Lot 41 : Forge

Robert Rauschenberg - 1925

Auction Location: United States of America - 2007
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Artist or Maker:

Robert Rauschenberg (b. 1925)

Title:

Forge

Description:

Robert Rauschenberg (b. 1925) Forge signed, titled and dated 'FORGE RAUSCHENBERG 59' (on the reverse) oil, printed paper, fabric, sock, necktie, paper plate and found metal object on canvas 73 x 31 in. (185.4 x 78.7 cm.) Executed in 1959.

Exhibited:

Musée d'art moderne de la ville de Paris,
First Biennale de Paris
, October 1959, no. 25.
Paris, Galerie Daniel Cordier,
Robert Rauschenberg
, April-May 1961. Milan, Galleria dell'Ariete,
Rauschenberg
, October-November 1961.
London, Whitechapel Gallery,
Robert Rauschenberg: Paintings, Drawings and Combines, 1949-1964
, February-March 1964, no. 20 (illustrated).
Turin, Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna,
New-Dada e Pop Art Newyorkesi
, April-May 1969, p. 35, no. 3 (illustrated).
New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum,
Acquisition Priorities: Aspects of Postwar Painting in America
, October 1976-January 1977, no. 48 (illustrated).
New York, Andrew Crispo Gallery,
Twelve Americans: Masters of Collage
, New York, November-December 1977, no. 139.
Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art,
Second Hiroshima Art Prize
, November 1993-January 1994 (illustrated).

Notes:

PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE EUROPEAN COLLECTION

"A pair of socks is no less suitable to make a painting with than wood, nails, turpentine, oil and fabric" (Robert Rauschenberg cited in C. Tomkins, Off the Wall: Robert Rauschenberg and the Art World of Our Time, New York, 1981, p.182).

Forge is a major Combine made by Robert Rauschenberg in 1959. Widely recognised as the artist's most important works, the Combines- "a combination" of painting and sculpture, artifice and reality-- culminated in 1959 in works such as Canyon with its appendage of a taxidermied bald eagle and Monogram-- a miraculous fusion of a stuffed goat and a tire. These works, as Roy Lichtenstein was later to point out, marked "the end of the Abstract Expressionist era" and "the beginning of something that developed in the fifties and sixties-- the return of the subject" (Roy Lichtenstein cited in M. Kotz Rauschenberg/Art and Life, New York, 1990, p. 91).

Rauschenberg's Combines present a kind of curiosity shop of 1950s America forged together in a seemingly casual way that allowed each object its own autonomy while seeming to deny aesthetic authorship. In doing so, these provocative, and at the time very shocking works, resurrected the mundane and the ordinary elements of daily life to a new and seemingly heightened status of worthiness that demanded the viewer's attention. "Painting relates to both art and life," Rauschenberg announced at the 16 Americans exhibition held at the end of 1959, "neither can be made. I try to act in the gap between the two" (Robert Rauschenberg, exh. cat. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1998, p. 558). The Combines are the physical manifestation of this aim, "combinations" of things that assert and bring the primacy of reality and the richness and chaos of modern life to the surface of a canvas. In this they can also be seen as a response to his friend John Cage's assertion that art should be an "affirmation of life-- not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a wake-up to the very life we are living" (John Cage cited in M. Kotz, Ibid, p. 89).

Throughout the 1950s Rauschenberg worked in close collaboration with John Cage, Merce Cunningham and most particularly Jasper Johns who shared a studio in the same building as Rauschenberg in Pearl Street, downtown Manhattan. These four innovators shared an especial closeness at this time because, although they were a part of the Abstract Expressionist circle whose work was the dominant force of the era, their own art was moving in a completely different direction. 'There was a whole language (of Abstract Expressionism) that I could never make function for myself," Rauschenberg explained, "words like 'tortured', 'struggle' and 'pain.' I could never see those qualities in paint. It was a time when we were all discussing 'a sad cup of coffee'. How can a cup of coffee be sad? I wondered. Or how can red be passion? Red is red. Jasper and I used to start each day by having to move out from Abstract Expressionism" (Robert Rauschenberg cited in Ibid, p. 90).

Rauschenberg's aim was not to make "Art" in the same way, but to operate in the same, natural uninhibited and creative manner that he had done as a child when he had built a divide between the room he shared with his sister out of crates filled with jars, boxes and other found objects. Recognising the self-absorption and soul-searching of Abstract Expressionism was not only against his nature, but also, in fact, unnecessary, Rauschenberg began to work with the material reality he found around him. Applying something of Duchamp's indifference or John Cage's Zen-influenced ideas about composition, he encouraged the flotsam that he found in and around his studio to assert itself in his work in such a seemingly arbitrary and unstructured way that each element established its own clear identity, independence and surprising facility.

The importance of Rauschenberg's objects, their significance and any possible symbolism was also deliberately underplayed so that no one element seemed more chosen or important than another. In the earlier Combines, Rauschenberg had often infused his work with a sense of biography, incorporating personal items and effects into his work, along with a plenitude of photographic material. By 1959, and wary of what he once described as the "souvenir quality" of some of these earlier works, he was consciously seeking for a more objective and documentary-like selection of objects and materials. As Calvin Tomkins has pointed out, in later Combines such as Forge, "Rauschenberg was starting to think of himself as a reporter, someone who bore visual witness to the constantly shifting, gritty, tension-filled life he saw around him in downtown Manhattan" (C. Tomkins, Off the Wall: Robert Rauschenberg and the Art World of Our Time, New York, 1981, p. 115). By this time he had started to think of his "red" paintings and earlier assemblages as reeking of "nostalgia," a quality that he described as one that "tends to eliminate some of the directness" that he wanted from his work. "Immediacy," he explained, "is the only thing you can trust" (cited in Robert Rauschenberg, exh. cat., Solomon. R. Guggenheim Museum New York, 1998, p. 558).

In the great works of 1959 the power of the Combines comes from the surprise with which increasingly fanciful objects are celebrated and incorporated into these also very painterly works. Forge integrates such disparate elements as cardboard, fabric, printed paper, a sock, a necktie and what appears to be the other half of the metal drum that he used for Canyon, into an extraordinary monolithic panel of rich painterly form. At the centre of the work, or just off center, is a painted paper plate over which a lump of white paint squeezed from the tube has been placed. This is an apparently nonchalant, almost comic act that draws attention to the extremely painterly nature of the work as well as emphasizing the artist's provocative matter-of-fact attitude towards the mystical material that was held to be almost sacred by the abstract Expressionists. "Paint is paint," Rauschenberg here seems to assert here in the same way that he said of Monogram "a stuffed goat is special in the way that a stuffed goat is special. I wanted to see if I could integrate an object as exotic as that" (Robert Rauschenberg cited in M. Kotz Ibid, p. 90).

In these later Combines it was a common practice of Rauschenberg's to present the principles of the painter's art-- its artifice, material (paint), form and color-- in the same arbitrary, non-subjective and non-hierarchical way in which he "combined" the real objects he drew from life. Paralleling some of the developments of Johns' Flags and Targets this practice was also an adaptation of the principles of his teacher, Josef Albers and his color theory of "combinations" that plainly threw into contrast different materials and pure colors. Where Albers, considered every color equally valid and the artist's choice of color of paramount importance, Rauschenberg, just as logically, saw this oppositely, preferring, in his early monochrome "white," "black" and "red" paintings for example, to celebrate this equality of value by keeping color autonomous and refusing to make a choice. "Albers' rule was to make order," he said, "but I consider myself successful when I do something that resembles the lack of order that I sense" (C. Tomkins, Ibid,New York, 1981, p. 115).