Nouveau Réalisme
ヌーヴォー・レアリスム / 1960–1970 / Style / Postwar European Art
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.
Layers of posters torn back / Accumulations of identical objects / Compressed industrial products / Material chosen rather than worked
Dictionary entry
- Best used for
- 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
- Fragments of existing typography, whatever survives the tear, rather than a face chosen for the job.
- Composition
- A full-bleed field of layered material with no hierarchy, anchored by one compressed or accumulated mass in the lower half.
- Material
- Real paper on real paper: paste it, tear it, expose the layers beneath, and let the physical edge do the drawing.
- Caution
- 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.
- Further study
- The 1960 manifesto and its signatories / The technique of décollage / Comparison with American Pop