Robert Rauschenberg: The Silkscreen Paintings 1962-64

In the early 1960s, Rauschenberg made an abrupt change from the Combines and Assemblages that had earned him the reputation of "enfant terrible" of the art world. The result was a number of canvases, many of enormous size, that were created by using silkscreened images from magazines and his own photographs. Whether black and white or in vibrant colours, these works brought into play the artist's penchant for an intermingling of very personal imagery that could be at once sensual, political, theatrical or erotic. Roni Feinstein, curator of the major exhibition of these works at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art (December 1990 to March 1991), has written a text which is complemented by an essay by "New Yorker" art writer Calvin Tomkins.

With their silkscreened images culled from magazines and newspapers, Rauschenberg's often monumental collages take the viewer on a roller-coaster ride through the America of the early 1960s. Astronauts, Army helicopters, JFK and baseball players, mixed with allusions to Velazquez and Duchamp, are a vibrant testament to this artist's propensity "to consider the world as one gigantic painting." Feinstein, curator of an exhibit at New York's Whitney Museum which this volume catalogues, convincingly interprets the paintings as an open-ended, associative dialogue about the ubiquitous role of the mass media in American life, with the technological present overwhelming the past. Throwing light on the smaller, lesser known, black-and-white silkscreen experiments that led to the artist's enormous, colorful canvases, Feinstein also belabors the familiar point that Rauschenberg was at the forefront of postmodernism, manipulating the image bank of culture. Tomkins's informal journalistic essay profiles the artist at work making the silkscreens.
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