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Artist or Maker: ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG 1925 – 2008

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Date: 1989

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Medium: Manipulated black and white Polaroid mounted on aluminium.

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Dimensions: 62 × 73 cm (24 3/8 × 28 3/4 in).

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Provenance: Galerie Baudoin Lebon, Paris

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Notes: Robert Rauschenberg was a pioneer of the Pop art world
and one of the greatest American artists of the 20th century.
The critic Jonathan Green, writing in the 1980s, described
Rauschenberg as “Perhaps the most important, and least
acknowledged, photographer of the past decade. [His]
position in the world of painting has so overshadowed his role
as photographic innovator that he is usually overlooked in
discussions of the history of photography. Yet his achievement
as a painter is essentially photographic in method. His painting
recapitulates the sensibility of the major photographers of the
fifties, parallels photography’s preoccupations of the sixties, and
anticipates the ‘mixed media’ and conceptual work of the 1970s”
(American Photography: A Critical History, 1945 to the Present, New
York, 1984, p. 131).
This work demonstrates his ingenuity in incorporating photographs,
taken from the mass media, into his paintings. He developed a
system that was entirely cutting-edge. With the use of a paintbrush
he sparsely applied bleach to the prints. This resulted in altering
the appearance of certain areas, and thus establishing a multilayered
image.
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