Robert Rauschenberg - Contemporary Art Day Sale London Thursday, February 16, 2012 | Phillips

Create your first list.

Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.

  • Provenance

    Galerie Baudoin Lebon, Paris

  • Catalogue Essay

    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.
    CTA_

132

Untitled from the Bleacher Series

1989
Manipulated black and white Polaroid mounted on aluminium.
62 × 73 cm (24 3/8 × 28 3/4 in).
Signed and dated ‘Rauschenberg 89’ lower left.

Estimate
£25,000 - 35,000 

Contemporary Art Day Sale

17 February 2012
London