Froissage Meaning: Definition, Pronunciation and Origin

The froissage meaning is simpler than the art history that surrounds it. Froissage is an ordinary French word for crumpling or creasing, and in English it is borrowed almost exclusively as the name of an art technique: crumpling a sheet of paper and using its creases as the basis for a drawing. This page explains the word itself.

For the technique, see what is froissage.

Definition

According to the French Wiktionary, froissage is a masculine noun (le froissage) meaning “the action of crumpling” (action de froisser). It is formed from the verb froisser plus the noun suffix -age, which turns actions into nouns, the same pattern as collage (from coller, to glue), frottage (from frotter, to rub) and grattage (from gratter, to scrape).

Pronunciation

• IPA: /fʁwa.saʒ/
• Approximate English spelling: frwah-SAHZH
• The oi is pronounced “wa”, as in moi or croissant.
• The ss is a hard “s”.
• The final -age ends in a soft “zh” sound, like the “s” in “measure”, not like English “age”.

English speakers often say “FROY-sahzh” or “frwah-SAHJ”. Both are understood, but the French pronunciation is preferred in art-historical contexts.

The verb froisser

Froisser is common in everyday French and has several meanings:

• To crumple or crease something: froisser une feuille de papier, to crumple a sheet of paper; une chemise froissée, a creased shirt.
• To strain a muscle: se froisser un muscle. Wiktionary also lists un froissage musculaire for this sense.
• To offend or hurt someone’s feelings: froisser quelqu’un, to put someone’s nose out of joint. Être froissé means to be offended.

Related words include froissé (crumpled; offended), froissement (the rustle or crumpling sound of paper or fabric) and infroissable (crease-resistant, of fabric).

Froissage versus froissement

Both nouns come from froisser, but they are used differently:

• Froissage stresses the action or process of crumpling, which is why it suits the name of a technique.
• Froissement more often describes the result or the sound: le froissement des feuilles, the rustling of leaves.

How the word became an art term

French artists’ vocabulary has a long tradition of naming techniques with the -age suffix. When the Surrealists developed new chance-based methods in the 1920s and 1930s, they used words like frottage and grattage, and the Czech artists Ladislav Novák and Jiří Kolář followed the same pattern for their own inventions, including froissage and Kolář’s rollage and chiasmage. In Czech, froissage is written froasáž. Read more in the history of froissage and Jiří Kolář’s collage techniques.

Using the word correctly in English

In English writing about art, a few conventions are worth following:

• Italics or not? Because froissage is now an established technical term, it is usually written without italics, like collage and frottage. Italics are still common when the word is introduced as a French term.
• Plural. Froissages refers to individual works made with the technique: “Novák’s froissages of the 1960s”.
• Article. In English you say “froissage” without an article for the technique (“she works in froissage”) and “a froissage” for a single work.
• Capitalisation. Lower case, unless it begins a sentence or forms part of a title, as in André-Pierre Arnal’s 1968 work Froissage.
• Spelling. Watch for confusion with frottage, fromage and froisage (a common misspelling with one s).

If you are writing a caption, a typical form is: artist, title, date, “froissage, ink and watercolour on paper”, followed by the collection.

Froissage in other languages

Language	Art term	Everyday equivalent
French	froissage	froisser, chiffonner
English	froissage	crumpling
Spanish	froissage	arrugar, estrujar
Czech	froasáž	mačkání, muchlání
German	Froissage	knüllen, zerknittern

A family of French studio words

Froissage belongs to a group of French nouns ending in -age that name an action, and several of them became the names of chance-based art techniques in the 20th century. Knowing the family makes the meaning of each easier to remember:

• Frottage, from frotter, to rub: Max Ernst’s rubbing technique, developed from 1925. See the frottage art technique.
• Fumage, from fumer, to smoke: images made with candle soot, associated with Wolfgang Paalen in the 1930s. See fumage.
• Décalcomanie (decalcomania), from décalquer, to transfer a tracing: paint pressed between two surfaces, taken up by Óscar Domínguez in 1936. See decalcomania.
• Grattage, from gratter, to scrape: Ernst’s oil-painting version of frottage, from 1927.
• Pliage, from plier, to fold: Simon Hantaï’s folding method on canvas, from 1960.
• Froissage, from froisser, to crumple: the crumpled-paper technique developed as a named method by Ladislav Novák around 1964.

All of them describe a physical gesture rather than a style. That is the key to the meaning of froissage: the word does not tell you what the picture shows, only how its starting texture was made. What the artist then sees in that texture depends on pareidolia, the habit of finding images in random patterns, discussed in our article on pareidolia in art. Much earlier, Victor Hugo’s ink blots worked in the same way, as our page on Victor Hugo’s ink drawings shows.

Words often confused with froissage

• Frottage: rubbing over a textured surface. See froissage vs frottage.
• Fumage: drawing with candle smoke.
• Pliage: folding; Simon Hantaï’s pliage comme méthode is folding as a painting method. See froissage artists.
• Collage: gluing materials onto a surface. See froissage collage.