Compose styles
Rather than blending styles toward a middle, this gives them roles. The first one carries the structure, the next comes in as the accent, and anything after that shows up in a single detail. Where they fight each other, it says so before you start.
How to divide the work
- Composition
- Follow Neo-Dada: No grid: a horizontal collage in which one three-dimensional object breaks the picture plane and pulls the eye off axis
- Type
- Set in Neo-Dada's manner (Mixed sizes and mixed faces from whatever was to hand, some stencilled, some torn out of existing print), and let Nouveau Réalisme's lettering (Fragments of existing typography, whatever survives the tear, never a face chosen for the job) appear only where you want the eye to catch.
- Material
- Ground in Neo-Dada's material (Silkscreened newsprint over smeared paint, registration deliberately out, erasures left visible); bring in exactly one thing from Nouveau Réalisme (Mass identical real objects, or paste and tear paper so the lower printings show).
- Colour
- Build on #d7d5c7, #bb6308, #181a24 and admit one accent from #d5ccb4, #7face6, #15171b.
Where they fight
These are already listed as related entries, so the join should come easily.
Caution
- Neo-Dada 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.
- Nouveau Réalisme 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.
Image prompt
Produce four original images that take their structure from Neo-Dada (style, 1953–1965) and their accent from Nouveau Réalisme (style, 1960–1970). ## What to make Make the kind of thing Neo-Dada exists for: record sleeves, zines and event graphics that need to look assembled out of the world rather than designed from nothing, or campaigns built from found print, where the receipts, newsprint and packaging keep their own history as part of the message. Choose one subject and hold it across all four. ## Structure comes from Neo-Dada - Ready-made objects brought onto the picture - Printed matter transferred by silkscreen - Forms halfway between painting and object - Traces of erasing, layering and soiling Composition: No grid: a horizontal collage in which one three-dimensional object breaks the picture plane and pulls the eye off axis. Type and lettering: Mixed sizes and mixed faces from whatever was to hand, some stencilled, some torn out of existing print. ## Accent comes from Nouveau Réalisme, used sparingly - Layers of posters torn back - Accumulations of identical objects - Compressed industrial products - Material chosen rather than worked Let one material quality come from it: Mass identical real objects, or paste and tear paper so the lower printings show. ## Colour and feeling Build the ground on #d7d5c7, carry the structure in #bb6308 and #181a24, and let a single accent come from #7face6. These are read off real works, so a direction rather than a fixed palette. Feeling to carry: rebellion, play, technique, exhilaration. ## What goes wrong - Neo-Dada: 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. - Nouveau Réalisme: 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. ## Across the four Keep the roles fixed in all four. Vary the framing, the scale and the arrangement so the set shows what this pairing can do rather than four versions of one picture. ## Constraints - Do not imitate, reference or name any specific artist, studio, brand, character or copyrighted work. - Do not reproduce the composition of an existing work. - Produce original compositions in the general period languages described above.
Related entries
- Neo-Dada 1953–1965 / Style / Postwar American Art
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 1960–1970 / Style / Postwar Abstract Painting
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.
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