Frottage

:This article is about the art technique. For the sexual practice of frottage, please see Frotteurism

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In art, frottage (from the French frotter, to rub) is a Surrealist and "automatic" method of creative

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production developed by Max Ernst in which one takes a pencil or other drawing tool and makes a "rubbing" over a textured surface.

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The drawing can either be left as is or used as the basis for further refinement. While superficially similar to brass rubbing, frottage differs in being aleatory in nature.

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Surrealist: REDIRECT Surrealism...

Brass rubbing: Brass rubbing was originally a British mania for reproducing brasses -- commemorative embossed brass reliefs found in church memorials from the 14th and 15th centuries -- onto paper. The concept of recording textures of things is more generally called making a rubbing. What distinguishes rubbings fr...

Aleatory: Aleatory (or aleatoric) means "pertaining to luck", and derives from the Latin word alea, the rolling dice. Aleatoric art is that which exploits the principle of randomness. One of the most ambitious aleatory projects in poetry is Raymond Queneau's Cent Mille Milliards de Po?mes (Hundred Thousand B...