges advise applicants to have their essays looked over several times by parents, teachers, mentors, and anyone else who can spot a comma splice. Your essay must be your own work, but there is absolutely nothing wrong with getting help polishing it.

And if you need more guidance, connect with PrepScholar's expert admissions consultants . These expert writers know exactly what college admissions committees look for in an admissions essay and chan help you craft an essay that boosts your chances of getting into your dream school.

Check out PrepScholar's Essay Editing and Coaching progra m for more details!

Want to write the perfect college application essay? Get professional help from PrepScholar.

Your dedicated PrepScholar Admissions counselor will craft your perfect college essay, from the ground up. We'll learn your background and interests, brainstorm essay topics, and walk you through the essay drafting process, step-by-step. At the end, you'll have a unique essay that you'll proudly submit to your top choice colleges.

Don't leave your college application to chance. Find out more about PrepScholar Admissions now :

Links to Full College Essay Examples

Some colleges publish a selection of their favorite accepted college essays that worked, and I've put together a selection of over 100 of these.

Common App Essay Samples

Please note that some of these college essay examples may be responding to prompts that are no longer in use. The current Common App prompts are as follows:

1. Some students have a background, identity, interest, or talent that is so meaningful they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story. 2. The lessons we take from obstacles we encounter can be fundamental to later success. Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience? 3. Reflect on a time when you questioned or challenged a belief or idea. What prompted your thinking? What was the outcome? 4. Reflect on something that someone has done for you that has made you happy or thankful in a surprising way. How has this gratitude affected or motivated you? 5. Discuss an accomplishment, event, or realization that sparked a period of personal growth and a new understanding of yourself or others. 6. Describe a topic, idea, or concept you find so engaging that it makes you lose all track of time. Why does it captivate you? What or who do you turn to when you want to learn more?

7. Share an essay on any topic of your choice. It can be one you've already written, one that responds to a different prompt, or one of your own design.

Now, let's get to the good stuff: the list of 177 college essay examples responding to current and past Common App essay prompts. 

Connecticut college.

• 12 Common Application essays from the classes of 2022-2025

Hamilton College

• 7 Common Application essays from the class of 2026
• 7 Common Application essays from the class of 2022
• 7 Common Application essays from the class of 2018
• 8 Common Application essays from the class of 2012
• 8 Common Application essays from the class of 2007

Johns Hopkins

These essays are answers to past prompts from either the Common Application or the Coalition Application (which Johns Hopkins used to accept).

• 1 Common Application or Coalition Application essay from the class of 2026
• 6 Common Application or Coalition Application essays from the class of 2025
• 6 Common Application or Universal Application essays from the class of 2024
• 6 Common Application or Universal Application essays from the class of 2023
• 7 Common Application of Universal Application essays from the class of 2022
• 5 Common Application or Universal Application essays from the class of 2021
• 7 Common Application or Universal Application essays from the class of 2020

Essay Examples Published by Other Websites

• 2 Common Application essays ( 1st essay , 2nd essay ) from applicants admitted to Columbia

Other Sample College Essays

Here is a collection of essays that are college-specific.

Babson College

• 4 essays (and 1 video response) on "Why Babson" from the class of 2020

Emory University

• 5 essay examples ( 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 ) from the class of 2020 along with analysis from Emory admissions staff on why the essays were exceptional
• 5 more recent essay examples ( 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 ) along with analysis from Emory admissions staff on what made these essays stand out

University of Georgia

• 1 “strong essay” sample from 2019
• 1 “strong essay” sample from 2018
• 10 Harvard essays from 2023
• 10 Harvard essays from 2022
• 10 Harvard essays from 2021
• 10 Harvard essays from 2020
• 10 Harvard essays from 2019
• 10 Harvard essays from 2018
• 6 essays from admitted MIT students

Smith College

• 6 "best gift" essays from the class of 2018

Books of College Essays

If you're looking for even more sample college essays, consider purchasing a college essay book. The best of these include dozens of essays that worked and feedback from real admissions officers.

College Essays That Made a Difference —This detailed guide from Princeton Review includes not only successful essays, but also interviews with admissions officers and full student profiles.

50 Successful Harvard Application Essays by the Staff of the Harvard Crimson—A must for anyone aspiring to Harvard .

50 Successful Ivy League Application Essays and 50 Successful Stanford Application Essays by Gen and Kelly Tanabe—For essays from other top schools, check out this venerated series, which is regularly updated with new essays.

Heavenly Essays by Janine W. Robinson—This collection from the popular blogger behind Essay Hell includes a wider range of schools, as well as helpful tips on honing your own essay.

Analyzing Great Common App Essays That Worked

I've picked two essays from the examples collected above to examine in more depth so that you can see exactly what makes a successful college essay work. Full credit for these essays goes to the original authors and the schools that published them.

Example 1: "Breaking Into Cars," by Stephen, Johns Hopkins Class of '19 (Common App Essay, 636 words long)

I had never broken into a car before.

We were in Laredo, having just finished our first day at a Habitat for Humanity work site. The Hotchkiss volunteers had already left, off to enjoy some Texas BBQ, leaving me behind with the college kids to clean up. Not until we were stranded did we realize we were locked out of the van.

Someone picked a coat hanger out of the dumpster, handed it to me, and took a few steps back.

"Can you do that thing with a coat hanger to unlock it?"

"Why me?" I thought.

More out of amusement than optimism, I gave it a try. I slid the hanger into the window's seal like I'd seen on crime shows, and spent a few minutes jiggling the apparatus around the inside of the frame. Suddenly, two things simultaneously clicked. One was the lock on the door. (I actually succeeded in springing it.) The other was the realization that I'd been in this type of situation before. In fact, I'd been born into this type of situation.

My upbringing has numbed me to unpredictability and chaos. With a family of seven, my home was loud, messy, and spottily supervised. My siblings arguing, the dog barking, the phone ringing—all meant my house was functioning normally. My Dad, a retired Navy pilot, was away half the time. When he was home, he had a parenting style something like a drill sergeant. At the age of nine, I learned how to clear burning oil from the surface of water. My Dad considered this a critical life skill—you know, in case my aircraft carrier should ever get torpedoed. "The water's on fire! Clear a hole!" he shouted, tossing me in the lake without warning. While I'm still unconvinced about that particular lesson's practicality, my Dad's overarching message is unequivocally true: much of life is unexpected, and you have to deal with the twists and turns.

Living in my family, days rarely unfolded as planned. A bit overlooked, a little pushed around, I learned to roll with reality, negotiate a quick deal, and give the improbable a try. I don't sweat the small stuff, and I definitely don't expect perfect fairness. So what if our dining room table only has six chairs for seven people? Someone learns the importance of punctuality every night.

But more than punctuality and a special affinity for musical chairs, my family life has taught me to thrive in situations over which I have no power. Growing up, I never controlled my older siblings, but I learned how to thwart their attempts to control me. I forged alliances, and realigned them as necessary. Sometimes, I was the poor, defenseless little brother; sometimes I was the omniscient elder. Different things to different people, as the situation demanded. I learned to adapt.

Back then, these techniques were merely reactions undertaken to ensure my survival. But one day this fall, Dr. Hicks, our Head of School, asked me a question that he hoped all seniors would reflect on throughout the year: "How can I participate in a thing I do not govern, in the company of people I did not choose?"

The question caught me off guard, much like the question posed to me in Laredo. Then, I realized I knew the answer. I knew why the coat hanger had been handed to me.

Growing up as the middle child in my family, I was a vital participant in a thing I did not govern, in the company of people I did not choose. It's family. It's society. And often, it's chaos. You participate by letting go of the small stuff, not expecting order and perfection, and facing the unexpected with confidence, optimism, and preparedness. My family experience taught me to face a serendipitous world with confidence.

What Makes This Essay Tick?

It's very helpful to take writing apart in order to see just how it accomplishes its objectives. Stephen's essay is very effective. Let's find out why!

An Opening Line That Draws You In

In just eight words, we get: scene-setting (he is standing next to a car about to break in), the idea of crossing a boundary (he is maybe about to do an illegal thing for the first time), and a cliffhanger (we are thinking: is he going to get caught? Is he headed for a life of crime? Is he about to be scared straight?).

Great, Detailed Opening Story

More out of amusement than optimism, I gave it a try. I slid the hanger into the window's seal like I'd seen on crime shows, and spent a few minutes jiggling the apparatus around the inside of the frame.

It's the details that really make this small experience come alive. Notice how whenever he can, Stephen uses a more specific, descriptive word in place of a more generic one. The volunteers aren't going to get food or dinner; they're going for "Texas BBQ." The coat hanger comes from "a dumpster." Stephen doesn't just move the coat hanger—he "jiggles" it.

Details also help us visualize the emotions of the people in the scene. The person who hands Stephen the coat hanger isn't just uncomfortable or nervous; he "takes a few steps back"—a description of movement that conveys feelings. Finally, the detail of actual speech makes the scene pop. Instead of writing that the other guy asked him to unlock the van, Stephen has the guy actually say his own words in a way that sounds like a teenager talking.

Turning a Specific Incident Into a Deeper Insight

Suddenly, two things simultaneously clicked. One was the lock on the door. (I actually succeeded in springing it.) The other was the realization that I'd been in this type of situation before. In fact, I'd been born into this type of situation.

Stephen makes the locked car experience a meaningful illustration of how he has learned to be resourceful and ready for anything, and he also makes this turn from the specific to the broad through an elegant play on the two meanings of the word "click."

Using Concrete Examples When Making Abstract Claims

My upbringing has numbed me to unpredictability and chaos. With a family of seven, my home was loud, messy, and spottily supervised. My siblings arguing, the dog barking, the phone ringing—all meant my house was functioning normally.

"Unpredictability and chaos" are very abstract, not easily visualized concepts. They could also mean any number of things—violence, abandonment, poverty, mental instability. By instantly following up with highly finite and unambiguous illustrations like "family of seven" and "siblings arguing, the dog barking, the phone ringing," Stephen grounds the abstraction in something that is easy to picture: a large, noisy family.

Using Small Bits of Humor and Casual Word Choice

My Dad, a retired Navy pilot, was away half the time. When he was home, he had a parenting style something like a drill sergeant. At the age of nine, I learned how to clear burning oil from the surface of water. My Dad considered this a critical life skill—you know, in case my aircraft carrier should ever get torpedoed.

Obviously, knowing how to clean burning oil is not high on the list of things every 9-year-old needs to know. To emphasize this, Stephen uses sarcasm by bringing up a situation that is clearly over-the-top: "in case my aircraft carrier should ever get torpedoed."

The humor also feels relaxed. Part of this is because he introduces it with the colloquial phrase "you know," so it sounds like he is talking to us in person. This approach also diffuses the potential discomfort of the reader with his father's strictness—since he is making jokes about it, clearly he is OK. Notice, though, that this doesn't occur very much in the essay. This helps keep the tone meaningful and serious rather than flippant.

An Ending That Stretches the Insight Into the Future

But one day this fall, Dr. Hicks, our Head of School, asked me a question that he hoped all seniors would reflect on throughout the year: "How can I participate in a thing I do not govern, in the company of people I did not choose?"

The ending of the essay reveals that Stephen's life has been one long preparation for the future. He has emerged from chaos and his dad's approach to parenting as a person who can thrive in a world that he can't control.

This connection of past experience to current maturity and self-knowledge is a key element in all successful personal essays. Colleges are very much looking for mature, self-aware applicants. These are the qualities of successful college students, who will be able to navigate the independence college classes require and the responsibility and quasi-adulthood of college life.

What Could This Essay Do Even Better?

Even the best essays aren't perfect, and even the world's greatest writers will tell you that writing is never "finished"—just "due." So what would we tweak in this essay if we could?

Replace some of the clichéd language. Stephen uses handy phrases like "twists and turns" and "don't sweat the small stuff" as a kind of shorthand for explaining his relationship to chaos and unpredictability. But using too many of these ready-made expressions runs the risk of clouding out your own voice and replacing it with something expected and boring.

Use another example from recent life. Stephen's first example (breaking into the van in Laredo) is a great illustration of being resourceful in an unexpected situation. But his essay also emphasizes that he "learned to adapt" by being "different things to different people." It would be great to see how this plays out outside his family, either in the situation in Laredo or another context.

Want to build the best possible college application?

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Example 2: By Renner Kwittken, Tufts Class of '23 (Common App Essay, 645 words long)

My first dream job was to be a pickle truck driver. I saw it in my favorite book, Richard Scarry's "Cars and Trucks and Things That Go," and for some reason, I was absolutely obsessed with the idea of driving a giant pickle. Much to the discontent of my younger sister, I insisted that my parents read us that book as many nights as possible so we could find goldbug, a small little golden bug, on every page. I would imagine the wonderful life I would have: being a pig driving a giant pickle truck across the country, chasing and finding goldbug. I then moved on to wanting to be a Lego Master. Then an architect. Then a surgeon.

Then I discovered a real goldbug: gold nanoparticles that can reprogram macrophages to assist in killing tumors, produce clear images of them without sacrificing the subject, and heat them to obliteration.

Suddenly the destination of my pickle was clear.

I quickly became enveloped by the world of nanomedicine; I scoured articles about liposomes, polymeric micelles, dendrimers, targeting ligands, and self-assembling nanoparticles, all conquering cancer in some exotic way. Completely absorbed, I set out to find a mentor to dive even deeper into these topics. After several rejections, I was immensely grateful to receive an invitation to work alongside Dr. Sangeeta Ray at Johns Hopkins.

In the lab, Dr. Ray encouraged a great amount of autonomy to design and implement my own procedures. I chose to attack a problem that affects the entire field of nanomedicine: nanoparticles consistently fail to translate from animal studies into clinical trials. Jumping off recent literature, I set out to see if a pre-dose of a common chemotherapeutic could enhance nanoparticle delivery in aggressive prostate cancer, creating three novel constructs based on three different linear polymers, each using fluorescent dye (although no gold, sorry goldbug!). Though using radioactive isotopes like Gallium and Yttrium would have been incredible, as a 17-year-old, I unfortunately wasn't allowed in the same room as these radioactive materials (even though I took a Geiger counter to a pair of shoes and found them to be slightly dangerous).

I hadn't expected my hypothesis to work, as the research project would have ideally been led across two full years. Yet while there are still many optimizations and revisions to be done, I was thrilled to find -- with completely new nanoparticles that may one day mean future trials will use particles with the initials "RK-1" -- thatcyclophosphamide did indeed increase nanoparticle delivery to the tumor in a statistically significant way.

A secondary, unexpected research project was living alone in Baltimore, a new city to me, surrounded by people much older than I. Even with moving frequently between hotels, AirBnB's, and students' apartments, I strangely reveled in the freedom I had to enjoy my surroundings and form new friendships with graduate school students from the lab. We explored The Inner Harbor at night, attended a concert together one weekend, and even got to watch the Orioles lose (to nobody's surprise). Ironically, it's through these new friendships I discovered something unexpected: what I truly love is sharing research. Whether in a presentation or in a casual conversation, making others interested in science is perhaps more exciting to me than the research itself. This solidified a new pursuit to angle my love for writing towards illuminating science in ways people can understand, adding value to a society that can certainly benefit from more scientific literacy.

It seems fitting that my goals are still transforming: in Scarry's book, there is not just one goldbug, there is one on every page. With each new experience, I'm learning that it isn't the goldbug itself, but rather the act of searching for the goldbugs that will encourage, shape, and refine my ever-evolving passions. Regardless of the goldbug I seek -- I know my pickle truck has just begun its journey.

Renner takes a somewhat different approach than Stephen, but their essay is just as detailed and engaging. Let's go through some of the strengths of this essay.

One Clear Governing Metaphor

This essay is ultimately about two things: Renner’s dreams and future career goals, and Renner’s philosophy on goal-setting and achieving one’s dreams.

But instead of listing off all the amazing things they’ve done to pursue their dream of working in nanomedicine, Renner tells a powerful, unique story instead. To set up the narrative, Renner opens the essay by connecting their experiences with goal-setting and dream-chasing all the way back to a memorable childhood experience:

This lighthearted–but relevant!--story about the moment when Renner first developed a passion for a specific career (“finding the goldbug”) provides an anchor point for the rest of the essay. As Renner pivots to describing their current dreams and goals–working in nanomedicine–the metaphor of “finding the goldbug” is reflected in Renner’s experiments, rejections, and new discoveries.

Though Renner tells multiple stories about their quest to “find the goldbug,” or, in other words, pursue their passion, each story is connected by a unifying theme; namely, that as we search and grow over time, our goals will transform…and that’s okay! By the end of the essay, Renner uses the metaphor of “finding the goldbug” to reiterate the relevance of the opening story:

While the earlier parts of the essay convey Renner’s core message by showing, the final, concluding paragraph sums up Renner’s insights by telling. By briefly and clearly stating the relevance of the goldbug metaphor to their own philosophy on goals and dreams, Renner demonstrates their creativity, insight, and eagerness to grow and evolve as the journey continues into college.

An Engaging, Individual Voice

This essay uses many techniques that make Renner sound genuine and make the reader feel like we already know them.

Technique #1: humor. Notice Renner's gentle and relaxed humor that lightly mocks their younger self's grand ambitions (this is different from the more sarcastic kind of humor used by Stephen in the first essay—you could never mistake one writer for the other).

My first dream job was to be a pickle truck driver.

I would imagine the wonderful life I would have: being a pig driving a giant pickle truck across the country, chasing and finding goldbug. I then moved on to wanting to be a Lego Master. Then an architect. Then a surgeon.

Renner gives a great example of how to use humor to your advantage in college essays. You don’t want to come off as too self-deprecating or sarcastic, but telling a lightheartedly humorous story about your younger self that also showcases how you’ve grown and changed over time can set the right tone for your entire essay.

Technique #2: intentional, eye-catching structure. The second technique is the way Renner uses a unique structure to bolster the tone and themes of their essay . The structure of your essay can have a major impact on how your ideas come across…so it’s important to give it just as much thought as the content of your essay!

For instance, Renner does a great job of using one-line paragraphs to create dramatic emphasis and to make clear transitions from one phase of the story to the next:

Suddenly the destination of my pickle car was clear.

Not only does the one-liner above signal that Renner is moving into a new phase of the narrative (their nanoparticle research experiences), it also tells the reader that this is a big moment in Renner’s story. It’s clear that Renner made a major discovery that changed the course of their goal pursuit and dream-chasing. Through structure, Renner conveys excitement and entices the reader to keep pushing forward to the next part of the story.

Technique #3: playing with syntax. The third technique is to use sentences of varying length, syntax, and structure. Most of the essay's written in standard English and uses grammatically correct sentences. However, at key moments, Renner emphasizes that the reader needs to sit up and pay attention by switching to short, colloquial, differently punctuated, and sometimes fragmented sentences.

Even with moving frequently between hotels, AirBnB's, and students' apartments, I strangely reveled in the freedom I had to enjoy my surroundings and form new friendships with graduate school students from the lab. We explored The Inner Harbor at night, attended a concert together one weekend, and even got to watch the Orioles lose (to nobody's surprise). Ironically, it's through these new friendships I discovered something unexpected: what I truly love is sharing research.

In the examples above, Renner switches adeptly between long, flowing sentences and quippy, telegraphic ones. At the same time, Renner uses these different sentence lengths intentionally. As they describe their experiences in new places, they use longer sentences to immerse the reader in the sights, smells, and sounds of those experiences. And when it’s time to get a big, key idea across, Renner switches to a short, punchy sentence to stop the reader in their tracks.

The varying syntax and sentence lengths pull the reader into the narrative and set up crucial “aha” moments when it’s most important…which is a surefire way to make any college essay stand out.

Renner's essay is very strong, but there are still a few little things that could be improved.

Connecting the research experiences to the theme of “finding the goldbug.”  The essay begins and ends with Renner’s connection to the idea of “finding the goldbug.” And while this metaphor is deftly tied into the essay’s intro and conclusion, it isn’t entirely clear what Renner’s big findings were during the research experiences that are described in the middle of the essay. It would be great to add a sentence or two stating what Renner’s big takeaways (or “goldbugs”) were from these experiences, which add more cohesion to the essay as a whole.

Give more details about discovering the world of nanomedicine. It makes sense that Renner wants to get into the details of their big research experiences as quickly as possible. After all, these are the details that show Renner’s dedication to nanomedicine! But a smoother transition from the opening pickle car/goldbug story to Renner’s “real goldbug” of nanoparticles would help the reader understand why nanoparticles became Renner’s goldbug. Finding out why Renner is so motivated to study nanomedicine–and perhaps what put them on to this field of study–would help readers fully understand why Renner chose this path in the first place.

4 Essential Tips for Writing Your Own Essay

How can you use this discussion to better your own college essay? Here are some suggestions for ways to use this resource effectively.

#1: Get Help From the Experts

Getting your college applications together takes a lot of work and can be pretty intimidatin g. Essays are even more important than ever now that admissions processes are changing and schools are going test-optional and removing diversity standards thanks to new Supreme Court rulings .  If you want certified expert help that really makes a difference, get started with  PrepScholar’s Essay Editing and Coaching program. Our program can help you put together an incredible essay from idea to completion so that your application stands out from the crowd. We've helped students get into the best colleges in the United States, including Harvard, Stanford, and Yale.  If you're ready to take the next step and boost your odds of getting into your dream school, connect with our experts today .

#2: Read Other Essays to Get Ideas for Your Own

As you go through the essays we've compiled for you above, ask yourself the following questions:

• Can you explain to yourself (or someone else!) why the opening sentence works well?
• Look for the essay's detailed personal anecdote. What senses is the author describing? Can you easily picture the scene in your mind's eye?
• Find the place where this anecdote bridges into a larger insight about the author. How does the essay connect the two? How does the anecdote work as an example of the author's characteristic, trait, or skill?
• Check out the essay's tone. If it's funny, can you find the places where the humor comes from? If it's sad and moving, can you find the imagery and description of feelings that make you moved? If it's serious, can you see how word choice adds to this tone?

Make a note whenever you find an essay or part of an essay that you think was particularly well-written, and think about what you like about it . Is it funny? Does it help you really get to know the writer? Does it show what makes the writer unique? Once you have your list, keep it next to you while writing your essay to remind yourself to try and use those same techniques in your own essay.

#3: Find Your "A-Ha!" Moment

All of these essays rely on connecting with the reader through a heartfelt, highly descriptive scene from the author's life. It can either be very dramatic (did you survive a plane crash?) or it can be completely mundane (did you finally beat your dad at Scrabble?). Either way, it should be personal and revealing about you, your personality, and the way you are now that you are entering the adult world.

Check out essays by authors like John Jeremiah Sullivan , Leslie Jamison , Hanif Abdurraqib , and Esmé Weijun Wang to get more examples of how to craft a compelling personal narrative.

#4: Start Early, Revise Often

Let me level with you: the best writing isn't writing at all. It's rewriting. And in order to have time to rewrite, you have to start way before the application deadline. My advice is to write your first draft at least two months before your applications are due.

Let it sit for a few days untouched. Then come back to it with fresh eyes and think critically about what you've written. What's extra? What's missing? What is in the wrong place? What doesn't make sense? Don't be afraid to take it apart and rearrange sections. Do this several times over, and your essay will be much better for it!

For more editing tips, check out a style guide like Dreyer's English or Eats, Shoots & Leaves .

What's Next?

Still not sure which colleges you want to apply to? Our experts will show you how to make a college list that will help you choose a college that's right for you.

Interested in learning more about college essays? Check out our detailed breakdown of exactly how personal statements work in an application , some suggestions on what to avoid when writing your essay , and our guide to writing about your extracurricular activities .

Working on the rest of your application? Read what admissions officers wish applicants knew before applying .

Want to improve your SAT score by 160 points or your ACT score by 4 points? We've written a guide for each test about the top 5 strategies you must be using to have a shot at improving your score. Download it for free now:

The recommendations in this post are based solely on our knowledge and experience. If you purchase an item through one of our links PrepScholar may receive a commission.

Anna scored in the 99th percentile on her SATs in high school, and went on to major in English at Princeton and to get her doctorate in English Literature at Columbia. She is passionate about improving student access to higher education.

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Easy Collage Organization Ideas And Tips For Art Journaling

Collage organization is a real struggle we creatives have. We love the papers, colors, and textures, and we just pile these things up, but how to efficiently organize collage materials?

In this post, I’ll share some ideas on collage organization, as well as some storage solutions, plus tips you should have in mind when gathering and organizing your collage supplies.

Disclaimer: Some links in this post may be affiliate links. This means that if you purchase something through that link, I get a small commission, at no extra cost to you.

What to have in mind before you start organizing?

I just wanted to remind you that there’s no one-fits-all way of organizing collage materials. This mainly depends on how you see things and what system works for you.

• For example, do you get inspiration just by looking at an image, or do you like having organized themes you can choose from, like color or size?
• Are you a messy artist who creates at the spur of the moment or do you need a system in order to find creativity?

Think about these things for a moment because they’ll help you decide on the organizational system for your collage materials.

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How to organize collage materials

There are many ways you can do this and the Internet is packed with advice, some might work for you, and others not.

I’d like to share basic collage organization systems I’ve tried, together with their positive and negative sides.

You won’t be able to use all of the systems , but this could help you to try one and see if it works. Maybe you’ll create your own unique organizing system, which I’ve seen many artists end up doing.

Collage organization by color

This works if you have collage material that comes in one main color. If your paper clipping has multiple colors, it’s hard to decide how to stash it according to color. And it’s harder for you to find the perfect paper later when you create.

I’ve heard that the color organizing system doesn’t work for many people. For me, it sometimes does, if (as I already said) the paper clipping has a prominent color, one main color.

So, what you can try is to organize your paper ephemera by color groups.

For example, you can organize them in warm and cool colors . This could be easier to organize and find something you like.

If you’re making a page with a warm background, maybe you want to add more warm colors or add the opposite, cold colors. You can play with these and see how this system works for you.

Or, you can organize them by grouping colors that go well together according to the color wheel (complementary colors, for instance).

For example, you could group together greens and reds, purples and yellows, etc.

Another thing I’d suggest is keeping your black and white images separate. It’s so much easier to find what you need. I sometimes organize my black and white paper clips further into categories like people and objects.

Collage organization by style

If organizing by color doesn’t suit you, you can try grouping your papers by style. This can come in handy if you’re a person who likes to create a certain style and then have collage materials follow that, too.

For example, if you want to try out different styles of art journal pages, like vintage or modern, keeping your collage materials according to style will help you a lot and save time.

Here are some categories for the organization based on style:

• Vintage – pinks, browns, and golds, black and white, lace, old images, vintage images, vintage text, handwriting
• Modern – bold colors, geometrical designs, modern text, magazine images of women
• Retro – patterns, warm colors, old images of furniture or appliances, cameras, cars
• Dark  – black and white, textured images, black letters
• Colorful  – flowers or nature images, butterflies, colorful clothes

Collage organization by size

This kind of organization can come in handy if you like to switch between small and large journals.

Also, large images take up a lot of space and it’s a good thing to keep them separately. When they’re mixed with smaller pieces, you can’t really find them easily. 

When I cut out my collage ephemera, I put the big ones on the side and then fussy-cut the smaller pieces. Larger ones are easier to cut out, so I leave them and cut them out later.

So, when I tried to organize my collage papers by size, it all came down to 3 main sizes:

• Medium 

And I rarely end up using the tiny ones. It takes much time to go through them and pick the one I like. So, they mostly just pile up.

But I also must say that I’m pretty impatient when it comes to creating art journal pages, so this doesn’t have to be the case with you.

That’s why this kind of organization hasn’t always worked for me. The good thing about it is that I separate the really big pieces so they don’t stand in the way.

Collage organization by theme

I believe this is my favorite so far. When I’m creating a page, and have my background done, I start thinking about what image I could use and if I have anything that could fit.

So, I go through my collage clippings that are organized in a few categories:

• backgrounds
• miscellaneous 

Then, what I do is, pick one image from the people category, one from nature, and one from the object category. That’s my starting point.

While I look for these images, I’m also mindful of the colors I want to choose. I either choose the same colors or complementary ones, or I make a color contrast with the images and the background.

Collage material Storage Supplies

I’ve never been much of an organized person, to be honest. Most of my collage papers are everywhere: big boxes, small folders, small boxes, etc.

If you don’t have many collage materials, you can use DIY boxes, reuse shoe boxes , or similar.

I also organize (when I’m in the mood) the papers by putting them into transparent folders . Sometimes it’s a nuisance to pick an image from there, but at least I keep them separate according to the theme.

Then I put these folders into a big box or in a binder. In the binder, they can become heavy and spill out, so I mostly keep them in a box.

If you’re really into organizing, unlike me, you can make pretty labels for your folders or boxes.

There are also a few neat things I’ve come across that could be a great option for organizing collage materials.

• You can use trays with dividers for smaller or medium-sized pieces or mini boxes
• For larger collage pieces, some kind of shallow trays would work fine.
• Also, you could use file folder organizers , these seem like a great idea.

Collage organization tips

Here are some final tips for collage organization that might take the overwhelm out of the entire process.

Don’t save what doesn’t inspire you

I’ve learned that keeping all the images or papers just makes a mess and doesn’t even inspire me to create. So, when you’re ready to cut out some images, take the ones that really got to you.

If you gasped or kept your eyes on an image for long, take that one. But the ones you just overlooked…leave them.

You don’t have to discard them forever, maybe during another cutting session, you’ll want to include them as well. But for now, just keep the ones that make you say: woow .

Don’t use too many categories

If you try to organize your collage materials in too many categories, you’ll spend so much time figuring out where to put each clipping.

So, start with only a few categories and if you see there’s a need for a new one, add it. Also, don’t overthink this, it’s supposed to be fun and relaxing.

Use your materials

I’ve long been guilty of not using my supplies or materials. But when you think about it, if you don’t use them, why try cut them out at all?

Keeping it for that perfect page? I know the feeling. But eventually, I get tired of looking at the same images I was saving and then end up not using them at all.

Please don’t be like me. Use your collage ephemera because the new one is always coming.

Schedule time just for cutting and categorizing

Let this be a process that you enjoy, just like making art. Save some time, gather up all the things you want to cut, and go slowly. Enjoy the images, and think about how they can inspire you.

I usually do this while listening to music, and it can be truly relaxing.

If fussy cutting gives you headaches, just cut around an image and leave it imperfect. Later, you can decide whether to use it with a line around it or fussy-cut it after all.

Limit your collage materials

What often happens to me is that I search for an image for my page, but I get lost in all of the clippings I have (especially if I mixed up the categories and can’t find anything – this happens).

It would be a fun experiment to limit your collage materials, for example, use only one or two categories from your stash. It’s a challenge, but I believe challenges boost our creativity.

You might be also interested in:

Easy Mixed Media Art Journal Tutorial With A Magazine Collage

Composition In Art: Create Interest In Your Art Even If You’re A Beginner

8 Essential Art Journal Supplies Every Beginner Should Start With

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‘They Never Came Home’: Bridge Collapse Casts a Pall Over Baltimore’s Hispanic Community

The six men who were killed were all immigrants from Latin America. Their deaths have shaken the growing Hispanic community in and around Baltimore.

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By Eduardo Medina

Reporting from Baltimore

• March 28, 2024

Jose López was one of the first in his family to leave Guatemala for a new life in the United States. He wanted work that would give him a better life. So in the early 2000s he found his way to Baltimore, a city where strivers have long found a home and where Mr. López made one for himself and his family.

He found fellow Guatemalans along with Mexicans and others who had left their countries with similar aspirations. He and his wife settled in a house with a porch, his brother Jovani said. The couple had two children, and Jose López often picked them up from school.

About two years ago, he took a new job, working late nights for a contractor repairing roads on Maryland bridges.

He didn’t mind the arduous hours because he viewed his purpose in life as providing food and shelter for his family, Mr. López’s older brother said.

Early Tuesday morning, a friend of both brothers called Jovani López with harrowing news. A ship struck a bridge that Jose López had been working on, causing it to collapse and sending six workers, including Mr. Lopez, into the Petapsco River. Hours later, Jovani López learned that they were dead.

“He was there to work,” Jovani López said on Thursday outside of the family’s home, where relatives embraced and cried. “Who could’ve ever imagined this?”

That question has echoed across Baltimore’s Hispanic community, as it mourns the six workers.

Five of them have been identified by the authorities, relatives or advocacy organizations: Mr. López, who was in his 30s; Alejandro Hernandez Fuentes, 35, also of Baltimore; Dorlian Ronial Castillo Cabrera, 26, of Dundalk, Md.; Miguel Luna, who was in his 40s and from El Salvador; and Maynor Yasir Suazo Sandoval, who was in his 30s and from Honduras. The authorities have said there are six victims.

They were men who had gone to work on a bridge late into the night, in cold temperatures, to ensure that thousands of other Marylanders could use the Francis Scott Key Bridge to make it to their own jobs.

“And they never came home,” said Lucía Islas, a community leader and president of Comité Latino de Baltimore, a nonprofit that assists the Hispanic community. Ms. Islas and other Latino community leaders have hosted meetings this week to highlight how immigrants often do the difficult and dangerous jobs that others do not want to do, such as roofing and road maintenance.

Last year, six highway workers, including two brothers from El Salvador and a father and son, were killed on a busy highway outside Baltimore when they were struck by a car that plowed into their work zone.

The dramatic ship crash, collapse of the bridge and the frantic search for survivors have captured the attention of the city and the country, but the disaster has cast a particular pall over the growing Hispanic community in and around Baltimore. From Dominican barbershops and Mexican taquerias to markets stocked with mango and tamarind candy, communities such as Highlandtown, Dundalk and Glen Burnie have been transformed by waves of immigrants from Latin America.

Zeke Cohen, a Baltimore City Council member whose district includes Highlandtown, said that the city had benefited by embracing its immigrants. He credited them for starting businesses, lowering vacancies in the housing market and reversing the blight that had marked some neighborhoods.

“It’s a blessing.”

Even as they are grateful for the support and concern, friends and family members of the victims said they were preoccupied with unanswered questions, none more painful than whether more could have been done to save the men.

Donna Batkis, a clinical social worker in Baltimore who has been helping the victims’ families, said in an interview that they were in shock.

The bodies of Mr. Fuentes and Mr. Cabrera were recovered on Wednesday, the authorities said. But the families of the four men whose bodies have not been recovered have described being in a “purgatory of grief” because they can’t plan a funeral, Ms. Batkis said.

They have repeated two questions in recent days, Ms. Batkis said: “Where’s my loved one? And what’s next?”

“Waiting is a very hard space to be in,” she said. And the family members’ anxiety is compounded by the fact that many of them don’t speak fluent English, and some of them are not legal residents, according to Latino community leaders.

Maryland Gov. Wes Moore and other top officials have voiced support and concern for the families of the men who were killed. On Wednesday, Tom Perez, a senior adviser to President Biden and a former Maryland labor secretary, met with families, Ms. Batkis said.

“Somos unidos,” Mr. Perez told the families, according to Ms. Batkis. “We are united.”

Over the last couple of days, relatives have consoled each other talking about the loved ones they lost.

Mr. Luna, of El Salvador, was married, had three children and had been living in Maryland for at least 19 years. Mr. Suazo, of Honduras, had immigrated to the United States more than 17 years ago, and he was married with two children. His brother, Carlos, said in a statement that Mr. Suazo was talented at repairing and operating all kinds of machinery, and that he had dreamed of starting his own small business.

As he grieves his brother, Jovani López, who emigrated from Guatemala about seven years ago, said he had mostly kept to himself.

At night, when he has trouble sleeping, he has tried to focus on the good memories: Jose López’s laugh; the hot, humid days back at their childhood home in Guatemala, near the eastern city of Chiquimula, where they played soccer; and the lives they had built in Baltimore.

But when daylight comes, he goes out to see the destroyed Key bridge. For hours on Wednesday night, as rain rippled across the Patapsco, he looked out toward the mangled mountain of steel miles away. He could see the ship. He could see the boats encircling it.

“All I could think was, Where is my brother?”

Miriam Jordan , Emiliano Rodríguez Mega and Jacey Fortin contributed reporting.

Eduardo Medina is a Times reporter covering the South. An Alabama native, he is now based in Durham, N.C. More about Eduardo Medina