Featuring the works of 50 artists and ranging across the modern era, Apparitions: Frottages and Rubbings from 1860 to Now is the first major museum exhibition to focus on the frottage technique and its many artistic applications.
The technique known as rubbing or frottage falls somewhere between drawing, printmaking, and sculpture, combining elements of all these mediums. It involves making an impression of an object through the transfer of its forms onto a sheet of paper, which is usually achieved by rubbing the paper over the object or incised surface with a marking agent such as graphite or wax crayon. The term frottage derives from the French frotter (to rub) and is most commonly associated today with the Surrealist artist Max Ernst and the idiosyncratic images that he created from a variety of surfaces, including wood and leaves, for his famous print portfolio Histoire Naturelle (1926). Ernst claimed that he discovered the technique in 1925, while gazing at the floorboards of his hotel room, and he regarded it as his contribution to automatism. As a type of automatic drawing, or a partially indirect process applied to achieve unpremeditated imaginary compositions, frottage became one of the key practices of Surrealist drawing.
1933 as the name of a sexual perversion, from French frottage "rubbing, friction," from frotter "to rub," from Old French froter "to rub, wipe; beat, thrash" (12c.), from Vulgar Latin *frictare, frequentative of Latin fricare "to rub" (see friction). As a paraphilia, it is known now as frotteurism.
For the collage Sag der Welt dass kein Krieg mehr ist we used mixed paper materials collected and found at the premises of the Peace Palace, the seat of the International Court of Justice in The Hague. In a first step, we visited these premises with an aim to capture the site through sketching, collecting and frottage (-a technique to collect the imprint of a surface by covering it with a paper and running a crayon over it). In a second step, we combined these mixed paper materials into a collage, creating a novel image in representation of the site. The co-constructed element of the collage exists in its being constructed in this case by two researchers, but also and more importantly in its inclusion of materials which are (partly) created by others. We included wishes from the peace tree which had fallen off its branches and that had been blown away, as well as images from promotional materials offered by the Peace Palace. Through sketching we sought to capture the visuality of the palace and its surrounding fence. Finally, through frottage we sought to capture the texture and materiality of the site and its on-site artworks. In keeping with the tradition of collaging, the exercise of collecting materials is in no way meant to be comprehensive, but rather it is intended to re-familiarise ourselves with a site we know well.
Sketching, frottage, and collaging can inform theoretical analysis or be a form of analysis but they also have intrinsic value of themselves. The purposive slowing down and looking for materials to collect foster a deep concentration. The need to also bring the materials into a collage, makes that this concentration is not just directed towards close observation, but also towards creation. The creative character of collages works well, as collages do not require creating something from scratch. You are creating with what is already there. For those who are not used to expressing themselves in visual ways, it can be a more accessible, more directed exercise than for instance painting would be. But in essence it is what artists and academics always do already: creating something new by building on what was previously there.
Frottage is an artistic technique first adopted by the Surrealist artist Max Ernst in the second half of the 1920s. The frottage creative process is based on the principle of rubbing a sheet of paper or a canvas over a rough and textured surface, using a pencil, a crayon or other drawing tools. Frottage is one of the techniques invented by the Surrealist movement to perform automated gestures and to obtain works of art that imply randomness and a subconscious component, instead of a rational process.
The frottage technique is performed by superimposing a sheet of paper or canvas on a surface with roughness and relief (e.g. a stone, a wooden surface, leaves, canvas sacks.) and rubbing it in with pencils, crayons, chalks or other drawing tools.
It was already commonly used in Ancient China and classical Greece, to obtain simple copies of bas-reliefs on rice or parchment paper but it was officially invented in the 20th Century, during the Avant-Garde movement of Surrealism. The pioneer of frottage art was the German naturalized American artist Max Ernst, who in 1926 made consistent use of this technique for the first time in Histoire Naturelle, his collection of nature-inspired drawings.
Ernst said that the inspiration for frottage came to him in 1925, while looking at the wooden floor of his house; the patterns of the graining communicated unexpected images to his mind; so, he decided to capture them by laying sheets of paper on the floor and rubbing over them with a pencil. From this intuition, Ernst obtained the first suggestions for the graphic cycle Histoire Naturelle (Natural History), creating irregular shapes which he then transformed into forests populated by mysterious creatures and birds.
Ernst was an innovator; in addition to the invention of frottage art, he was also responsible for the invention of the grattage technique, obtained by scraping fresh paint with a spatula, and for the dripping, obtained by pouring fresh paint directly onto the canvas, which was more commonly used later in Action Painting. In Frottage Art, the drawing obtained by the artist can be simply used reproducing the surface of the selected object, but it can also be the starting point to create other more elaborated images. Several artists start with frottage, adding details later to create more complex graphic textures.
The invention of frottage was a method for Surrealism to invent a painting technique that followed the principle of psychic automatism. The Surrealists, influenced by psychoanalysis, wanted to get in touch with the most unconscious part of their Self, so they used techniques that reduced the rational intervention of the artist to the minimum. In this way, in the Surrealist view, the frottage drawings represented a message from the unconscious. Its interpretation was a task that the artist had to undertake later. Frottage (like grattage and dripping) were painting techniques that followed the same principle as automatic writing, which the Surrealists used in poetry and literary field.
The frottage technique was extremely popular, apart from Ernst, among other Surrealist artists, like Michaux, BrÃton, Penrose. However, it was also used in more contemporary times. The artist Giuseppe Penone, an exponent of Italian Arte Povera, often used the technique of frottage on trees bark, leaves and branches, to capture the essence of nature through a direct process. Frottage was also used by Sari Dienes, rubbing ink directly on Webril, Louise Bourgeois, Robert Indiana, Gabriel Orozco, and Mona Hatoum.
Learn to take your crayon rubbings to the next level! Frottage is a surrealist creative process of transferring surface textures by rubbing over them with various art mediums. This tutorial demonstrates two methods of creating a work of art using frottage. The first is using one sheet of paper placed on top of various textures in different directions to create a finished rubbing. In the second method, a collection of rubbings are collaged together to form a new piece of art.
2. Max Ernst was a famous artist who often used the process of frottage to overcome the challenge of starting a new drawing on a blank canvas. Click here to learn more about how he started using the frottage process to create his drawings.
Compulsive sexual behavior consists of sexual obsessions and compulsions that are recurrent, distressing, and interfere with daily functioning. It has been called hypersexual disorder in the upcoming diagnostic and statistical manual 5(th) edition. Though hypersexuality is commonly seen in mania, it can also be seen in depression and anxiety disorders. This case report describes a case that presented with depression and had underlying compulsive sexual behavior in the form of frottage.
What is frottage in art and what are frottage techniques? Frottage printing is a surreal and automatic method of artistic creation in which a rough surface is rubbed with a pencil or other artistic tool. Max Ernst is credited with first experimenting with various frottage techniques. Today we will learn about this interesting technique and look at a few notable frottage art examples.
Max Ernst pioneered the method in sketches beginning in 1925. The French word for rubbing is frottage. Ernst was motivated by an old hardwood floor on which the grain of the boards had been highlighted by years of cleaning. The graining patterns reminded him of bizarre imagery. He began capturing them in 1925 by spreading sheets of paper on the floor and wiping over them with a fine pencil. The results indicate fascinating woodlands populated by bird-like animals, and Max Ernst released Natural History (1926), a compilation of these sketches. He went on to employ a variety of textured materials and soon transferred the method to oil painting, coining the term grattage. In grattage, the canvas is primed with a layer or layers of paint before being put over the coarse item and scraped over.
38c6e68cf9