In our series Sticks & Stones, we take a deep dive into medium. Each installment features one of art history’s most significant materials—its history, evolution, and unusual uses. (See past installments.) This week’s medium is collage (explore the playlist).

The 20th century saw the rise of a radical new kind of image-making. In Paris in the 1910s and 1920s, Cubists were abstracting and shattering what came before. Their images are preserved in museums and textbooks for generations to come, but a significant part of the story is frequently left out of the narrative: collage. Enabling artists to effortlessly move pieces around to create a whole, papier collé spurred an entirely new sort of experimentation.

The word ‘collage’ comes from the French verb coller, meaning ‘to glue.’ While the idea of gluing shreds of paper together was certainly nothing new, Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso were among the first to consider the practice worthy of being considered fine art. Around 1910, the two artists—who were, incidentally, also good friends—began experimenting with the idea of assemblage, or creating sculptural compositions with two- and three-dimensional materials. But it was not until the summer of 1912, when the two were working in the South of France, that Braque had a breakthrough. Wandering through the city of Avignon one day, Braque spotted a roll of wallpaper with a faux wood grain pattern in a store’s window display. He purchased the roll, but didn’t even think of it until several weeks later, when Picasso was away in Paris and he was alone in the studio. Braque incorporated cut pieces of the wood grain paper into a series of charcoal drawings; Fruit Dish and Glass are acknowledged to be the first of what he would later refer to as his papier collé (pasted paper) works. Braque later said, “After having made the papier collé, I felt a great shock and it was an even greater shock to Picasso when I showed it to him.” The pair excitedly coined the word “collage” to describe pieces composed from glued-together scraps of paper, newsprint, and fabric. Both considered collage to be a cheeky and unexpected intermingling of high and low art.

Collage was a perfect compliment to the Cubist approach to art, because it allowed artists to build dimensionality and volume into a piece using disparate elements—with an effect similar to the one they tried to achieve in their paintings. Painted cut-outs, newsprint, and patterned paper provided three-dimensionality and literal, rather than illusionary, elements to famous works like Picasso’s Bottle of Vieux Marc, Glass, Guitar and Newspaper, and Braque’s Violin and Pipe. The collage movement itself emerged through the efforts of Picasso and Braque, but was used very successfully by other devotees of Cubism. In the words of art critic Peter Schjeldahl, “After Picasso and Georges Braque, collage became the most consequential visual-art form of the twentieth century.”

Collage was not just adopted by Juan Gris; he perhaps mastered the technique. Unlike his predecessors, Gris preferred to use paper alone in his collage, creating multilayered surfaces of pasted-on pattern and color. In many cases, Gris used pattern literally—for example, using a real tobacco packet label collaged onto a trompe-l’oeil painting of the packet, in the piece Tobacco, Newspaper, and Wine Bottle. Collage allowed Gris to further explore one of the central questions of Cubism: how subjectively or objectively can an artist observe and depict reality?

Even after Cubism fell from fashion, collage played an instrumental role in the course of art. Today, it is perhaps most closely linked to its original use by the likes of Hannah Hoch, or the Pop art movement’s repurposing of advertising and cartoon imagery into fine art, through the collages of artists such as Richard Hamilton. The appropriation of the collage ‘look’ into other mediums, by artists like Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg, is further evidence of collage’s lasting impact. Collage continues to be used in creative new ways by contemporary artists, both digitally and in how Braque and Picasso originally intended, with paper pasted together.