Collage 

Gherasim Luca made this collage, and it is an unsettling image of a woman in what looks like 18th-century dress. There is something of the museum about it. The original painting is of the kind you might find hanging in a stately home, now preserved as a national heritage site. Yet, the woman's face is covered by a dark rectangle. Is Luca defacing a national treasure? Is he making a comment on the elite social class of pre-revolutionary Europe? Luca was a Romanian Jew active in the French Surrealist movement, an artistic and intellectual tendency that was committed to critiquing the values of bourgeois society. His work challenged existing social norms by using unexpected juxtapositions and by subverting familiar images, encouraging viewers to question their assumptions about the world. To understand this collage better we need to look into the original image that Luca used and consider the socio-political context in which it was made. Only then can we see the significance of his defacement.