Montage in Art: Definition, Photomontage, and Artists

Dora Maar, Untitled (Hand-Shell), 1934.
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The Definition of Montage

The term "montage" originates from French, meaning "assembly" or "editing." While we often associate "montage" with film, it's actually a technique utilized across various artistic disciplines, including literature, visual arts, and music. Montage is a creative method involving the juxtaposition or combination of different elements to create new meaning, convey emotions, or evoke specific responses from the audience. Through montage, artists can explore connections, contrasts, and relationships between elements, offering viewers fresh perspectives and insights into the subject matter depicted.
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László Moholy-Nagy, Militarismus (Propagandaplakat), 1924.
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As time has passed, montage has evolved into diverse forms and styles, adapting alongside the ever-changing currents of artistic movements and cultural landscapes. From the revolutionary experiments of the Surrealists to the conceptual explorations of contemporary artists, montage has served as a catalyst for creativity, continuously pushing the frontiers of visual expression and questioning conventional modes of representation. We can observe montage manifested through various artistic forms, especially collage or photomontage.
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What is Photomontage?

According to Tate's explanation, a photomontage is a collage constructed from photographs and is often used as a means of expressing political dissent, particularly in the context of Dadaism and Surrealism. In 1915, photomontage was first used as a technique by the dadaists in their protests against the First World War. It was later adopted by the surrealists, who exploited the possibilities of photomontage by using free association to bring together widely disparate images, reflecting the workings of the unconscious mind. Famous artists such as Hannah Höch, John Heartfield, and Raoul Hausmann pioneered the use of photomontage as a means of social and political critique.
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Herbert Matter, Come and Get It--Out of Paperboard, from the Early Series, 1942.
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Photomontage offered a way to create visually impactful compositions by combining photographs, text, and graphic elements. In 1923, Russian Constructivists such as El Lissitzky and Aleksander Rodchenko began experimenting with photomontage as a means of creating impressive, socially engaged imagery concerned with the placement and movement of objects in space. Photomontage was widely used in creating posters, pamphlets, and other forms of graphic design that utilized photomontage to convey revolutionary slogans, images of industry, and visions of the new socialist society.
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El Lissitzky, Record, 1926.
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Photomontage has also found its way into contemporary practice, especially within conceptual art. Conceptual artists often utilize montage as a means of exploring abstract concepts or ideas. They may employ fragmented or disjointed imagery to represent complex ideas or emotions, relying on the viewer's interpretation and engagement with the artwork to derive meaning. This approach encourages a more open-ended and subjective interpretation of the artwork, inviting viewers to contemplate the underlying concepts and draw connections between seemingly unrelated elements.
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Are Montage and Collage the Same?

Martha Rosler, Cleaning the Drapes, from the series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home, ca. 1967-1972.
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You might wonder, since montage and collage both use related artistic techniques, are they the same? The answer is no, they aren't. Although both involve combining different visual elements to create a new composition, they have distinct approaches and applications. Montage often focuses on the dynamic arrangement and sequencing of elements to tell a story or convey a specific message. On the other hand, collage typically emphasizes physically layering and juxtaposing materials to add texture, depth, and visual interest to the artwork.
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Key Figures of Montage in Art 

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Hannah Höch


Hannah Höch, Flucht (Flight), 1931.
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Hannah Höch is a German Dada artist known for her incisively political collages and photomontages, a form she helped pioneer. She appropriated and recombined images and text from mass media to critique popular culture, gender and identity, the failings of the Weimar Republic, and the socially constructed roles of women. In particular, she humorously criticized the concept of the "New Woman" in Weimar Germany, a vision of a woman who was purportedly man's equal.

Höch was inspired by the collage work of Pablo Picasso and fellow Dada exponent Kurt Schwitters. Her own compositions exhibit a similarly dynamic and layered style. She noted that "there are no limits to the materials available for pictorial collages—above all, they can be found in photography, but also in writing and printed matter, even in waste products." The dynamic photomontage compositions in Höch's work still evoke a sense of avant-garde and rebellion, even today.
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John Heartfield

John Heartfield, Untitled (Diagnosis), 1935.
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John Heartfield was a pioneering German artist who was a member of the Berlin Dadaists and is famous for his agitprop photomontages and political activism. Born as Helmut Herzfeld, he adopted his anglicized name in protest against the rampant nationalism in Germany during World War I.

One of Heartfield's most famous works is the series of photomontage covers he created for the leftist magazine "Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung" (AIZ). In his works for AIZ, Heartfield used the very tools with which the mass media of his time constructed "reality," such as photographs and text, to represent instead the incompetence, greed, and hypocrisy behind appearances. His aim was to expose the dangers and abuses of power in the Nazi regime. However, due to Heartfield's leftist political leanings, his work has rarely been shown in the West.
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Raoul Hausmann

Raoul Hausmann, The Art Critic, 1919–20.
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Raoul Hausmann, one of the founders of Berlin Dada, is credited with pioneering the technique of photomontage. Hausmann believed that photomontage was a powerful tool for deconstructing and critiquing the mass media and consumer culture of the time. His photomontages often featured political and social commentary, reflecting his anti-war and anti-authoritarian beliefs.

Hausmann once wrote, "What is important is that our optical awareness rids itself of classical notions of beauty and opens itself more and more to the beauty of the instant and of these surprising points of view that appear for a brief moment and never return; those are what make photography an art." Together with his companion Hannah Höch, Hausmann developed a cut-and-paste "anti-art" strategy that directly challenged the aesthetic and ideological norms established by earlier and contemporary avant-garde movements.
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László Moholy-Nagy


László Moholy-Nagy, Love Your Neighbor; Murder on the Railway, 1925.

László Moholy-Nagy was a Hungarian artist and one of the most influential teachers at the Bauhaus, particularly known for his work in photography, photomontage, and graphic design. One of Moholy-Nagy's most notable contributions was his experiments with cameraless photographs, which he dubbed "photograms".

Moholy-Nagy's artistic vision was constantly infused with innovation as he ventured into various media. He saw photomontage not only as a way to delve into the dynamic interplay of form, space, and light but also as a means to articulate the intricacies of modern existence. His photomontages frequently showcased abstract geometric shapes, industrial imagery, and inventive plays of light and shadow. Moholy-Nagy fully embraced the power of photography and photomontage to encapsulate the essence of modernity and to convey the pulsating energy and dynamism of urban life.
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Dora Maar

Dora Maar, Sans titre, 1935.
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Dora Maar, a talented French artist, photographer, painter, and poet, rose to prominence during the 1930s with her provocative photomontages, which became celebrated icons of Surrealism. In her photographic work, Maar often experimented with techniques such as photomontage, double exposure, and solarization to create dreamlike and unsettling images. Her penchant for the unusual extended to her commercial photography, which encompassed fashion, advertising, and social documentary projects.

Unlike many other photomontage creators of her time, Maar did not rely on photographs sourced from illustrated newspapers or magazines. Instead, she frequently utilized images from her own body of work, encompassing both street and landscape photography. This distinctive approach to image selection and composition became a defining feature of Maar's artistic practice.
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Montage and Conceptual Art

Montage continues to serve as a creative technique that influences artists and designers to this day. However, we find that conceptual art, in particular, employs montage techniques to convey abstract concepts or ideas. Since conceptual art prioritizes the idea or concept behind the artwork over aesthetic or material qualities, and montage has the ability to juxtapose and combine disparate elements, it can be a powerful tool for conceptual artists to express complex ideas, or invite viewers to question and engage with the underlying concepts.

In conceptual art, montage techniques serve to deconstruct and reconstruct meaning, blurring the boundaries between reality and fiction, truth and illusion. Through the fragmentation, juxtaposition, and appropriation of found imagery, archival material, and text, conceptual artists create works that challenge viewers to reconsider their preconceptions and explore fresh perspectives on the world. For instance, John Baldessari, a pioneering figure in conceptual art, often transformed pop cultural and art historical iconography into meditations on image, language, appropriation, and authenticity. His approach to montage is characterized by a playful manipulation of found images, infused with humor and irony, aimed at critiquing traditional notions of art and representation.
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John Baldessari, Stairway, Coat and Person, 2011.
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