Robert Motherwell in his studio at 33 West 8th Street, New York, ca. 1945; © Peter A. Juley and Son Collection, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Collage was invented by Georges Braque in September 1912. During a sojourn in the Provençal town of Sorgues, with his fellow pioneer of Cubism Pablo Picasso and their female companions, Braque noticed a roll of wood-grain paper in a wallpaper shop in nearby Avignon. When Picasso left for a short trip to Paris, Braque quickly bought some of the fake wood-grain and began to incorporate it into his work before his friend, colleague, collaborator, and rival returned. Since Braque had been trained to do trompe-l’oeil finishes as a teenager when he worked for his family’s house decorating business, he must have been charmed by discovering a mass-produced version of an effect he knew how to produce with paint and a special comb—a facsimile of a facsimile. But what was more important, the way of working provoked by the material Braque discovered had significant repercussions in his work and beyond. The transformation of the unstable, overlapping fictive planes typical of early Cubism into the solid, interlocking shapes of its later manifestations, both in Braque’s work and that of his colleagues, had its origins in the invention of collage.