By Malcolm Pillar

The term ‘Photomontage’ was invented just after World War I by artists of the Dada Group in Berlin. The Dada movement, which had its roots in Zurich at the Cabaret Voltaire, was anti-establishment: hostile to traditional forms of art and noted for staging loud, provocative and shambolic public performances. Photomontage – the cutting up and manipulation, or assemblage, of photographic images – found an ideal way to mock bourgeois society and culture, attack the militarism of Imperial Germany and expose financial greed.

Photographic developments in the 19^thcentury made paper prints from negatives possible, opening the way for images to be used in creative ways: whether pasting onto screens or in scrapbooks, or by combining negatives and producing montages. By the late 19th century, photographs could be printed in magazines, journals and newspapers, providing a wealth of material for artists armed with scissors or scalpels to use. In the early 1900s, picture postcards became popular and photomontage was a means to create novelty and fantasy (Figure 1, ‘Lorely’ Zieher, Germany). Cards aimed at loved ones parted by the Great War were particularly inventive and even included angels and comforting verses.

DADA AND SURREALISM 1919-1939

The Berlin Dada group, which included Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Hoch and George Grosz, defined photomontage as the use of more than one photograph in a piece of work, which differed from collages using photographic imagery as just another element in a composition, alongside  coloured papers, fabric, newspaper and various materials pasted onto a surface. Kurt Schwitters, an artist based In Hanover, tended towards the latter, but Hoch and Hausmann cut up and combined or juxtaposed their images, sometimes with painted or drawn additions, to convey meaning, carry a political message and/or provoke a response, as well as for visual effect. Hannah Hoch’s Cut With The Kitchen Knife (Figure 2)(1919-20) is aimed at the ‘Beer Belly’ culture (as Hoch puts it) of Weimar Germany, with its military posturing and machine mentality. It employs a scatter-gun approach, with images spread over the surface showing no relationship, scale-wise, between one another and little suggestion of depth. It is clearly mocking and satirical, with a re-fashioned Kaiser in the top right-hand corner, presiding over the mayhem.

Hausmann takes aim instead at the art establishment in The Art Critic (Figure 3) (1919-20) showing a figure with an oversized head (implying a large ego) made of composite cut-up photographs and with the implication that he is a hack working for money. George Grosz is mainly known for his scathing paintings of the excesses of Berlin society in café nightclubs and bars. A collaboration with John Heartfield entitled Life And Work strikes a gentler tone with a tangled collection of images and titles from popular media of the time.

In John Heartfield’s work, photomontage found a champion to stand up against the rise of Hitler and Fascism. Many of his works appeared in the weekly publication AIZ and still shock today. The Moral Of Geneva (AIZ  1932) shows a bayoneted Dove of Peace in front of the League of Nations, where anti-Fascist protesters were massacred. Hurrah, The Butter Is Finished (Figure 4) (AIZ 1935) satirises a speech by Goering implying that Iron (i.e. armament) was more important than feeding the people. Heartfield gathered images from various printed sources and even had photographs specially made. His photomontages create another reality: a domestic dining room of the ‘Volk’ or a backdrop of the League of Nations, which makes them all the more powerful. Siouxsie and the Banshees later used Hurrah as the cover for their Mittageisen (Metal Postcard) single in 1979.

As Dada shaded into Surrealism, photomontage was drawn into the service of the dreamlike, the fantastic and the uncanny. Spurred on by the psychoanalysis of dreams (Freud and Jung) and by ideas of the ‘automatic’ creation of works of art, which could tap in to the subconscious, the montage technique allowed for strange juxtapositions and chance encounters. Max Ernst, inspired by the pictures in a scientific catalogue, made a number of photomontages with hybrid constructions involving human, insect and animal forms, such as Le Vapeur Et Le Poisson and The Chinese Nightingale (Figure 5) (1920s). Herbert Bayer, in The Lonesome City Dweller (1932) continued the search for unsettling urban dreamscapes, prefigured by Paul Citroen’s imaginary Metropolis (1923). In contrast, the British painter, Paul Nash, fashioned surrealism from the landscape around him, its history, folklore and mythology. In Swanage (c1936) he incorporated natural forms he had collected and photographed into his work.

CONSTRUCTIVISM

Following the Russian Revolution, art in the Soviet Union gradually moved into the service of the state, promoting Revolutionary Socialism and the dynamics of industry. As a technique of proven worth for propaganda posters and publications, photomontage was widely used in graphic communication and information.  El Lissitzky produced a dramatic poster for the Russian Exhibition in Zurich (Figure 6) (1929) and also produced work for the Soviet Pavilion in Dresden. Constructivism as an art term had a meaning separate from the making of a new society. The photomontages of El Lissitzky, Alexander Rodchenko and Laszlo Moholy Nagy, (Human Mechanics), were bold and well-structured, with a strong sense of geometry. Photomontage was also used in book publication (Alexander Rodchenko: Illustrations for Mayakovsky’s poem About This) (1923).

POP CULTURE (1945-)

Post-WWII, sources for photomontage proliferated. Popular entertainment of all types provided material, as well as newspapers, magazines and cheap, sensational literature. The Beat Movement in 50s’ America brought about a collaboration between Brion Gysin and William Burroughs, where cut-up writings merged with the photomontage technique. (Untitled Collage For The Third Mind)  (c1965). Stuart Perkoff and Ray Johnson were other notable practitioners.

The use of popular culture, advertising and consumer packaging became more evident in art in the late 40s and 50s. Robert Rauschenberg used photomontage on his Combine (a freestanding object with attachments), Odalisque, and transferred the concept to photo screen-printing, combining space exploration and political imagery with old master paintings. Retroactive II (1963).

A marker for the start of British Pop Art is held to be Richard Hamilton’s photomontage for the This Is Tomorrow Exhibition (“‘Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?”) (Figure 7) (1956), with popular culture and consumerism gone mad, but Eduardo Paolozzi was using his archive of images for collage and photomontage in the 1940s (Dr Pepper) (Figure 8) (1948) and also in his later prints. Peter Blake drew on a vast archive and a collector’s enthusiasm for anything connected with popular entertainment. He frequently painted pop stars and his well-known album cover design for Sgt.Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) has a photomontage-effect backdrop of famous people set behind The Beatles. Pauline Boty, like Blake, studied at the Royal College of Art and her collages and photomontages echo those of her contemporaries by using vintage prints and magazine cut-outs.  (Untitled, Pears Inventor) (c1959).

Pop culture literally ‘ate itself’ in the Punk and Post-Punk period, when record sleeves and fanzines boasted collages and photomontages. Linder Sterling, an artist (and musician performing as Ludus), whose work is currently on show at The Barbican, created the picture sleeve for The Buzzcocks single, Orgasm Addict (1977), which provides a statement on the conflicting portrayal of women in pop culture: the domestic and the sexual. This superficial view of women led to the concept of a photograph of a face being peeled from a face. Linder’s She She, photographed by Birrer (Figure 9), also subverts the practice of photomontage.

THE PHOTOGRAPHY OF PROTEST

The Civil Rights Protests in America, the rise of Black Power and the protests against the war in Vietnam all inspired some iconic images which have been reproduced countless times. Photo-journalism was so predominant that the single image (sometimes a ‘still’ taken from a film clip) tended to relegate photomontage to its adapted use in silkscreen art and lithography. A few artists, such as Joe Tilson, referenced protest and race in their work: Bela Lugosi Journal (Figure 10) (1969, screenprint). It relates images of social and political unrest to Bela Lugosi horror film clips in a mock news spread.

The use of photomontage for political propaganda and activism continued in the work of Peter Kennard, with a nod towards Heartfield in his design for Defended To Death (Penguin Books, 1983) and his much-reproduced adaption of a Constable painting (Haywain, Constable/Cruise Missiles, USA) (Figure 11) (1821/1983) with cruise missiles on home soil threatening the rural idyll. Private Eye and other publications also use photomontage to lampoon politicians and for political commentary.

AFTERMATH

The digital revolution has led to exciting developments in photomontage, while old methods continue to be used. My survey of photomontage has necessarily been of predominantly European and American art and, chronologically, stops where different cultures and generations, with their own preoccupations and perceptions, have emerged. Photomontage in its various forms is clearly not dead.

It is worth noting that Dawn Ades’ indispensable and groundbreaking work on the subject has recently been reprinted by Thames and Hudson: Photomontage, World Of Art.

(c) Malcolm Pillar, 2025

Malcolm Pillar is a collage and photomontage artist who studied at Leicester and Ravensbourne Colleges of Art, graduating in Fine Art (Sculpture) in 1968. He then won a Commonwealth Scholarship to study Indian Art and Architecture at Baroda University, India. He has an MA in Art History from Birmingham Polytechnic and spent his career in teaching.

In the late 1970s he was active in the ‘Mail Art Movement,’ part of a world-wide network; producing collages and photomontages for a number of projects and exhibitions, notably the Michael Scott-curated Poste Restante exhibition at Liverpool Academy in 1979. At this time he decided to combine his two great interests, music and art, by producing a music fanzine: Real Shocks, which ran to four issues and included artwork and interviews with the likes of Depeche Mode, The Raincoats , Cabaret Voltaire and other New Wave bands.

During the Covid lockdown, he decided to make a collage a day for 50 consecutive days (The Isolation Collages). He sources material from old magazines and books, comics and printed ephemera, making new associations of images and removing them from their original context. He often creates postcard-size art work and music ‘mix’ covers which could be described as Post-Surrealist, often whimsical, with a touch of Pop and a sense of dark humour.

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