Decollage, a word derived from French with a traditional accent over the first “e,” refers to a type of art created entirely from torn public posters with no further intervention on the artist’s part. Some artists hung their work on the walls outside, while others tore layers of posters completely off the walls and repurposed them as art. Mimmo Rotello was a pioneer in this field, despite the fact that many of his works were collage. Decollage was one of the first art forms to incorporate mass culture, and as a result, it can be considered a form of Pop Art.
Decollage means “to take off” or “to unglue” in French. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, artists in Italy and France began looking for ways to incorporate mass market imagery into their work, and they began peeling street posters from public walls to reveal other posters beneath. Excavated posters, also known as lacerated posters, were considered works of art and were frequently left behind anonymously. Some artists would simply peel layers of posters away from the wall and display their decollages elsewhere. Popular subjects in these works included movie stars and mass-produced goods.
One of the inventors of decollage, the Italian artist Mimmo Rotella, began tearing posters from public walls and gluing them to canvas. Although Rotella called these pieces “decollage,” they were actually collage. Decollage is a subtractive art technique in which paper is removed from an image to reveal the image beneath it without causing further damage. Collage, on the other hand, is a method of creating art that is additive. To create a collage, the artist glues newspaper, magazine clippings, colored paper, photographs, and any other material to a canvas or cardboard.
Decollage arose as artists sought new ways to incorporate mass culture images into their work while also commenting on the nature of these images. Although Mimmo Rotella is sometimes credited with inventing the art form, it was also used by artists in France. Rotella was eventually invited to join the New Realism group of French artists, who worked with mass media materials in their work. The New Realism movement paved the way for French Pop Art. Andy Warhol, the American artist whose images of soup cans and Marilyn Monroe became famous worldwide during the 1960s, was one of the most well-known figures in Pop Art.