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. With intuitive tools, a library of curated designs, grid, and layouts, and a little magical assistance, you can easily turn your photos and videos into next level photo grid collages! You can even add videos to make it a video collage! 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. 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."

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." 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. 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.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.

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.As an art medium, collages are also very handy. They can serve as a visual collection of special memories that can bring a smile to your face, and they can also act as a vision board for your goals and dreams. 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. If you’re looking to commemorate special events in your life, these free online photo collage templates cover a gamut of milestones, featuring text and images that suit the occasion. Suppose it’s creating a mood board that you’re after. In that case, there are plenty of sample photo collage designs to choose from, along with aspirational “pegs” and professionally shot images from the extensive Canva media library. For anything else you might need, such as promotional and advertising material, there is surely a perfect photo collage example to serve your purpose.

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."

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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." 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." 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. 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."