Neo-Dada vs Nouveau Réalisme
ネオ・ダダ / ヌーヴォー・レアリスム
Neo-Dada comes from Postwar American Art and Nouveau Réalisme from Postwar Abstract Painting. Both are read here as style. They are reached for with some of the same intent, which is where they get confused.
Neo-Dada
A postwar current that answered the inwardness of Abstract Expressionism by bringing household objects, printed matter and taxidermy onto the picture, working in the gap between art and life. It inherited Dada's gestures while making the materials of consumer society into structural components. The branching point immediately before Pop art.
Nouveau Réalisme
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A group that declared, in Paris in 1960, the direct appropriation of reality. Layers of torn posters, compressed car bodies and accumulated refuse make the city itself into the work without passing through depiction. The stance of selecting material rather than working it laid the ground for all later assemblage.
| Neo-Dada | Nouveau Réalisme | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 1953–1965 | 1960–1970 |
| Family | Postwar American Art | Postwar Abstract Painting |
| Kind | Style | Style |
| Cues | Ready-made objects brought onto the picture / Printed matter transferred by silkscreen / Forms halfway between painting and object / Traces of erasing, layering and soiling | Layers of posters torn back / Accumulations of identical objects / Compressed industrial products / Material chosen rather than worked |
| Best used for | Record sleeves, zines and event graphics that need to look assembled out of the world rather than designed from nothing · Campaigns built from found print, where the receipts, newsprint and packaging keep their own history as part of the message | Urban and cultural posters that take fly-posted, weathered layers as their actual language rather than as a filter · Retail and exhibition display built from massed identical units, where the accumulation is the graphic device |
| Type | Mixed sizes and mixed faces from whatever was to hand, some stencilled, some torn out of existing print. | Fragments of existing typography, whatever survives the tear, never a face chosen for the job |
| Composition | No grid: a horizontal collage in which one three-dimensional object breaks the picture plane and pulls the eye off axis. | Let the torn edge draw the composition, splitting the field around one compressed or massed block |
| Material | Silkscreened newsprint over smeared paint, registration deliberately out, erasures left visible. | Mass identical real objects, or paste and tear paper so the lower printings show |
| Caution | Pasting readymades alone never shows why they were chosen, and it becomes a shelf of knickknacks. Arranging it tidily strips the dirt and scale the work depends on, and leaves clean decoration. | Simulating the torn poster with a distress filter: the movement's entire claim is that the material was taken and not made, and a synthetic tear reverses it. |