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. Fifty years behind? Quite unlikely if we examine the history of this practice in literature, in particular across the experiments done by the first avant-garde trends: transmediation processes appear as early as 1912-1913, gradually shifting the aesthetic of visual arts collage to poetry. It is the history of those fifty years "behind" that this study intends to explore in order to examine the different forms that the transmediation of the collage aesthetic takes in the avant-garde trends until the invention of the cut-up.
