A lesser-known art form allowed British aristocracy to circumvent rules of propriety, with in-jokes and suggestive messages hidden inside seemingly innocent images, writes Holly Williams.LLook up the term “collage”, and the Tate’s website will inform you that this cut-and-paste method for making new work was “first used as an artists’ technique in the early 20th Century.” Generally, Picasso and Braque get credited with inventing collage, with Picasso’s decision to paste oilcloth into his painting Still Life with Chair Caning in 1912 considered a firing shot for an explosion of avant-garde art. And when photographs were included in such mixed-media works, the results were particularly witty, subversive, or downright unsettling – as seen in the photomontages by Dadaist Hannah Hoch and Surrealist Max Ernst, revolutionary Soviet artists Alexander Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova, British pop artists like Richard Hamilton and Peter Blake, and Linder Sterling’s punk collages.So far, so coherent a journey through 20th-Century art trends. But what if the Cubists, the Dadaists and the Surrealists were actually predated in this innovation by… upper-class Victorian society women?
Source: The surprising ways that Victorians flirted – BBC Culture
