assemblage, in art, work produced by the incorporation of everyday objects into the composition. Although each non-art object, such as a piece of rope or newspaper, acquires aesthetic or symbolic meanings within the context of the whole work, it may retain something of its original identity. The term assemblage, as coined by the artist Jean Dubuffet in the 1950s, may refer to both planar and three-dimensional constructions.
Although artworks composed from a variety of materials are common to many cultures, assemblage refers to a particular form that developed out of intellectual and artistic movements at the beginning of the 20th century. The practice began about 1911–12 with the Cubist collages of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque and sculptural assemblages by Futurists such as Umberto Boccioni and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. One of the earliest examples is Picasso’s “Still Life with Chair Caning” (1911–12), in which a piece of oilcloth with an imitation chair caning design was pasted onto the painting, and a rope was used to frame the picture. Subsequent art movements such as Dada and Surrealism explored the possibilities of assemblage. Marcel Duchamp, for instance, created “ready-mades” and “found objects” from industrial and natural objects; he elevated them into the realm of art simply by adding an inscription or by including them in an exhibition. Artists of the mid-20th century working in assemblage included Louise Nevelson and Robert Rauschenburg.