This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Collage did not stay a Cubist still life technique for long. Within a few years of Braque and Picasso's first papiers colles, a new generation of artists working under the banner of Dada took the same basic act, gluing found material to a surface, and pointed it at a different target, the recent memory of a world war and the culture of mass production many Dadaists blamed for enabling it. The word collage itself only entered common use for the work of Dada and Surrealist artists, especially Max Ernst, whose collages were built from old engravings and printed illustrations, carefully cut apart and reassembled into scenes that read as calm on the surface and deeply irrational underneath. Where Braque's wallpaper had evoked an ordinary domestic object, Ernst's spliced engravings produced images that could not exist in the world at all, closer to a visual equivalent of automatic writing than to a Cubist still life. Other Dada artists pushed the technique in still other directions. Hans Arp allowed chance to compose some of his torn paper works, dropping cut pieces onto a surface and gluing them roughly where they landed, treating collage as a way to remove the artist's controlling hand rather than to sharpen observation of an object. In Germany, Kurt Schwitters built an entire private practice out of the same gesture, naming it Merz after a fragment of the word Kommerz that appeared, by his account, in one of his own compositions. His Merz pictures were assembled from tram tickets, wrappers, string and other everyday debris, and in his hands the practice grew into a three-dimensional, room-filling construction called the Merzbau, built inside his own house in Hanover over roughly sixteen years before its destruction in the Second World War. This spread illustrates something about collage as a form rather than as a single invention: the underlying method proved adaptable to purposes its Cubist originators had not intended, from Ernst's uncanny narrative scenes to Arp's experiments in chance to Schwitters's lifelong accumulation of scrap. What began as a way to reintroduce a recognizable object into an increasingly abstract picture became, in Dada hands, a way to question what counted as art material at all.