Robert Rauschenberg: Prints from ULAE Catalog Preview

ROBERT R A U S C H E N B E R G Prints from Universal Limited Art Editions, 1962-2008

Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art University of Oklahoma

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FRED JONES JR. MUSEUM OF ART, UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA

Robert Rauschenberg Prints from Universal Limited Art Editions, 1962–2008 Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art University of Oklahoma

Street Sounds, 1992 Edition of 38, intaglio (detail, see page 83)

ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG: 1962–2008

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Contents

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Foreword Ghislain d’Humières

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Introduction Mark A. White

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Picture This Mimi Thompson Robert Rauschenberg 1962–2008

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Stunt Man Series, 1962

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Drifts, Gulf, Tides Series, 1969

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1978 Series

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Glacial Decoy Series, 1979–80

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Razorback Bunch Series, 1980–83

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Bellini Series, 1986–89

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Soviet American Array Series, 1988-91

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Street Sounds Series, 1992–95

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Ground Rules Series, 1996–97

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Ruminations Series, 1999

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Lotus Series, 2008

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Selected One-artist Exhibitions

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Timeline

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Selected Bibliography

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About the Venue

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Publication Notes

Darkness Mother, 1978 (facing page) Edition of 42, lithograph (detail, see page 45)

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FRED JONES JR. MUSEUM OF ART, UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA

Foreword

Ghislain d’Humières

I didn’t have the privilege of knowing Robert Rauschenberg, but I had the pleasure to meet and work

Wylodean and Bill Saxon Director,

with Bill Goldston, director of Universal Limited Art Editions, who worked so closely with this major

Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art

American artist.

The idea to celebrate Robert Rauschenberg’s career through a complete series from 1962 to his last set (The Lotus Series, 2008) came from Bill. This exhibition previously was shown once in Miami and then in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

I thought that it would be important for University of Oklahoma students to be exposed to such a creative artist, who used so many different techniques and presented his interpretation of the 20th century political situations around the world.

Rauschenberg continues to inspire such creativity in the next generation. The Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art already has hosted a musical concert inspired by Tibetan Garden Song in June 2010, as well as contemporary choreography inspired by The Lotus Series in June 2011.

Bill Goldston never forgot his Oklahoma roots and helped enable the FJJMA to share Rauschenberg’s legacy with upcoming generations. This catalogue is a tribute to all who support education through art and give students an opportunity to open their minds to the rest of the world.

Enjoy the exhibition and let your imagination and intellect challenge you to begin a dialogue between the art and yourself.

Epic (Ground Rules), 1997 (facing page) Edition of 44, intaglio with photogravure (detail, see page 89)

ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG: 1962–2008

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FRED JONES JR. MUSEUM OF ART, UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA

Introduction

Mark A. White

Robert Rauschenberg: Prints from Universal Limited Art Editions, 1962–2008 examines the ex-

Eugene B. Adkins Curator,

tensive collaboration between Robert Rauschenberg and the fine art print publisher, Universal Limited

Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art

Art Editions. Together, artist and publisher helped redefine printmaking through an extensive experimentation with the medium, and the results contributed significantly to the history of modern art in the United States. The exhibition provides a thorough survey of that relationship, from the first year of their collaboration in 1962 to 2008, the year of Rauschenberg’s death.

Rauschenberg was born in Port Arthur, Texas, in 1925. He began his education at the Kansas City Art Institute and the Académie Julian in Paris before attending Black Mountain College in North Carolina in 1948. His classes with former Bauhaus instructor Josef Albers were less influential than other relationships he developed during that time with musician John Cage and dancer Merce Cunningham.

The two not only informed Rauschenberg’s work but often provided him with a public forum for his experimentation in the coming years. For instance, Cage’s Theatre Piece #1 (1951) offered Rauschenberg the opportunity to develop his first combine, an assemblage of painting and found objects that both challenged distinctions between painting and sculpture and blurred the boundaries between art and everyday life. As he later explained, “I was bombarded with TV sets and magazines by the refuse, by the excess of the world … I thought that if I could paint or make an honest work, it should incorporate all of these elements, which were and are a reality.”1

Glacial Decoy Series: Lithograph IV, 1980 (facing page) Edition of 25, lithograph (detail, see page 57)

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This interest in the excess of the world and the increasing profusion of images in American culture eventually led Rauschenberg to printmaking and ULAE. Tatyana Grosman, a Russian immigrant, founded ULAE in 1957. She started her first project with artist Larry Rivers and writer and critic Frank O’Hara that same year and actively sought clients among the young contemporary artists of New York City. In 1960, she began working with Jasper Johns, who introduced her to Rauschenberg the following year.

Grosman encouraged Rauschenberg to experiment with lithography, resulting in the 1962 Stuntman series. Rauschenberg used discarded printing plates from the New York Times and New York Herald Tribune to develop a bemusing array of imagery. The resulting work is open to interpretation and requires the viewer’s participation in the construction of meaning.

Rauschenberg often pushed the boundaries of printmaking, and in 1969, his plan to use photo-sensitive stones led Grosman to seek the help of Bill Goldston, a student who had already experimented with the process. Goldston’s influence at ULAE grew, and in 1976, Grosman asked him to take over the press.

Rauschenberg would become a close friend and advisor to Goldston over the ensuing decades. Their collaboration pushed the boundaries of printmaking as they experimented with non-traditional processes and materials. Rauschenberg continued to work with ULAE until his death in 2008, and the press produced his last print series, The Lotus Series. Robert Rauschenberg: Prints from Universal Limited Art Editions, 1962–2008 offers an intriguing exploration of the stylistic and thematic directions of Rauschenberg’s career, and the important contributions he and ULAE made to contemporary printmaking.

Endnote 1 Robert Rauschenberg quoted in Mary Lynn Kotz,

Robert Rauschenberg: Art and Life (New York:

Harry N. Abrams, 1990), 99.

Glacial Decoy Series: Etching IV, 1979 (facing page) Edition of 23, intaglio with etching and photoetching (detail, see page 52)

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FRED JONES JR. MUSEUM OF ART, UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA

ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG: 1962–2008

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Picture This

Mimi Thompson

“A light bulb in the dark can not show itself without showing you something else, too.”1 —Robert Rauschenberg

Ideas rarely line up in an orderly fashion, their unruliness being part of their beauty; they often insist on incorporating other dimensions and time periods, expanding with or without permission. Artists like Paul Klee understood that “to define the present in isolation is to kill it,”2 and that art and ideas exist in extended time. This desire to embrace the future as well as the past also indicates our precarious place in the moving, shape-shifting present. Not only do we need to include history and future dreams in our present but we also desire to keep our audience intrigued. The resulting serial and time-based activitie­s—novels and TV series with cliff-hanging moments, sports events requiring seasons of dedicated viewing, music made from sounds that change with each different instrument and tempo, and artwork with ideas that emerge singly or in series—keep us guessing. And the poetic license that time and memory allow permits our variant culture to tell these changing tales in words, pictures and sound. They are stories full of the improbable, the beautiful and the banal; they keep us apprehensive, on the edge of our seats.

The late Walter Hopps once described Robert Rauschenberg’s work done in series as “families.”3 These sequential investigations, in two, three or four dimensions, include all the vagaries, missteps and passions that link blood relations, shifted into the realm of intellect. Working in a series allowed Rauschenberg to prolong an idea, line up different images in time and construct patterns of thought.

In his very first print, This is the First Half of a Print Designed to Exist in Passing Time, c. 1949, time is marked off by each cut in the wood like a castaway’s calendar. There are 14 woodcuts which begin with a black inked square and continue on with one line carved into the black square, then two, obediently following this simple counting exercise until the 9th print, where either the aesthetics of the print or a slip of the hand while carving becomes more important than the counting. The 14th print has 11 lines carved into the woodblock.4 This surprise, emerging from a rather predictable beginning, underlines the respect and admiration that Rauschenberg had for chance, especially when it leads to happy accident and a good-looking image.

Bellini 2, 1987 (facing page) Edition of 48, intaglio (detail, see page 69)

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Unlike many artists, Rauschenberg worked from the start with boundaries erased. He had no need to reject traditional methods because he had never embraced them. And the speed with which Rauschenberg leapt into experimentation with technique and ideas was sometimes literal. He created his wellknown Automobile Tire Print in 1953 by asking his friend, the composer John Cage, to drive his Model A Ford with inked tires over 20 sheets of paper, taped together. The car became the press and the tires the plate; the resulting print demonstrated Rauschenberg’s absolute freedom with materials and his natural understanding of how a static object can reflect time and movement. These early printmaking experiments paired sophisticated ideas with, if not primitive, unusual methods, and laid groundwork for his later prints and paintings.

The photographer Jean-Henri Lartigue said that as a child, he devised a kind of “vision trap.” He would close his eyes halfway and stare intently at what he wanted to see. Then he would turn around three times, thinking that would “trap” the vision as well as the colors and sounds. Eventually, when the vision trap didn’t seem to work, he turned to the camera.5 Rauschenberg also used the camera to catch what he saw, and the pictures he captured on film were often repeated and reused. His early experiments with photography in paintings and prints relied on found images in newspapers, but evolved into the use of his own photographs that could be reproduced with evermore sophisticated techniques.

With both methods, he created a lexicon of pictures and wove them throughout his work. For instance, a 1952 photograph of Cy Twombly with a large Roman relic—a hand with a finger pointing upward— reappears in Glacial Decoy Series: Lithograph III (1980), with only the hand visible. And two baroque muses6 appear in film-like repetition in the unique work Chain Reaction (Anagram) (1996), and also in the print Intermission (Ground Rules) (1996), but to different effect. Like Marcel Proust’s use of the madeleine to trigger involuntary memory, Rauschenberg’s image repetition indicates memory’s connective power, but he takes it out of the realm of sentiment and reflects the more removed, streaming consciousness of his own time. His intense method of looking was perhaps an attempt to hold on to a view, but if it changed or developed, with or without him, that would only make it more interesting.

Two works, Factum I and Factum II (1957), similar in name and appearance, illustrate Rauschenberg’s early desire to capture something, and also his desire to let that something go. The two works include identical imagery, and within each work images are repeated as well. Two headshots of President Eisenhower and two views of a launderette fire appear in each; the slight shifts in paint application

Glacial Decoy Series: Lithograph II, 1980 (facing page) Edition of 25, lithograph (detail, see page 55)

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FRED JONES JR. MUSEUM OF ART, UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA

Stunt Man Series 1962

Stunt Man I, 1962 Edition of 37, lithograph (detail, see page 36)

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Stunt Man I, 1962 (above) Edition of 37, lithograph 57.15 x 44.45 cm

Stunt Man II, 1962 (right) Edition of 35, lithograph 57.15 x 44.45 cm

Stunt Man III, 1962 (facing page) Edition of 36, lithograph 57.79 x 44.45 cm

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Drifts, Gulf, Tides Series 1969

Tides, 1969 Edition of 28, lithograph (detail, see page 41)

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Drifts, 1969 (facing page) Edition of 35, lithograph 106.7 x 76.2 cm

Gulf, 1969 (left) Edition of 31, lithograph 106.7 x 76.2 cm

Tides, 1969 (above) Edition of 28, lithograph 106.7 x 76.2 cm

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Robert Rauschenberg Timeline

Robert Rauschenberg was born in Port Arthur, Texas, on October 22, 1925. For a short while he studied pharmacy at Texas University and then served the U.S. Navy in World War II. 1947 Enrolled at the Kansas City Art Institute (until 1948) and at Academie Julien, Paris, where he met Susan Weil, his future wife.

1948–1949 Studied under Joseph Albers at Black Mountain College (North Carolina), where he befriended Merce Cunningham, John Cage and David Tudor.

1949 Attended the Art Students League until 1952.

1951 Birth of his son, Christopher.

Held his first solo exhibition ever at Betty Parsons Gallery, New York.

1952 Took part in John Cage’s Theatre Piece #1, a performance that is considered to be the first multimedia happening.

Began his combine drawings. Coined the term “combine” to designate an assemblage that includes found objects.

1953 Designed costumes for Septet, performed by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company.

Began the Red Paintings series.

1954 Received a commission from Merce Cunningham to design the set for the dance company’s Minutial.

Met Jasper Johns.

1959 With the purchase of Painting with Red Letter S (1957), the Albright-Knox Art Gallery of Buffalo (NY) became the first public arts organization to include a painting by Rauschenberg in its holdings.

1960 Met Marcel Duchamp, to whom the following year he paid a tribute with the work Trophy II.

1961 Rauschenberg, David Tudor, Jasper Johns, Tinguely and his wife Niki Saint Phalle came together in the multimedia performance “Homage to David Tudor,” presented at the U.S. embassy in Paris.

1999 Embarked on Apogamy Pods (1999–2000), a series incorporating homely images and subdued colors using vegetable pigments transferred onto archival sound polylaminate.

1962 Rauschenberg produces his first lithograph at ULAE – Universal Limited Art Editions, in New York. At the same time, he adopted silkscreen in his painting technique.

Created Ruminations prints at ULAE – Universal Limited Art Editions.

1964 Awarded the Grand Prize for Painting at the Venice Biennale.

1966 Joined scientists Billy Klüver, Robert Whitman and Fred Waldhauer in the foundation of Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.).

1970 Established permanent residence and studio on Captiva Island, Florida.

1975 Traveled to India, where he worked with paper at the Gandhi Ashram.

1978 Began serving as chairman, Trisha Brown Company.

1982 Traveled to China to work at the Xuan Paper Mill.

1984 Introduced ROCI (Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange), at the United Nations in New York.

An exhibition of more than 200 works created during his travels and as collaborations with artists from the world over which toured for eight years around Asia, Europe and the Americans before ending at the National Gallery of Art, of Washington, DC in 1991.

2000 Created the monumental Synopsis Shuffle (52 nineand-one-half-foot-high) panels that can be perpetually shuffled by collaborators into new arrangements. The Whitney Museum of American Art presented this work in an entire floor of the museum.

2002 Began the Scenarios series.

2003 Along with Darryl Pottorf, contributed art to benefit Lee Memorial Hospital’s Trauma Center, Fort Meyers, Florida.

2004 Traveled to Eckert Fine Art, Naples, Florida, with Dorothy Lichtenstein for opening of “Roy Lichtenstein: Chinese Landscape” and “Robert Rauschenberg: 7 Characters.”

2005 Planned exhibitions for the Miami Art Museum, Florida; the University Art Museum, University of Louisiana at Lafayette; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA).

2007 Began The Lotus Series at ULAE. Robert Rauschenberg died on May 12, 2008 in Florida.

1990 Founded the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, a not for profit organization the projects of which were meant to increase public awareness of, and publicize, critical issues for the artist. He was active in various fields, including medical research, art and education.

1996 Presented at the United Nations in New York, the print and poster “Clan Destiny” for the United Nations Conference on Human Settlements, Istanbul. At the same time, showed twenty-nine works of art he had created over the years for various U.N. and philanthropic projects.

Stunt Man III, 1962 (facing page) Edition of 36, lithograph (detail, see page 37)

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Publication Notes

Copyright © 2011 The University of Oklahoma.

This catalogue has been published in conjunction with the exhibition Robert Rauschenberg Prints from Universal Limited Art Editions, 1962–2008 at the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, October 1–December 30, 2011.

No part of this publication may be reproduced or used in any form without the written consent of the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art. Catalogue author: Mimi Thompson Catalogue design: Eric H. Anderson Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, The University of Oklahoma 555 Elm Avenue, Norman, Oklahoma 73019-3003 phone: 405.325.3272; fax: 325.7696 www.ou.edu/fjjma Wylodean and Bill Saxon Director: Ghislain d’Humières Deputy Director: Gail Kana Anderson Eugene B. Adkins Curator: Mark A. White Library of Congress Control Number: 2011926831 ISBN: 0971718784 This catalogue was printed by the University of Oklahoma Printing Services and is issued by the University of Oklahoma. 1,000 copies have been printed and distributed at no cost to the taxpayers of Oklahoma.

Cover: Lotus II (The Lotus Series), 2008 Edition of 50, pigmented ink-jet with photogravure (detail, see page 103)

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