Word and Image
In 1910, just as they approached the brink of abstraction, Braque and Picasso drew back and began to introduce visual clues into their pictures. Braque specifically referred to the flat forms of stenciled letters as "certitudes." Picasso later used the term "attributes" to describe such immediately recognizable elements.
Cubism came of age at a moment of explosion in print media: posters and newspapers turned Parisian streets into veritable collages of word and image. Picasso first depicted a newspaper masthead in a painting from the summer of 1911, Still Life with Fan: "L'Indépendant." By fall 1912, Braque and Picasso had begun pasting bits of mass-produced papers directly onto their drawings, giving rise to the new medium of papier collé. Braque took the lead by incorporating faux bois (imitation wood grain) wallpaper into his drawings; two of his earliest examples are displayed on the opposite wall. Picasso responded by composing images with pieces of newspaper. The use of unorthodox art materials, jettisoning of traditional modeling, and play of visual and verbal puns were revolutionary. The need for illusionistic representation was gone; meaning could be imparted through signs for things or even through fragments of actual objects. Cubist collage, a radical development, would have an extraordinary impact on the art of subsequent generations.
