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'Collage' THE PRACTICE OF collage first entered into fine art in 1912 as part of Pablo Picasso's and George Braque's explorations of the fragmentation of modern life and their deconstructions of the hollow pretenses and limiting conventions of Western painting. In the process, high art was invaded by popular culture. Paintings took on sculptural elements. The work of the solitary painter began to share properties with mass-produced, commercial imagery. Created works came to include found objects. The development of collage as an art practice thus anticipated and informed many of the main currents of modernism – from cubism to Dada to pop – along with the dissolution of disciplines now celebrated in the rise of "new media." UC Berkeley Art Museum draws from its permanent collection to present "Collage," a broad survey of the form. Along with two 19th-century works that situate collage in popular and commercial practice, the show includes a remarkably broad range of 20th-century artists who used collage techniques in their work. An untitled piece by abstract expressionist Robert Motherwell explores formal considerations of color and line by mounting loosely painted, torn sheets of white paper against a mustard yellow background. In Entablature VIII, pop artist Roy Lichtenstein employs screen-printing, collage, and embossing to create a decorative architectural molding in his characteristically mechanical style. In Continuities, Romare Bearden constructs a cubist portrait of an agrarian African American family with cut-outs from magazines, colored paper, and paint. And Bay Area artist Jess announces a reading by poet Robert Duncan in a black-and-white poster, which playfully juxtaposes figures from art history and puts words in their mouths with comic strip bubbles. The exhibition emphasizes collage's contribution to the dissolution of conventional art disciplines by including documents of performance pieces as works of collage, such as Norman Colp's Mystery Museum Project. Colp distributed stamped postcards to art professionals and challenged them to identify the museums on the front of the postcards, which he had almost entirely blacked out. In light of this exhibit, one has to ask: which art form remains untouched by the practice of collage, and what does that mean for art's place in the modern world? Wed., Fri.-Sun., 11 a.m.-5 p.m.; Thurs., 11 a.m.-7 p.m., 2626 Bancroft Way, Berk. $4-$8 (free first Thursday). (510) 642-0808. (Clark Buckner)
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