Assemblage involves bonding found objects together to create sculptures. It allows artists to give new meaning to everyday items. Famous assemblage artists include Marcel Duchamp, who created readymades like Bicycle Wheel and Fountain, and Louise Nevelson, who assembled wood scraps into monumental black sculptures. Robert Rauschenberg is also known for his combines, which merged paintings and found objects into mixed media works like Monogram, featuring a stuffed goat.

2. “Victorian Summer”

3. “Red Music Box”

4. What is Assemblage
 Assemblage sculpture is the
bonding of shapes or objects by
gluing, soldering, pasting, nailing,
etc… These objects tend to be
mainly found objects.
 Basically, assemblage is a three-
dimensional collage.

5. “Red Planet”

6. “Thinking of Mahler”

7. Why is it important?
 Assemblage is an innovative
method of creating art.
 Many world famous artists have
used assemblage to create modern
masterpieces.
 Assemblage allows us to give new
meaning to everyday objects.

8. Reconstructed
Chair

9. Famous Artists that used
Assemblage
 Marcel Duchamp
 Bicycle Wheel was the first of a
class of objects that Duchamp
called his “readymades.” He
created twenty-one of them, all
between 1915 and 1923. The
readymades are a varied
collection of items, but there are
several ideas that unite them.
 The readymades are
experiments in provocation, the
products of a conscious effort to
break every rule of the artistic
tradition, in order to create a
new kind of art—one that
engages the mind instead of the
eye, in ways that provoke the
observer to participate and
think.

10. Fountain
 Duchamp’s most notorious
readymade was a manufactured
urinal entitled “Fountain”. Conceived
for a show promoting avant-garde
art, “Fountain” took advantage of
the show’s lack of juried panels,
which invariably excluded forward-
looking artists.
 Under a pseudonym, “R.Mutt,”
Duchamp submitted “Fountain”. It
was a prank, meant to taunt his
avant-garde peers. For some of the
show’s organizers this was too much
—was the artist equating modern art
with a toilet fixture? –and “Fountain”
as ‘misplaced’ for the duration of
the exhibition. It disappeared soon
thereafter.

11. Box in a Valise
 Box in a Valise is a
portable museum of
Duchamp’s works,
reproduced in
miniature, packed
in a customized
collapsible case,
like a salesman’s
valise. It debuted in
a deluxe edition of
twenty copies in
1940.
 Duchamp must
have been
concerned for his
legacy. In 1934 he
learned that a few
of his works had
been broken. More
than half the
readymades were
lost. Box in a Valise
is a mini-museum, a
resume of
Duchamp’s life in
art, created with
painstaking care in
the face of a
vanishing material
legacy.

12. Louise Nevelson
“I have made my world and it is a much better world than I
ever saw outside”

14. Louise Nevelson (1899-1988) was a towering
figure in postwar American art, exerting great
influence with her monumental installations,
innovative sculptures made of found wood
objects, and celebrated public art. She was
recognized during her lifetime as one of
America’s most prominent and innovative
sculptors, and her work continues to inspire
contemporary sculptors today.

16. “Rain Garden II”

17. Her autobiographical works symbolically address issues of
marriage, motherhood, death, Jewish culture, memory and
(although she resisted the label) feminism.

18.  Nevelson was born in the Ukraine and immigrated to
the United States with her family six years later. Her life
encompassed most of the 20th century, giving her
exposure to Cubism, Dada, Surrealism, Abstract
Expressionism, Minimalism, and installation art. Although
linked to all of these movements, Nevelson formed a
unique visual language that earned her recognition as
one of America’s most distinguished artists. Her work
continues to inform contemporary sculpture nearly 20
years after her death.
 Her groundbreaking technique involved assembling
cast-off wood pieces and transforming them with coats
of monochromatic black, white, and (more rarely) gold
spray paint. Nevelson’s work started with tabletop scale
objects, but quickly grew into human-scale and room-
sized works. Her later, monumental public works stood
their ground with the buildings that surrounded them.

20.  Despite the size and drama of Nevelson’s sculptures,
they were at times overwhelmed by her larger-than-
life public persona. She was known for wearing eye-
catching assemblages of couture, ethnographic
clothing, outsize jewelry and hats. A trademark look
involved donning multiple layers of false eyelashes.
“With the passage of time, Nevelson’s larger-than-
life persona may be viewed in historical perspective,
thus allowing viewers to focus on her extraordinary
artistic legacy,” says Timothy Anglin Burgard, Ednah
Root Curator-in-Charge of the American Art
Department.

25. Robert Rauschenberg

26. “Monogram”

27. Rauschenberg
 Rauschenberg’s enthusiasm for popular culture and his rejection of the angst
and seriousness of the Abstract Expressionists led him to search for a new
way of painting. He found his signature mode by embracing materials
traditionally outside of the artist’s reach. He would cover a canvas with
house paint, or ink the wheel of a car and run it over paper to create a
drawing, while demonstrating rigor and concern for formal painting. By 1958,
at the time of his first solo exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery, his work had
moved from abstract painting to drawings like “Erased De Kooning” (1953)
(which was exactly as it sounds) to what he termed “combines.” These
combines (meant to express both the finding and forming of combinations in
three-dimensional collage) cemented his place in art history.
 One of Rauschenberg’s first and most famous combines was entitled
“Monogram” (1959) and consisted of an unlikely set of materials: a stuffed
angora goat, a tire, a police barrier, the heel of a shoe, a tennis ball, and
paint. This pioneering altered the course of modern art. The idea of
combining and of noticing combinations of objects and images has
remained at the core of Rauschenberg’s work.

28. You tube Video about
DeKooning/Rauschenberg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpCWh3IFtDQ

29. In Conclusion
 Assemblage is a creative method of sculpture
incorporating everyday found objects into a
three-dimensional sculpture and can be used to
create dramatic, humorous, satirical, and
emotional works of art.