Abstract
Collage and cut-up are two techniques that have emerged – as a practice and as a concept – in the mid-twentieth century: collage appeared in the first decade, while cut-up appeared in the late fifties. The word collage comes from the visual arts and from the practices that have succeeded to the experiments that Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso did with “papiers collés” from 1912, while the term cut-up is borrowed from American writer Brion Gysin who experimented this technique together with William Burroughs in 1959. Some fifty years separate the two techniques which do not cover quite the same practices as Brion Gysin noted: “Writing is fifty years behind painting”, thereby meaning to strictly apply to literature the very practice of “papiers collés” of cubist experiments.