Tag Archives: rauschenberg

WOW! – Work of the Week – Robert Rauschenberg – Soviet/American Array VI

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Robert Rauschenberg
Soviet/American Array
1988-1990
Intaglio in 16 colors on Saunders paper
88 1/2 x 52 in.
Edition of 59
Pencil signed and numbered

About the work:

Robert Rauschenberg was endlessly curious, creative and politically-minded. He is one of most influential artists of the post-war era and is credited with a revival and redefinition of printmaking. His aesthetic strategy included assemblage and collage of images of the everyday world, the juxtaposition of which, enhances their effects on each other to form a narrative.

Rauschenberg used his art as a means to depict political experiences of the time, which in turn allowed him to process them internally. Much of his political work is not only a meditation on the state of the nation but also on the state of the nation in relationship to the world.

For a conscientious citizen like Rauschenberg, who served in World War II, the overwhelming rise of the Cold War between post-war superpowers America and Soviet Union could not be ignored. He later explained that he had felt assaulted by current events. His resolution to this was undertaking and fostering cultural exchange through his ROCI (Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange) initiative. Among his projects for the initiative was the Soviet/American Array series.

This week’s Work of the Week! WOW! is Soviet/American Array VI.

For Rauschenberg, current events directed his thinking and emotions of the time. Despite seemingly different worlds on opposite sides of the Iron Curtain, Soviet/American Array VI reveals a surprising display of visual similarities across the Cold War divide. The piece was most likely inspired by Russia poet Andrei Voznesensky’s 1981 work entitled “Russian-American Romance:”

In my land and yours they do hit the hay
and sleep the whole night in a similar way.
There’s the golden Moon with a double shine.
It lightens your land and it lightens mine.
At the same low price, that is for free,
there’s the sunrise for you and the sunset for me.
The wind is cool at the break of day,
it’s neither your fault nor mine, anyway.
Behind your lies and behind my lies
there is pain and love for our Motherlands.
I wish in your land and mine some day
we’d put all idiots out of the way.

This work interweaves images of American life and Soviet life through the intaglio process in 16 colors. The work is very large, standing 88 1/2 in. high by 52 in. wide and was done in a very limited edition of 59 pieces. Some images are obvious such as the silhouette of a statue of Lenin and other, less recognizable images were taken from Rauschenberg’s travels throughout the Soviet Union and America. What is most interesting about the work is how difficult it is to discern which images represent the USSR and which represent the U.S.A.

In this piece Rauschenberg turns images from the two Cold War nations, which stressed their differences for over forty years, into a montage of an inextricably interconnected life, neither Soviet nor American, but an array of both.

Rauschenberg’s effort was to break through the pain. He stated in 1989: “My goal is to open people’s eyes to the surrounding reality, to deepen mutual understanding between people and to aspire for peace.” The aim of these works was “to shake people awake,” to the fact that despite ideological differences, people across the world are not all that different.

WOW – Work of the Week – RAUSCHENBERG, Ape, from Stoned Moon

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Robert Rauschenberg
Ape, from Stoned Moon
1970
Lithograph
46 x 38 in.
Edition of 46
Pencil signed, dated and numbered

About the work:

“The bird’s nest bloomed with fire and clouds. Softly largely slowly silently Apollo 11 started to move up. Then it rose being lifted on light. In its own joy wanting the earth to know it was going. Saturated, super-saturated, and solidified air with a sound that became your body. For that while, everything was the same material. Power over power, joy, pain, ecstasy, there was no inside, no out. Then bodily transcending a state of energy. Apollo 11 was airborne, lifting pulling everyone’s spirits with it.”
Rauschenberg’s account of the launch of the Apollo 11 mission

Acclaimed as the first postmodern artist and a forerunner of the Pop Art movement, Robert Rauschenberg, invited by NASA, traveled to Cape Canaveral in July 1969 to document the launch of the historic Apollo 11 mission, the first manned spaceflight to the moon’s surface. While in Cape Cape Canaveral Rauschenberg enjoyed unrestricted access at NASA’s Florida facilities. He roamed the buildings and adjacent landscape, met with astronauts and other personnel, and was granted full access to official NASA photographs and technical documents.

This trip profoundly impacted the artist, who came away from the experience energized and with a renewed sense of optimism after having been deeply disillusioned for several years by the course of the Vietnam War and the growing social unrest in the United States.

After the launch, Rauschenberg began work on the Stoned Moon series (1969–70).

Conceptually named from the idea of the alignment of a moon rock (or lunar stone), and a lithographic stone, the Stoned Moon was a series of 34 lithographs that juxtapose hand-drawn passages with imagery that pairs the lush Florida landscape with the and the region’s tourist highlights against the crisp industrial aesthetic of the space race: scenes of astronauts and complex machinery

The surfeit of indigenous birds populating the Stoned Moon lithographs speaks to the blurring of the natural and the manmade. These familiar symbols rein in the otherworldliness of Cape Canaveral, where gigantic sophisticated machines intrude upon a vast, sparse landscape. Now that humans’ capacity for flight definitively exceeded that of any natural flyer, was nature rendered obsolete?

The Stoned Moon lithographs reflect upon the binaries of think/feel, natural/manmade, bodily/immaterial, earthly/heavenly. Rauschenberg is able to situate popular countercultural tendencies alongside the nationalistic aims of NASA’s project without overtly addressing either.

The thirty-four Stoned Moon lithographs provides a singular account of the space program and humankind’s first lunar landing. Rauschenberg’s impressions contain a mixture of trepidation and wonder that conveys the technological and astronomical sublime. The immensity (quantified in just about any way: by ambition, financial commitment, the literal size of the rocket or distance to the moon) of the mission exceeded the capacity of photography’s limited scale.

Apollo 11 Mission

Apollo 11 was the spaceflight that landed the first humans on the Moon on July 20, 1969: Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. Armstrong was the first to step onto the lunar surface six hours later on July 21, and he uttered the now-famous words, “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” Armstrong spent about two and a half hours outside the spacecraft, Aldrin slightly less. The third member of the mission, Michael Collins, piloted the command spacecraft alone in lunar orbit until Armstrong and Aldrin returned to the spaceship for the trip back to Earth. Launched by a Saturn V rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Merritt Island, Florida on July 16, Apollo 11 was the fifth manned mission of NASA’s Apollo program. Apollo 11 effectively ended the Space Race and fulfilled a national goal proposed in 1961 by the U.S. President John F. Kennedy in a speech before the U.S. Congress: “before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.”

WOW – Work Of the Week – Robert Rauschenberg “Chow Bags Series”

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Chow Bags - Monkey Chow Chow Bags - Rabbit Chow

ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG
Monkey Chow and Rabbit Chow, from Chow Bags Series
1977
Screenprint with collage of string
48 1/8 x 36 3/8 in. each
Edition of 100
Pencil signed and numbered

About These Works:

Robert Rauschenberg’s Chow Bags portfolio (1977) consists of six screen prints with graphite and plastic thread, each featuring a different domesticated animal. The prints are based on paper collages that Rauschenberg created from actual bags of animal feed manufactured by Ralston Purina (now Purina Mills), a company best known for its Dog Chow and Cat Chow brands. He chose the packaging for the less common feeds, based on bags for a livestock feed.
They are: Mink Chow, Goat Chow, Monkey Chow, Hog Chow, Rabbit Chow, and  Calf Startena (based on a bag for a livestock feed supplemented with nutrients for early growth).

They all share the distinctive red-and-white checkered pattern (except Monkey Chow, which has the green and white checkered pattern), made famous by Purina’s more familiar products. By incorporating this pattern and other prominent design elements of the bags, Rauschenberg’s Chow Bags call attention to the simultaneous familiarity and strangeness of Purina’s graphic identity.

Photographs of the finished collages were used as the basis for the screen prints. Although Rauschenberg selectively cut and partially flattened the paper feed bags to create his collages, he retained their rectangular shape and allowed this form to dictate the overall configuration of each print. The bold, graphic renderings of the animals at the center of these works are surrounded by various arrangements of fainter transfer images such as flowers and leaves, cars stuck in traffic, Coca-Cola bottles, and a woman’s glossy, manicured finger. The resulting compositions present the animals gazing out as in traditional portraiture, playfully framed by colorful graphics and strong geometric shapes. 

After the silkscreen process, additional collage elements were applied to each print, including small pieces of fabric and plastic stitching that mimics the pull-strings used to open feed bags. The Chow Bags series was printed by Styria Studio in New York, and issued in an edition of 100.

Rauschenberg was impressed by the history of Purina Mills. Founded by William Danforth in 1884, the company produced Purina Chow, a line of food for animals that prospered for well over a century. The name of the product has an explanation. The word Purina (from pure) was coined to describe the purity of the grain made by the Danforth mills, and Chow is the name that soldiers during World War I used to refer to food.
Purina Mills supported the United States’ war effort. It assisted farmers through various programs to produce better food for the troops; and during the Great Depression, the company increased the sale of its breakfast products by rewarding — with toys and trinkets — any youngster who returned box tops to the company. This exemplified the power of advertising in even a poor economy. The success and entrepreneurial spirit of the Purina Mills company stands as an example of capitalistic America at it best.

The Chow Bags series embraces the very essence of what Robert Rauschenberg has been trying to capture and convey in his art, and in the Pop Art movement in general.  
Pop Art’s introduction of identifiable imagery (drawn from mass media and popular culture) was a major shift from the direction of Modernism and Abstract Expressionism.   Pop artists celebrated commonplace objects and people of everyday life. By creating paintings or sculptures of mass culture objects and media stars, and incorporating  commercial images, the Pop Art movement aimed to blur the boundaries between “high” art and “low” culture, in this way seeking to elevate popular culture to the level of fine art. 

Rauschenberg’s Chow Bags series seemingly embraced the post World War II manufacturing and media boom. His choice of Purina Chow as imagery is an enthusiastic endorsement of the capitalist market and the goods it circulated, while at the same time denotes an element of cultural critique, playing on the concept of consumerism that was at an all time high after the war, and also elevating the everyday to high art: tying the commodity status of the goods represented to the status of the art objects themselves. Which is exactly what the Pop Art movement is about.

WOW! – Work of the Week 9/21/15

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Robert Rauschenberg, Signs

 

Robert Rauschneberg, Signs, 1970

 

 

Robert Rauschenberg
Signs
1970
Screenprint
43 x 34 in.
Edition of 250                                                                                                                                     Pencil signed & numbered

 

About This Work:

Robert Rauschenberg’s “Signs” 1970, is one of the most sought after Rauschenberg screenprints because of the artwork’s incredible iconographic imagery and historical significance. Signs was originally commissioned by Time Magazine, with the intention that it would be used as the January edition cover for the year 1970. After considering the final composition, the executives at Time Magazine found the piece was more politically charged than they had hoped and decided against using it. It was felt that the composition, though stunning, was more of a recapitulation of the 1960’s than a welcome to the new decade.

After the dismissal by Time Magazine, Robert Rauschenberg’s trusted dealer Leo Castelli convinced him to print a limited edition screenprint of Signs. The edition was published by Leo Castelli in New York in an edition of 250; each signed, dated ‘70’, and numbered in pencil.

Signs is an astounding collage encompassing the monumental events and people of 1960’s America. Rauschenberg masterfully juxtaposes scenes of innovation like the moon landing with the destructive violence of the war in Vietnam and the civil rights movement. The revolutionary nature of the era is pronounced through the images of peace protestors at the top, whose rallies for change and peace are echoed by the voice of Janis Joplin deeply singing into her microphone. The iconic leaders of the era including JFK and his brother Bobbie Kennedy challenge the divisive violence of the wars and civil unrest, even as their forms and images transition into the faces of martyrs. The “Signs” of this transformative decade are woven seamlessly by Rauschenberg, and this screen print is known as one of his most important works of art.

About The Artist:

Robert Rauschenberg began what was to be an artistic revolution. 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” (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.

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.

As Pop Art emerged in the ’60s, Rauschenberg turned away from three-dimensional combines and began to work in two dimensions, using magazine photographs of current events to create silk-screen prints. Rauschenberg transferred prints of familiar images, such as JFK or baseball games, to canvases and overlapped them with painted brushstrokes. They looked like abstractions from a distance, but up close the images related to each other, as if in conversation.

These collages were a way of bringing together the inventiveness of his combines with his love for painting. Using this new method he found he could make a commentary on contemporary society using the very images that helped to create that society.

In 1998 The Guggenheim Museum put on its largest exhibition ever with four hundred works by Rauschenberg, showcasing the breadth and beauty of his work, and its influence over the second half of the century.

For more information and price please contact the gallery at info@gsfineart.com

WOW! – Work of the Week 9/1/15

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Robert Rauschenberg, Waves

 

Robert Rauschenberg, Waves, from Stoned Moon, 1969

Robert Rauschenberg, Waves, from Stoned Moon, 1969

 

Robert Rauschenberg 
Waves, from Stoned Moon
1969
Lithograph
89 x 42 in.
Edition of 27
Pencil signed and numbered

 

About This Work:

In 1969, NASA invited artist Robert Rauschenberg to witness the launch of Apollo 11, the spacecraft that would place man on the moon for the first time. The launch of Apollo 11 was seen as the most significant technological advancement. In terms of the global political climate, it marked the apex of the ‘space race’. 

For Rauschenberg, the moon mission represented a crucial occasion, far beyond the obvious scientific headway. Rather, the launch marked the end of a decade that had left Rauschenberg completely disillusioned. Prior to his official opportunity to witness man’s mission to the Moon, the core of his works in the 1960s incorporated popular political and social subject matter of war and destruction, as seen by media images of the Vietnam war, America’s race riots and the assassinations of JFK and Martin Luther King. The launch gave him a new hope for the future. 

His Stoned Moon series consists of 34 works that cleverly captured the essence of the historical event far beyond any Walter Cronkite broadcast or television marathon. In his work Waves, one of the best and largest black-and-white images of the series, Rauschenberg sets the print in two landscapes the Earth and the Moon. Rauschenberg chose to appropriate two of the first pictures taken from the Moon in the bottom of the work. In the bottom right corner we see Neil Armstrong in his space suit taking his famous steps for mankind and on the left we see a reproduction of Aldrin’s photograph of his very own boot print. We also see astronauts floating in space and even the lunar modular on the moon at in the bottom of the work, which is set on the Moon and in space. Whereas, the top part of the work we can seen a scene from Earth, where the rocket is launching into space leaving plumes of smoke behind. Rauschenberg’s careful black-and-white scheme of Waves mimics the monochromatic nature of the Moon’s surface to emphasize the strange and mysterious atmosphere of the ‘Stoned moon’ as a visual metaphor for the future of man and technology.

The brushstrokes seen through out the work are seen as Rauschenberg’s artistic ties with Abstract Expressionism. Waves is a great example that shows Rauschenberg’s bridging the gap between Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art – a style that made him famous and one of the most important contemporary artists.

About The Artist:

Robert Rauschenberg began what was to be an artistic revolution. 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” (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.

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.

As Pop Art emerged in the ’60s, Rauschenberg turned away from three-dimensional combines and began to work in two dimensions, using magazine photographs of current events to create silk-screen prints. Rauschenberg transferred prints of familiar images, such as JFK or baseball games, to canvases and overlapped them with painted brushstrokes. They looked like abstractions from a distance, but up close the images related to each other, as if in conversation.

These collages were a way of bringing together the inventiveness of his combines with his love for painting. Using this new method he found he could make a commentary on contemporary society using the very images that helped to create that society.

In 1998 The Guggenheim Museum put on its largest exhibition ever with four hundred works by Rauschenberg, showcasing the breadth and beauty of his work, and its influence over the second half of the century. 

For more information and price please contact the gallery at info@gsfineart.com

Opening Night at Art Aspen 2015

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Gregg Shienbaum Fine Art is happy to announce a great opening night at Art Aspen 2015
The show will be open August 13th through August 16th
Come visit us at Booth B16

Art Aspen

 

Gregg Shienbaum Fine Art Booth B16 exhibiting at Art Aspen 2015

Gregg Shienbaum Fine Art Booth B16 exhibiting at Art Aspen 2015

 

Opening night at Art Aspen 2015

Opening night at Art Aspen 2015


 

 

WOW! – Work of The Week

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Robert Rauschenberg, Soviet American Array VI

Robert Rauschenberg, Soviet/American Array VI, 1990

Robert Rauschenberg, Soviet/American Array VI, 1990

Robert Rauschenberg
Soviet American Array VI
1990
Intaglio in 16 colors on Saunders paper
88 1/2 x 52 in.
Edition of 59
This piece is pencil signed and numbered.

About This Work:

Rauschenberg’s Soviet American Array VI  is one of a seven print series where he sought to address the politics of newfound peace constructively through his art. In 1989 Rauschenberg became the first American artist since WWII to have a solo show in the Soviet Union. His Moscow show in 1990 debuted his Soviet/American Array series.

The works of the Soviet/American Array series display photographs taken both in the United States and former Soviet Union to highlight the similarities and contrasts of the two major super powers of the Cold War. Rauschenberg juxtaposes photographic subjects that range from street signs to grand Soviet architecture to people immersed in their daily lives and jobs. When put together, these images bring attention to the ways we understand and define cultures, which are both complex and dynamic.

About Robert Rauschenberg:

Robert Rauschenberg began what was to be an artistic revolution. 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” (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.

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.

As Pop Art emerged in the ’60s, Rauschenberg turned away from three-dimensional combines and began to work in two dimensions, using magazine photographs of current events to create silk-screen prints. Rauschenberg transferred prints of familiar images, such as JFK or baseball games, to canvases and overlapped them with painted brushstrokes. They looked like abstractions from a distance, but up close the images related to each other, as if in conversation.

These collages were a way of bringing together the inventiveness of his combines with his love for painting. Using this new method he found he could make a commentary on contemporary society using the very images that helped to create that society.

In 1998 The Guggenheim Museum put on its largest exhibition ever with four hundred works by Rauschenberg, showcasing the breadth and beauty of his work, and its influence over the second half of the century.