Another Daily Pic from the Lauder gift to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This time, a 1912 piece by Georges Braque that is one of the very first collages made in fine art. It’s a medium that is now so familiar that it’s hard for us to take in how radical it must once have seemed. Originally, collage had troubling intimations of the domestic and feminine (scrapbooking already existed); as an early form of appropriation, collage attacked the venerable notion of the artist’s unique hand and touch; it was, at best, a technique that cheap builders might use in pasting down fake wood-grain as moldings. It extended Cubism’s depicted explosions into the real world of things, and made them still more threatening. Once, collage was good art because of its non-artiness–and now we’re left with it as simply and normally artful. (Promised Gift from the Leonard A. Lauder Cubist Collection;© 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris)

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