COLLAGE, ASSEMBLAGE AND THE FOUND OBJECT <i> By Diane Waldman (Abrams: $85; 323 pp.) </i>

Guggenheim curator Diana Waldman’s lucid survey of this engaging current in 20th-Century art offers layers of interest, as the works themselves do. For starters, consider the endpapers: Who but the humorless or historically impaired could resist David Hammon’s “Flying Carpet” (1990), a wine-dark Persian rug studded with golden fried chicken?

In the past 80 years, since Picasso and Braque conjured up the first papiers colles (cut paper), artists have enriched the picture plane with un-palette-like materials ranging from fabric to wax, postage stamps to fat, steel wool to macaroni.

As a giftable tome, this 336-page book (304 plates, 100 in color) is not just for the student of art or cultural history. There is rich material for the photographer, practitioner of crafts, flea-market habitue, kitsch collector, and the just plain visually curious.

Especially noteworthy are the generous examples of painterly collagist Kurt Schwitters and of Joseph Cornell’s box constructions. The chapter on Matisse cutouts is brief but bright and arresting.

Among women working in the collage/assemblage tradition were pioneer Sonia Delaunay and Louise Nevelson, whose work evolved from box construction to massive walls of black, white or gold. Pop Art’s Andy Warhol went beyond found-object art with replicas like his “White Brillo Boxes” (1964). Compelling concepts figure in the still-flowing current, as is evident in contemporary artist Anselm Kiefer’s darkly pessimistic historical pieces.

In the end, one doesn’t argue with Waldman’s statement that collage/assemblage/the found object has influenced “virtually every major art movement of the 20th Century.”