The 'Wham!' of Roy Lichtenstein's Prints

You can love him or not, but you can't ignore him. Roy Lichtenstein's prints are signature works during the Pop Art movement in the 1960s. His simplistic use of only 20 colors during his career is interesting by itself, but the complexity of the images and the way he maneuvered himself seamlessly out of the Pop art period to explore other icons of the 20th c. was and is a fascinating education in how an artist teaches himself to become a better artist.

Roy Fox Lichtenstein 1923 –1997 was a part of the American Pop Art movement. During the 1960s, he became a leading figure in the new American-dominated movement, along with fellow artists Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and James Rosenquist. Using comic strips as his main inspiration, Lichtenstein created tongue-in-cheek, hard-edged compositions in clean, crisp primary colors. His work was also heavily influenced by popular advertising. He described pop art as "not 'American' painting but actually industrial painting". During his career, Lichtenstein made over 300 prints, mostly in screen printing.

Lichtenstein was born in New York City, into an upper-middle-class Jewish family, where his father was a real estate broker, and his mother, a homemaker. He attended public school for a time, then enrolled at New York's Franklin School for Boys. Lichtenstein first became interested in art and design as a hobby, and then through school. In 1939, Lichtenstein enrolled in summer classes at the Art Students League of New York, where he worked under Reginald Marsh. Being an avid fan of jazz music, he frequently drew portraits of Harlem’s Apollo Theater jazz musicians while playing their instruments.

Lichtenstein went to study art at the Ohio State University. His studies were interrupted for three years (1943-1946) while he served as an orderly, draftsman, and artist in the Army during and after World War II. He returned home to visit his dying father and was discharged from the army with eligibility for the G.I. Bill. He returned to OSU and studied under Hoyt L. Sherman, who is widely regarded to have had a significant impact on his work (Lichtenstein would later name a studio the Hoyt L. Sherman Studio Art Center after his mentor). Lichtenstein continued his graduate studies at OSU, was hired as an art instructor, and received his Master of Fine Arts degree in 1949.

In 1957, he moved to upstate New York and began teaching at the State University of New York at Oswego. In 1960, he started teaching at Rutgers University alongside Allan Kaprow. In 1961-1965, Lichtenstein began his first pop images using cartoons and commercial printing techniques. Leo Castelli started displaying his work at his gallery in New York in 1961 and he had his first one-man show in 1962; the entire collection was bought by influential collectors before the show even opened. In September 1963 he took a leave of absence from teaching to focus time on his artwork.

"I think my work is different from comic strips -- but I wouldn't call it transformation; I don't think that whatever is meant by it is important to art".
Lichtenstein reproduced masterpieces by Cézanne, Mondrian and Picasso before embarking on his Brushstroke series in 1965. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art commissioned him to make a film with the help of Universal Film Studios. It was called Three Landscapes, about marine landscapes, directly related to a series of collages with landscape themes he created between 1964 - 1966.
Also in 1970, Lichtenstein purchased a former carriage house in Southampton, Long Island, built a studio on the property, and spent the rest of the 1970s in relative seclusion. Over the next ten years his style began to loosen and he expanded on what he had done before.

During a trip to Los Angeles in 1978, Lichtenstein was fascinated by lawyer Robert Rifkind's collection of German Expressionist prints and illustrated books. Small colored-pencil drawings were used as templates for woodcuts, a medium favored by Emil Nolde and Max Pechstein, as well as Dix and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. A major series of Surrealist-Pop artwork from 1979–81 is based on Native American themes. Having been inspired by Edgar Degas’ monochromatic prints from a show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he created the motifs of his Landscapes in the Chinese Style series are formed with simulated Benday dots and block contours, rendered in hard, vivid color, with all traces of the hand removed.

Lichtenstein married twice, once to Isabel Wilson, with whom he had two sons, and again to Dorothy Herzka. From 1970 until his death, Lichtenstein split his time between Manhattan and Southampton. He also had a home on Captiva Island. He was committed to his art until the end of his life, often spending at least 10 hours a day in his studio. In 1997, he died of pneumonia in New York.

Commissions
1964 New York State Pavilion, World's Fair, New York City.
1969 bedroom suite painting for Gunter Sachs, Palace Hotel, St. Moritz.
late 1970s - 1980s, major commissions for works in public places: the sculptures in Miami Beach; at Port Columbus International Airport; the Equitable Center, New York; and Barcelona.
1994 Times Square Mural , Times Square subway station.
1977 paint a Group 5 Racing Version of the BMW 320i for the BMW Art Car Project.
1977 Skowhegan Medal for Painting, Skowhegan School, Skowhegan, Maine.
1979 American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York.
1989 American Academy in Rome, Rome, Italy. Artist in residence.
1991 Creative Arts Award in Painting, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts.
1993 Amici de Barcelona, from Mayor Pasqual Maragall, L’Alcalde de Barcelona.
1995 Kyoto Prize, Inamori Foundation, Kyoto, Japan.
1995 National Medal of the Arts, Washington D.C.
The DreamWorks Records logo – last design project

Awards
1995 National Medal of Arts

Education
Parsons School of Design, The Ohio State University, Art Students League, Franklin School for Boys (now Dwight School)
Honorary Doctorate degrees:
George Washington University (1996),Bard College, Royal College of Art (1993), Ohio State University (1987), Southampton College (1980), and the California Institute of the Arts (1977).

Exhibitions
1967 first museum retrospective exhibition, Pasadena Art Museum, CA
1967 first solo exhibition in Europe at museums in Amsterdam, London, Bern and Hannover
1968 participated in documenta IV
1977 participated in documenta VI
1994 second retrospective, the Guggenheim Museum, NY
1987 first living artist to have a solo drawing exhibition, Museum of Modern Art from
2010 "Roy Lichtenstein: Meditations on Art" Museo Triennale, Milan
2010 The Morgan Library & Museum
2012 major retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago, National Gallery of Art in Washington, Tate Modern
2013 major retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in Paris

Collections
1996 the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. – largest single repository
The Art Institute of Chicago
Dorothy Lichtenstein, and of the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation
Museum Ludwig, Cologne
National Gallery of Australia's Kenneth Tyler Collection

The Most Expensive Prints in the World...Really?

Well , my fellow inksters, some scouting around for examples of the top selling original prints at auction generated some varying reports, but I think I have grasped recent information to impart. You will pardon me for not knowing the very latest information, because I don't usually hang at the local art auction house. Being an artist myself, I'm likely to spend my cash on supplies than another work of art, and besides, it seems these auction things take place quite a lot so the information is always changing. :)

My quest to find the most expensive print in the world, lead me first to Pablo Picasso’s “Le Repas Frugal”, (pictured above) which was a bit of a surprise. I mean, really, this one is nice and all, but I guess I supposed that something by Rembrandt or Durer would claim the top prize. Still, there is something in this piece by Picasso that grabs the viewer. The primordial couple sitting very intimately at a table, looking out at the world, as if they hadn’t a care. The fact this piece comes early in Picasso’s oeuvre, lends some intrigue for the period the work is associated with – namely the carnival and Rose period. The couple’s faces are drawn and their gaze seems detached from the world around them. Their bodies are elongated as one would expect to see if El Greco was alive and working in the 20thc., but they aren’t representing celestial beings, just the average Parisian starving artist.

Then, after more investigation, I discovered there are subcategories to the original print auction records, and low and behold, some other surprising names and pieces popped up. I will give a listing and a sampling of them at the end of this article. More predictably, Rembrandt’s Three Crosses,” a 1653 etching, One impression,( about 80 are known to exist), sold privately a few years ago for $1.5 million. (It's estimable value in 1967 was a mere $20k. Yikes!) Albrecht Durer figures into the same subcategory with his famous "Adam and Eve" print.

Still, moving closer to our own time period, some of the most recent art auction sales for original prints on paper are garnishing staggering sums at auction. Pablo Picasso's “La Femme Qui Pleure I” (pictured here)now claims to the top price paid for a work of art on paper in the print category. A nice little piece, considering the subject is of a wailing woman:)

One Norwegian artist's print has recently risen to the upper levels of the charts and stolen our collective hearts. It's a quiet little color print by the tortured soul Edvard Munch. His "Young Woman on the Beach", done in 1891-92, just sold for a whopping $3.2 million.

Picasso's rival, Henri Matisse, rates the number Two spot for the Impressionist/Modern category with his “Océanie, La Mer”(below). It grandly reflects his latter Joy collage work, without the usual bold colors.

Two artists from the Contemporary category who have done well, one expectantly so, is Andy Warhol. His iconic Marilyn Monroe portrait is on the top-selling list, but it's his Chairman 'Mao" 10 portraits series that has garnished over $2 million in recent sales. They seemed a sort of quirky subject, given Mao wasn't the Iconic American figure like Marilyn was, but in the 1970s, when US President Nixon went to visit the famed leader of the eastern world, it was big news and a significant step toward what became global enterprise.

For a living artist, Jasper Johns has realized a hefty price for one of his prints, "Untitled" from 1983, where this painterly impression brought in $1.5 million in 2012.It's not exactly a favorite of mine, but it easily speaks to John's paintings.

All this fuss about some dried ink on paper, but admit it, they Are treasures in the art world, and they reflect a growing art-savvy collector base. We printmakers can take encouragement from this news, as we all know we’re not giving up the 'ink in our veins idea' that original prints are worth as much as any old bit of oil paint on canvas, or a collage, or even a .... photograph.

Truly, the real thing here to pay attention to is not how Much $ these lovely pieces of paper are Worth. The real importance to any of them is the artist who decided to make an image friom his/her imaginaiton or observations. The real importance is the result we get from seeing these images and the messages they convey to our collective souls. No one auction record could ever mean anything compared to that.

Look over these stats, and chew on those numbers. Just imagine how much paper, plates and ink we could buy with that, eh?

OLD MASTERS
1. Rembrandt van Rijn, “Christ crucified between the two thieves: The Three Crosses” (circa 1660) $990,000 at Doyle New York, May 23, 1990.
2. Rembrandt van Rijn, “Christ Presented to the People: Oblong Plate” (1655)
$956,100 at Christie’s London, December 10, 1991.
3. Rembrandt van Rijn, “Christ Crucified Between the Two Thieves: The Three Crosses” (1653–61) $924,200 at Christie’s London December 5, 2006.
4. Albrecht Durer, “Adam and Eve” (1504) $655,900 at Christie’s London, July 7, 2011.
5. Albrecht Durer, “Map of the Northern Sky and Map of the Southern Sky” (circa 1515)
$577,800

IMPRESSIONIST/MODERN
1. Pablo Picasso, “La Femme Qui Pleure I” (1937) $5,122,500 at Christie’s New York, November 1, 2011.
2. Henri Matisse, “Océanie, La Mer” (1946–47) $4,774,500 at Christie’s London, June 21, 2011.
3. Pablo Picasso, “Le Repas Frugal” (1904) $3,052,400 at Christie’s London, June 20, 2012.
4. Edvard Munch, “Vampire II” (1895–1902)$2,182,800 at Grev Wedels Plass Auksjoner, Oslo, November 27, 2007.
5. Pablo Picasso, “La Minotauromachie” (1935) $1,980,400

CONTEMPORARY
1. Andy Warhol, “Mao” (set of 10 from 1972) $2,544,800 at Sotheby’s London, May 22, 2012.
2. Andy Warhol, “Mao” (set of 10 from 1972) $1,684,900 at Christie’s London, October 16, 2007.
3. Andy Warhol, “Marilyn Monroe” (set of 10 from 1967) $1,551,800 at Christie’s London, June 20, 2007.
4. Jasper Johns, “Untitled” (1983) $1,482,500 at Christie’s, New York, May 9, 2012.
5. Andy Warhol, “Mao” (set of 10 from 1972) $938,500.

The Legacy of America's Pioneer Robert Blackburn and the Printmaking Workshop

Robert (Bob) Blackburn is a name that will live in the hearts of printmakers and artists worldwide for generations to come, and the person behind the name was one of the most giving and generous men of his age. Although he left this earthly realm nearly ten years ago in 2003, his was a life full of experience and adventure and at the age of 82, few can have claimed to have done half as much.

"We console ourselves with the knowledge that he had an extraordinary and productive life" - Jane Stephenson, Executive Director, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts

Born in Summit, New Jersey  in 1920 to Jamaican immigrant parents, Robert (Bob) Hamilton Blackburn was raised in the Harlem neighborhood of New York during its Harlem Renaissance period. In addition to the Harlem movement, Blackburn was influenced by European abstract art and American and Mexican social realism. He was mentored by several Harlem Renaissance artists like Charles "Spinky" Alston, Augusta Savage, and James Lesesne Wells and studied lithography, etching, woodblock, and silk-screening with Riva Helfond at the WPA Harlem Community Art Center. The Center was also a gathering place for black writers and artists such as Langston Hughes, Richard Wright and Jacob Lawrence. A scholarship to the Art Students League in 1941 made it possible for Blackburn to study painting with Vaclav Vytlacil and lithography with Will Barnet, who later became a close friend. 

Blackburn’s early black and white figurative work gave way to colorful biomorphic abstractions and he became known for his artistic abilities as much as for his teaching and technical skills as a Master Printer for numerous artists of the age. This was due in part to the modernist trends in 1940s-1950s New York, including Abstract Expressionism, and the aesthetics of Atelier 17, a  print shop run by the renowned printmaker Stanley William Hayter.

In 1948 Blackburn and Barnet established the Printmaking Workshop, an 8,000-square-foot loft at 55 West 17th Street in Chelsea as an informal cooperative studio for experimenting with innovative lithographic techniques.

From 1957 to 1963, he was the first master printer at the prestigious Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE) lithographic press in Long Island, N.Y. At ULAE, Blackburn collaborated with prominent Abstract Expressionist and Pop artists Larry Rivers, Helen Frankenthaler, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. He printed the first 79 editions for ULAE, setting their technical and aesthetic standard of excellence by which all later American print shops took note.

Blackburn’s own complicated, varicolored abstractions prefigured and complemented projects produced at ULAE, but his early experiments in color lithography during the 1950s literally propelled an American graphic art explosion over the next ten years.

After working at ULAE, Blackburn returned to his Chelsea studio (Printmaking Workshop) in 1963 where he encouraged thousands of artists to work in the printmaking medium. Some of those artists included  Kathy Caraccio, Roy DeCarava, Ernest Crichlow, Mel Edwards, Terry Haass, Antonio Frasconi, Mohammed Khalil, Thomas Laidman, Krishna Reddy, Faith Ringgold, John von Wicht, and Charles White among many others. Under his direction, the Printmaking Workshop became one of the most vital collaborative art studios in the world. It was celebrated in the printmaking community for its open and  innovative atmosphere, and it brought together a wide variety of artists, including longtime friend Romare Bearden.

In his lithograph ‘Faux Pas’, Robert Blackburn refers to Robert Rauschenberg's Accident, the "gaffe" which became a milestone in contemporary printmaking. Through the middle of the image, a white stripe of paper breaks apart the image, alluding to the fragile nature of the limestone. Blackburn continued to explore the broken stone concept with a suite of calligraphic works, that revealed his interest in Sumi ink drawing.

In 1971, the Printmaking Workshop became a non-profit corporation, with a mission to maintain creative and artistic quality, support and encourage innovation, create opportunities for Third-World and minority artists, and foster public appreciation of the fine art print. Blackburn’s Printmaking Workshop was directly responsible for fostering similar workshops internationally, including the Lower East Side Printshop in New York City, the Asilah Workshop in Morocco (working with Camille Billops and Mohammed Khalil), and the first Namibian printshop for black artists in post-apartheid South Africa. Blackburn also worked with other internationally-recognized artists such as Diogenes Ballester, Elizabeth Catlett, Pavel Ouporov and Suzanne Scherer.

Due to financial difficulties, Blackburn approached the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts in 2001 to maintain his workshop. It is now located on West 39th Street in Manhattan. The Foundation has mounted a fundraising campaign to continue to operate the Printmaking Workshop, and house the Printmaking Workshop's archives and Blackburn's papers at the Library of Congress.

Under his guidance, the Printmaking Workshop has helped artists realize their dreams, and explore a new medium. Side by side in the studio, artists, black, white, young, old, American, foreign born, have sought to render their artistic visions in print.

In addition to his work as a master printer and mentor, Blackburn taught at the Cooper Union, Pratt Institute, School of Visual Arts, Columbia University, New York University, Maryland Institute College of Art, and Rutgers University, amongst many other institutions.

Public Collections:

Library of Congress

Brooklyn Museum

Bronx Museum

the United Negro College Fund

Baltimore Museum of Art

Asilah Museum (Morocco)

Tel Aviv Museum

Achievements:

1953-54 - John Hay Whitney Traveling Fellowship

1957 - first Master Printer hired at Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE), a lithographic print shop founded by Tatyana & Maurice Grosman, in West Islip, Long Island.

1988 - Governor's Art Award from the New York State Council on the Arts

1992 - New York Artists Equity Award for "dedicated service to the printmaking community."

1992 - John T. and Catherine D. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship

2000 - Lifetime Achievement Awards from the College Art Association and The National Fine Print Association 

"Bob Blackburn's groundbreaking vision and achievements have influenced American Arts, African American culture, and generations of artists throughout the world. Master printer, mentor, teacher, brother, uncle, friend -- Bob made a major difference in the lives of so many of us. His legacy -- as a printmaker and as the founder and director of the Printmaking Workshop -- will long continue in the arts community; his countless acts of kindness to thousands of artists and many others will remain in the hearts of people everywhere," -Ted Berger, Executive Director of the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Carrie Ann Plank's Battleground Between Minimalism vs. Content

Carrie An Plank has been exhibiting her re-contexted images for a a few years now. She has amassed an impressive resume, has exhibited her work nationally and internationally, and is included in some notable public collections. Plank's creative forays into multiple-layered images extends into several media as well. For our discussion, I have selected some of her prints that deal with shapes,  figures, diagrams, mathematical references, measuring, x-rays and microbial cells. Finding Plank's actual content/context in these deeply-layered images will be the goal of our search.

Plank presents compositions that are balanced, and her colors are pleasing to one's eyes; her lines are sharp and clear. They are initially inviting on several levels, but they also call upon the viewer to ponder their many-imaged layers to see if there is something of stronger substance behind the forms and colors. Once the viewer allows him or herself to delve into the actual objects Plank uses in her images, then the sparks start to fly. You see, the viewer is confronted with a battle, and it is one of changing definitions vs. absolutes.  In her statement at www.carrieannplank.com, she often refers to her  prints as being 'based on re-contextualizing information'.   The battleground being fought over here is whether the deliberate density of Plank's images succeeds in negating the content that is so buried within, and whether she succeeds in reformulating a new context for the images. If so, what can the artist be saying about  these works? Is there anything the viewer can glean from these over-saturated images other than formal relationships, and if formalism is a key factor, then do we make a leap of faith into a kind of neo-minimalism?  So you understand my(our) quandry.... 

The answer may not be reached in this article, but Plank is one of many artists who have grown up in an age of  media overload. Rather than present her work in the ever-popular but nearly always abysmal media defined as performance and installations (except for Nam June Paik)  Plank works in printmaking, book arts and painting. Thank goodness. For me, her subliminal images are more visually successful in painting, but her prints have their own tactile qualities. The truth of  Paik's  early sound and contemporary event installations is certainly an ancestor of Plank's work, but she softens it a bit with images that refer to women and children, mathematical measurements of normalcy, and systematic scientific charts to predict and record one's findings in a world so full of information we can't hope to achieve a Renaissance Man stature. Those days are long gone, and we have much more information to process than they did 500 years ago. The velocity with which information and images propel themselves at us everyday is almost too much for our heavily-challenged  retinas and brain synapses to store into our now pre-ahlzheimers'-disposed brains. We're burning ourselves out, literally and visually.

Plank's work also refers to earlier artists who have explored the saturation age - artists like Robert Rauschenberg, and the deeply-veiled (exasperatingly so) imagery of Jasper Johns. Where Rauschenberg worked through a steady stream of application and intuitive response, Plank's works are more measured in their compositions, her colors are well-selected and balanced,  and one sees evidence of careful consideration for her seemingly random subject selection. The underlying conflicts and skirmishes that Plank creates (maybe unknowingly) present a conundrum for the viewer and the  works' lasting impressions in that we want to find the connections between the seeming randomness of her process. 

What may the most challenging process of making and our understanding of Plank's images is her eternal searching through disparate subject matter. This can be a dizzying process and to get to the point of such inundation that the subject's meaning is no longer remembered but one only 'processes' the subject according to form and line, maybe that is Plank's success(?) I don't know if one could call it that, but surely Plank won't be the only artist who 'achieves' this level of cognitive disconnect. It is a development of the mind to disassociate from content and the history of a form's context. Is this the path to a new form of Neo-minimalism or Neo-Contexturalism? It's clearly not the kind of minimalism we saw in the 1970s, but it is a minimizing of visual reference and a de-emphasis on meaning that we have held as a truth for centuries. Have we (in this case Plank) evolved to  some new level of cognition?

I will confess that I am an artist that appreciates knowing the artist' intent, their content and their visual message. We as artists reflect what is in our society and we can be a mirror, or we can shift through the muck and speak a truth that needs to be said.  There is enough confusion in the world to go around, and we as artists have a visual compass and a moral responsibility to lead the the world through the quagmire of life toward understanding. When we merely reflect (either as a document or record) what happens, we do not lead the uninitiated toward enlightenment. I find no crumbs or clues as to the direction of Plank' s images, no series apparent except through some repeated images. No matter, (for that's my crux to bear.) The man vs. science I previously mentioned is the clearest visible path toward understanding her work, and finding the marriage between those two realms may be the key to our understanding. While this is hardly a new theme,  it is one without end - as long as there is information to gather and process, and there is a curious mind to disseminate the morass. 

Plank may well have achieved a level of  mindful disconnect to re-invent context. It may well be that a generation of artists are on the verge of seeing the world differently than anyone has previously understood. I, for one, hope we do not lose visual sight with our history, any more than we have already struggled to decipher ancient symbols and languages that have helped us to understand our evolution. I will, however, cautiously watch this new re-contexturalizing as a possible step toward a new enlightenment.

Contact: carrieannplank@gmail.com, www.carrieannplank.com

Education: MFA - Pennsylvania State University, BFA - East Carolina University


Teaching: Assistant Director of Fine Arts at the Academy of Art University, formerly taught at Pennsylvania State University, Xavier University, and University of New Orleans
Residencies: Vermont Studio, Monte Azul in Costa Rica
Exhibitions: United States, England, China, Japan, Croatia

Selected Collections:
The Library of Congress
City of Venice, Italy
SGC International Archives, U. of Mississippi, Washington University Special Collections
University of Virginia
East Carolina University
Honolulu Academy of Art

Robert Rauschenberg: The Pop-NeoDada-Conceptualist Printmaker

Milton Ernest Rauschenberg a.k.a. Robert Rauschenberg was born in the southern oil refinery town of Port Arthur, Texas in 1925.  His parents were Fundamentalist Christians and they believed in instilling a hard-work ethic in their children. Rauschenberg said he never liked school because he suffered terribly from dyslexia. After he managed to get through high school Rauschenberg chose to go into the military, enlisting with the Navy. He was stationed in California, and it was during a visit to the Huntington estate in Pasadena that he was first exposed to fine art. He decided to study art after finishing his military service and went to the Kansas City Art Institute. Then he went to France for a brief study at the Académie Julian in Paris. and after returning to the United States in 1948 Rauschenberg went to study at the famed Black Mountain College in North Carolina.

Josef Albers was one of his instructors at BMC, and Rauschenberg often credited Albers as inspiring him to move toward experimentation [the opposite of what Albers taught], which lead to his now infamous combine painting/sculptures. Rauschenberg later studied with Vaclav Vytlacil and Morris Kantor at the Art Students League of New York, from 1949-1952.  He briefly married artist Susan Weil in 1950 and they had a son, Christopher. After his divorce he was known to be involved with fellow artists Cy Twombly, Jasper Johns and Darryl Pottorf, but he mostly kept his private life out of the public’s eye.

In 1966, Rauschenberg, along with Billy Klüver, established a non-profit organization called Experiments in Art and Technology  (E.A.T.) to promote collaborations between artists and engineers. He continued that idea and expanded upon it in 1984, when the Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange (ROCI) was announced at the United Nations. This seven-year project was designed to encourage "world peace and understanding" as he went on a ten-country tour of Chile, China, Cuba, Germany, Japan, Malaysia,  Mexico, the Soviet Union, Tibet, and Venezuela; leaving behind a piece of artwork about the culture he observed.  The ROCI venture, supported by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., was exhibited in 1991.

In 1990, Rauschenberg created the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation (RFF) to promote awareness of the causes he cared about, such as world peace, the environment and humanitarian issues. In 2011, the foundation launched its “Artist as Activist” print project which will invitean artist to come to work at the late artist’s estate on Captiva Island in Florida to create an editioned work on a subject of his/her choice. The foundation also maintains the 19th Street Project Space in New York. Additionally, Rauschenberg set up one-time only grants via Change, Inc., to assist financially-challenged visual artists.

Artistically, Rauschenberg questioned the difference between art and everyday objects, much in the same vein that Marcel Duchamp’s "Fountain" revisited art’s meaning in the eye of the observer. In in Rauschenberg created an international incident in 1953 when he asked Abstract Expressionism’s leader, Willem DeKooning,  to participate in an ‘art experiment’ where he ‘erased’ a multimedia drawing by de Kooning. The result initially sent shock waves throughout the art world for defacing a work of art by a modern master, but  the concept held ground and he was seen as a pioneer of Neo-Dada.

"Combines" mainly refers to Rauschenberg's work begun from 1954 to 1962. Critics first saw these as difficult to interpret due to his densely-laden imagery with no apparent order to their presentation. By 1962, Rauschenberg regularly utilized appropriated images from mainstream newspapers and magazines. He transferred photographs to canvas via the silkscreen process and this touched off a firestorm of interest in printmaking. Rauschenberg liked the multiplicity of creating images, and continued to embrace this flattened over-layered image for the rest of his career, but he challenged the parameters of the medium like everything else he touched. This work propelled him to become seen as one of the pivotal artists of the Pop Art movement and put him on a par with Andy Warhol.

As for his prints, one of the first series he attempted was the 16.5-meter-long silkscreen print called  Currents (1970), and his Surfaces project (which soon followed). They both consisted of large-scale screened prints with newspaper headlines and textures, creating the illusion of looking at a television screen with bad reception. The air wave patterns he created while layering his images cover over and obscure the messages of the clippings. His subtle yet hit-you-over-the-head commentary about the effects of bombarding our ever-acquiring society with information couldn’t have been better timed. It pre-dated the movement of social consciousness and political art which defined work in the 70s. Likewise, Rauschenberg’s obsessive exploration of alternative media and manipulation allowed him a freedom to break with traditional means of making art. His combines and assemblages broke new ground and liberated younger artists to mix media, much in the same manner as Pablo Picasso’s assemblages, or Frank Stella’s combined sculpture/painted/prints of the late 1980s. 

In printmaking, Rauschenberg left no inked method untouched. He printed with anything available; including a rubber car tire and etched sheets of glass and backlit them within a frame. One of his multi-media prints stretches a staggering ¼ mile in length. His prints’ subjects spanned all the current events of the mid-20thc, and they brought a new voice to the collage method introduced by Picasso fifty years prior. One of his last technological innovations was making large-scale digital Iris prints and using biodegradable vegetable dyes in his transfer processes, which advanced the medium toward the bio-friendly movement in the 1990s.

Robert Rauschenberg was a dominant force behind the Pop Art movement of the 1960s, and he continued to challenge himself artistically up until his death. As a printmaker, Rauschenberg was a leader in the social/political circles. His comments were not only pointed, but they were diplomatic and ‘inclusive’. Some saw the work as a mere reflection of ‘current’ events, but looking back on those Currents and Surfaces series now, one can see his vision was a clear and pointed criticism of the mass media frenzy which surrounded people and events of the day. He was unafraid of people’s responses to the work, and said what he wanted to say. You see, he felt he had nothing to lose. He came from no art experience, from a nothing town to become a pinnacle voice of the 20^th c. art world. He felt his background permitted him a fresh look at the world, and left him untainted by his ignorance. The viewer was called to give an opinion of what they saw and responded to his word collages at a time which pre-dated Joseph Kosuth’s conceptualist group and their minimal ‘worded’ images of the 1970s. From 2003 Rauschenberg worked at his home and studio on Captiva Island, in Florida. He died there in 2008, from heart failure, but his legacy continues a support for younger artists, artists in need and intercultural exchange. 

Honors and Awards

1964 the first American artist to win the Grand Prize at the Venice Biennale

1983 Grammy Award for Album Design, Talking Heads

1993 National Medal of Arts

Commissions

1965 Life magazine Inferno: theVietnam War, racial violence, neo-Nazism, political assassinations, and ecological disaster^. 

1998 Vatican commission commemorate controversial Franciscan priest Pio of Pietrelcina,

Exhibitions

1951 one-man show at Betty Parsons Gallery

1954 one-man show at Charles Egan Gallery

1963 first career retrospective, at the Jewish Museum

1976& 1978 retrospective by Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., traveled throughout the United States

1997-1999 retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Houston, Cologne, and Bilbao.

2005-2007 traveling retrospective to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, and Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 

2008 collection of photographs shown at the Guggenheim Museum

2009-2010 Peggy Guggenheim Colleciton, Venice. Tinguely Museum, Basel, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, and Villa e Collezione Panza, Varese.