Schwitters Kurt

Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948) Excluded from the movement Hobby-horse Berlin, it reacts by melting Dada Hanover. This movement was founded on the apolitical one (thus with the antipodes of the designs of Berlin Hobby-horse, which was a politically engaged movement), the fantastic one and constructivism. Its principal pillars are the Merz review, and the art of the same name.

Merz is a reduction of the word Kommerz which we were able to read on a collage of year 1919. The word arose organically from the merzage of the picture(board), not accidentally, because in the artistic development nothing is accidental, what is logical. J named formerly this picture, according to its legible part, picture Merz. When looking for a generic name for my art, j understood that I created except the usual generic notions, I l named according to the most characteristic picture, the picture Merz. The notion Merz was untranslatable and thus susceptible to evolve in the management given by the picture Merz. By a logical overbid, I gave to the notion of Merz its current meaning and offered it to the community by means of the magazine Merz.
Merz write 1923

The process on which this art is founded is at the same time a major process of all the literary Hobby-horse as much as plastic: it is about joining. One found on his fabrics of the tickets of bus, the scraps of posters or newspapers, of the rags, the buttons, the pieces of fabrics, the stoppers, etc which constituted “harmonious” tables. Merz is besides the fragment of a paper where was writes the German word Kommerz, of Kommerz Bank. (Merz perhaps also translated into French by “trick”, “thing”, which characterizes these assemblies of various elements indeed…) L studied the painting of 1909 to 1914 with the Academy of Dresden. It took part in the review der Sturm of Berlin. Large friend of Hausmann and Arp, it founded a movement parallel with the Hobby-horse which it named Merz. From 1930 to 1948, it took refuge in Norway to flee the Nazism. It was pointed out by drawings with the pencil, the charcoal, the watercolour then joinings and assemblies since 1919. Refused to the Hobby-horse of Berlin by Huelsenbeck, it reacts and creates its Merzbild table in 1919. The word Merz being cut out since Kommerz in a printed advertisement. In 1923, it creates its work in Hanover, Merzbau, a whole of timber structures and plaster with cavities where is embedded its work and those of his/her friends. Destroyed in 1943, it partially rebuilt by Switzerland Harald Szeemann. After 1923, it binds with the constructivists Theo van Doesburg and Russian El Lissitsky. It carried out with them the Merz review appeared between 1923 and 1932. A power station of Merz publicity was creates and it launched the new advertisement for firms like Pelikan, Opel or Bahlsen. After the German invasion of Norway, it resided in 1946 at Ambleside in Westmoreland in England. In February 1995, the Beaubourg Center in Paris organized a Schwitters exposure. It published Anna Blume in 1919 and Ursonate in 1932.

When Schwitters died to Wesmoreland he was far from suspecting that one day he would contribute to make the fortune of the industrialists of the glue in the world. Hundreds of thousands of collagistes applied more or less talented, make collages conscientiously shown during hundreds of exhibitions(exposures) today which are applauded, analyzed and bought, with the aim of achieving a world célbrité. Schwitters was not able to attend his world success, he would have appreciated a lot.

Stezaker John

John Stezaker been born in 1949 in Great Britain.

There are few documents on the course and the step of John Stezaker. He however exposed in the best Museum d contemporary art and his paintings faces in l permanent exhibition of the Tate gallery in London on the collage.

John Stezaker’s work re-examines the various relationships to the photographic image: as documentation of truth, purveyor of memory, and symbol of modern culture. In his collages, Stezaker appropriates images found in books, magazines, and postcards and uses them as ‘readymades’. Through his elegant juxtapositions, Stezaker adopts the content and contexts of the original images to convey his own witty and poignant meanings.

Coupling male and female identity into unified characters, Stezaker points to a disjointed harmony, where the irreconciliation of difference both complements and detracts from the whole. In his correlated images, personalities (and our idealisations of them) become ancillary and empty, rendered abject through their magnified flaws and struggle for visual dominance.
In using stylistic images from Hollywood’s golden era, Stezaker both temporally and conceptually engages with his interest in Surrealism. Placed in contemporary context, his portraits retain their aura of glamour, whilst simultaneously operating as exotic ‘artefacts’ of an obsolete culture. Similar to the photos of ‘primitivism’ published in George Bataille’s Documents, Stezaker’s portraits celebrate the grotesque, rendering the romance with modernism equally compelling and perverse.

They involve images taken by a myriad of sources and arranged in a grid representing transistors, as described by Anne Bartlett Ayres: "The image of radios and serves as a" base "is a collage receiver deities and demons , An issuer of talismans and secret codes: Hebrew letters, crosses of all kinds, locks, keys and doors; fragments of Greek and Eastern sculptures, photographs by contemporary religious leaders appeared in newspapers; naked women, portions of bodies, heaps of 'Stars; rifles and snakes and birds and roses and mushrooms.

In its brief and intense life Berman devoted this relentless pursuit of the unspoken and yet the "unscribed." in 1957, its first and only public exhibition at the Ferus Gallery, was closed by the LAPD and Berman was arrested for displaying what was then regarded as "pornography." As a result of the indignity to which he has undergone it withdraws from the scene of public art completely. Berman abandoned Los Angeles and moved to San Francisco, returning in 1963 to Topanga Canyon where he lived and worked until his death. Berman left Los Angeles and moved to San Francisco, back in 1963 in Topanga Canyon, where he lived and worked until his death in 1976.

According to Freedom of the Centre Pompidou exhibition Los angeles 1955 - 1985

Roman CIESLEWICZ

Throughout its professional life, Roman Cieslewicz showed an exceptional inventiveness. With an untameable creative energy and without being concerned with borders, it used joining and the photomontage to divert images and to create strange associations. The quasi systematic use of the colors sharp and the pure forms gives to its creations a single and immediately recognizable seal. Beyond its artistic qualities, Roman Cieslewicz remains also unforgettable for its standpoint, its claims, its engagement but also its capacity to be shocked. Biography of the author Born in 1930 in Poland, Roman Cieslewicz passed most of its life to France. Its work, completely singular definitively upset contemporary graphic creation. Funny, provocative, sometimes even uncomfortable or dérangeantes, its image cannot leave us indifferent. Disappeared in 1996, Roman Cieslewicz is without any doubt a emblematic figure of contemporary graphics. IT HUSTLES all the rules. It stirs up the spirits. ll triturates the images with the scissors, the photocopier and the adhesive to recycle them in a strange, provocative and poetic way. It diverts reality, recomposes it to create an inventive, free, coloured and black world at the same time, passing very close to the unreal one sometimes. The French artist of Polish extraction, Romance Cieslewicz (born in 1930 in Lwow, died in 1996 in Paris), that which was defined as a “pointsman of retina” to have the eye and the world with the eye, left us the explosive work among richest, most expressive, most claiming of the school of the Polish poster artists; this school born in the crucible of propaganda after the Second World war. Its style, founded on the circle, the large obliques, exaggerated off-centrings, the use of the letter for its figurative value, is recognized in the moment. The artist unceasingly nourishes associations of images in black and white (800/1 200 € for Topor, a photocollage of 1978, 2.000/3 000 €, joining original for It of 1968 with its bodies of truncated women, in fishnet stocking) but also colors sharp (2 000/4 000 € for the image icon of Che If, original model for the cover Opus n° 3). The world of Cieslewicz touches us by the expression of turbulences of its heart, its humour and its phantasms. Poetic and extremely at the same time. Always full with modernity.

John Heartfield

First painter he is best known for his collages violently denouncing Nazism. His work is published in newspapers communists. Friends of George Grosz he was admitted to the Dada movement in 1918.

The photomontage and photograms are inseparable from the new way to see who emerges in 1920 in Germany with John Heartfield is one of the actors. The New Vision opposes upstream and downstream two photographic art movements: Pictorialism and the new objectivity. The pictorialist photography dominated the soumettrant pictorial model. The photomontage used as a means of resistance are also a reaction to the painting which he denounces Raoul Hausmann and Hannah Höch increasing abstraction, conceptual vacuum, the break with reality. It also contributes in a breakthrough in making visible the social and political situations outrageous by photography.

Jiri Kolar

At the beginning of 1918, Raoul Haussmann had started to make tables with fragments of posters, coloured bits of paper and newspaper cuttings. But it is at the time of a stay at the edge of the Baltic, with Hannah Hoch, that it had the idea of the photomontage. In almost all the houses where was hung, with the wall, a lithography color, image kind of Epinal, representing a pomegranate on bottom of barracks. To make this memorandum more personal, several families had had the idea to stick to the place of the head pomegranate a photograph of the son or the husband died in the face. It was like a flash, writing Hausmann, I live itself instantaneously to make tables entirely made up of cut out photographs. The extract the Author, an autobiography (Olivier/the Threshold, 2001) and Roussel limited liability company (Al Dante/Scheer, 2003). If collage cubist allowed a new projection in the investigation of space, the photomontage makes it possible Hausmann to analyze the image and its operation. I adopted with the discovery of the photomontage a supra-realistic attitude, which makes it possible to work with a prospect in several centers and to superimpose objects and surfaces? , writes he in his synthetic Cinéma text of painting. Such a freedom makes it possible the artist to obtain complex images mixing the visual element, the letters, the words, often joining together the organic world, emotional and it mechanical.

Philibert Charrin

PHILIBERT-CHARRIN (1920 - 2007) Figure uncontested of the art of collage during 50 years, it carries out “painting-joinings” starting from materials, pieces of paper, most various of fabric or partitions, old subway tickets etc… Pierre Brisset in the revie the Eye in December 1985 wrote: ”… Regarded since too a long time as minor art, and even a diversion for (poor) surrealist delayed which is satisfied to replace the head of the Mona Lisa by that of a rhinoceros or to finish in tail of the Venus body of the titien, joining finds with Charrin its true identity. Philippe Charrin is not only a one creator full with imagination and sensitivity, but still a painter authenticates who, even without lesecours brush manages, as Jean-François chabrun wrote it at one time, “to translate” the values of the true painting”

Raoul Haussmann

At the beginning of 1918, Raoul Haussmann had started to make tables with fragments of posters, coloured bits of paper and newspaper cuttings. But it is at the time of a stay at the edge of the Baltic, with Hannah Hoch, that it had the idea of the photomontage. In almost all the houses where was hung, with the wall, a lithography color, image kind of Epinal, representing a pomegranate on bottom of barracks. To make this memorandum more personal, several families had had the idea to stick to the place of the head pomegranate a photograph of the son or the husband died in the face. It was like a flash, writing Hausmann, I live itself instantaneously to make tables entirely made up of cut out photographs In this he was followed by Hannah Hoch. The extract the Author, an autobiography (Olivier/the Threshold, 2001) and Roussel limited liability company (Al Dante/Scheer, 2003). If joining cubist allowed a new projection in the investigation of space, the photomontage makes it possible Hausmann to analyze the image and its operation. I adopted with the discovery of the photomontage a supra-realistic attitude, which makes it possible to work with a prospect in several centers and to superimpose objects and surfaces? , writes he in his synthetic Cinéma text of painting. Such a freedom makes it possible the artist to obtain complex images mixing the visual element, the letters, the words, often joining together the organic world, emotional and it mechanical.