Word: rauschenberg
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Rauschenberg was living in the middle of a junk-crammed environment?Manhattan?a place that every week threw away more artifacts than were made in a year in 18th century Paris. An afternoon's stroll could furnish him with a complete "palette" of things to make art with: cardboard cartons, striped police barriers, sea tar, a stuffed bird, a broken umbrella, a shaving mirror, grimy postcards. These relics were sorted out in his studio, glued to surfaces, punctuated with slathers of paint. They emerged as large-scale collages, to which Rauschenberg gave the name combines. At first they were relatively...
There was seldom enough money to buy proper materials, so Rauschenberg used improper ones. Blueprint paper in wide sheets cost $1.75 a roll; he and Susan Weil (they were married in 1950, and their son Christopher was born the following year) spread the stuff out on the floor of their apartment, strewed it with pattern-objects like fishnets and doilies, and one lay down naked on it while the other went over the paper with a portable sun lamp, making giant prints. Only one of the works survives: the blue roentgen ghost of a nude, eerily transparent. Later, Rauschenberg...
...second, equally important, was the idea that a painting's surface was an impartial collector of images. Anything could be dropped on the blueprints and leave its mark. Soon afterward, Rauschenberg made grass paintings?bundles of soil and plant matter held together with chicken wire, from which seedlings sprouted. (The last of these modest forerunners of earth art perished of cold and thirst in his loft down by the Fulton Street docks in 1954.) The results of this clownish exercise, as it looked then, would be of capital importance to modern...
...course, the roots of Rauschenberg's combines are fixed in the history of collage and particularly in the work of the German Dadaist Kurt Schwitters. Rauschenberg remembers being "amazed" by the Schwitters collages he saw at the Museum of Modern Art, and he was particularly influenced by the way they were composed on a horizontal-vertical grid. "He wasn't using diagonals. I hate diagonals!" The effect shows in works like Rebus. 1955?a curiously fugitive image despite its size, full of airy space and images of flight: the winds from Botticelli's Birth of Venus, photographs...
...Rauschenberg stretched his bed quilt over an improvised frame, added a pillow, and covered both with streaks and drips of paint. The result, Bed, 1955, was to become one of the objets de scandale of American...