As a method practiced by major artists, the art of assemblage originated early in the twentieth century. During the spring of 1912, the great Spanish painter Pablo Picasso affixed a piece of oilcloth, printed to simulate chair caning, to a canvas on which he was painting a cubist still life. This was the first collage, or "pasting," made by a contemporary master. Shortly afterward, Picasso began to construct small cubist objects from fragments of cardboard and wood;
Georges Braque introduced newsprint into his drawings; and the third great cubist, Juan Gris, added mirror-glass, photographs, and other extraneous materials to his oil paintings.
An "assemblage," extending the method initiated by the cubist painters, is a work of art made by fastening together cut or torn pieces of paper, clippings from newspapers, photographs, bits of cloth, fragments of wood, metal, or other such materials, shells or stones, or even objects such as knives and forks, chairs and tables, parts of dolls and mannequins, automobile fenders, steel boilers, and stuffed birds and animals.
Between Ig12 and the recent upsurge of unorthodox media among younger artists, assemblage has developed erratically but rapidly. By 1915 the Italian futurists were making typographical collages, and the dadists juxtaposed lettering, photographs, and all sorts of materials to make ironic, amusing, and startling objects that symbolized their attack on traditional art. Marcel Duchamp proclaimed a bottle-drying rack to be a work of art. Kurt Schwitters assembled pictures from bus tickets, labels, buttons, and other refuse which he collected in his pockets as he walked in the street.