Wall-Hanging Framed Asian Themed Art Assemblage. A wide variety of items and materials, including jade figures, a silk fan, a calligraphy brush, and much more, all combined to create an ode to oriental ideals. 

Provenance: Created by the consignor, an artist. One-of-a-kind piece. 

Size: 33 x 20 1/2 x 5 in. 

Assemblage is an artistic form or medium usually created on a defined substrate that consists of three-dimensional elements projecting out of or from the substrate. It is similar to collage, a two-dimensional medium. It is part of the visual arts and it typically uses found objects, but is not limited to these materials. The term also may be applied to free-standing works that have been assembled. The origin of the art form dates to the cubist constructions of Pablo Picasso from 1912 to 1914. The origin of the word (in its artistic sense) may be traced back to the early 1950s, when Jean Dubuffet created a series of collages of butterfly wings, which he entitled assemblages d’empreintes. However, Marcel Duchamp, Jean Arp, and others had been working with found objects for many years prior to Dubuffet. Russian artist Vladimir Tatlin created his “counter-reliefs” in 1914. Alongside Tatlin, the earliest woman artist to try her hand at assemblage was Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, the Dada Baroness. In Paris during the 1920s Alexander Calder, Jose De Creeft, Picasso, and others began making fully three dimensional works from metal scraps, found metal objects, and wire. In the United States one of the earliest and most prolific assemblage artists was Louise Nevelson, who began creating her sculptures from found pieces of wood in the late 1930s. In the 1950s and 1960s assemblage started to become more widely known and used. Artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns started using scrappy materials and objects to make anti-aesthetic art sculptures, inventing a big part of the ideas that make modern assemblage what it is. In 1961 the exhibition “The Art of Assemblage” was featured at the New York Museum of Modern Art, heralding its place as a legitimized artistic movement, William C. Seitz, the curator of the exhibition, is credited with defining assemblage in his criteria for choosing the works, which has remained essential to the movement ever since: made up of pre-formed natural or manufactured materials, objects, or fragments not (regularly) intended as art materials.