Robert Rauschenberg

Leo Castelli Gallery, New York (LC #170)
Mr. and Mrs. Gilbert Hahn, Washington, D. C. (acquired from the above in May 1964)
Thence by descent to the present owner

Washington, D. C., The Corcoran Gallery of Art, The 28th Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting, January - March 1963, cat. no. 110, n.p.

Andrew Forge, Rauschenberg, New York, 1969, p. 227 (text)
Andrew Forge, Rauschenberg, New York, 1978, p. 81 (text)
Calvin Tomkins, Off the Wall: Robert Rauschenberg and the Art World of Our Time, New York, 1980, p. 305 (text)
Exh. Cat., New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Robert Rauschenberg: The Silkscreen Paintings, 1962-1964, 1990, cat. no. 52, fig. 70, p. 158, illustrated and p. 147 (text)

This work is in good condition. In the bottom half of the painting, the white oil pigment applied by brush to the left and below the blue skyline image exhibits an overall pattern of networked craquelure which is slightly cupped in the heaviest impasto. There is also a linear horizontal crack located 2 ½-2 ¾ from the bottom and 8 ¼ - 10 inches from the right. There are flyspecks scattered in the bottom half as well as scattered whitish drip and pinpoint accretions that fluoresce yellow and white. Under ultraviolet light, there are no apparent restorations. The canvas is framed in a wood strip frame with metal strip facing.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
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Rauschenberg’s renowned Silkscreen Paintings possess an affinity with the preceding Abstract Expressionist art of the 1950s beyond the standard critical references to the drippy painterliness that emerged in this momentous series. More significantly, the Silkscreen Paintings and the Combine Paintings before them were aesthetic statements by Rauschenberg of the critical role of the viewer in the art of the last half of the Twentieth Century, a position also espoused by artists of the sublime such as Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still. Whether on canvas, paper or sculptural relief, art was now an open and free field for direct engagement between the artist and the audience, and to this arena, Rauschenberg brought the sights and objects from life directly into his art. In works such as Star Grass the artist’s innovative use of collaged imaging, begun in the Solvent Transfer drawings of the late 1950s, allowed him to circumvent the additive collaging techniques of cut-out paper and three-dimensional objects of the early part of the Twentieth Century, and in its place, works like Star Grass achieved the purity of two-dimensional, multi-juxtaposed imagery more akin to the visual and reproductive technologies of late twentieth century media.

Although Rauschenberg evinced a disregard for traditional illusionism, an inspired deployment of imagery and color in the Silkscreen Paintings allowed him to retain the frisson or spatial tension of recessive images juxtaposed with flatter silhouettes or more graphic photographic sources. In Star Grass, the post-card like image of the New York City skyline animates the center of the painting, vivid against the white background, punctuated only in the lower regions with a small bright red square that almost suggests a trompe l’oeil piece of red tape. The slippage of the skyline depiction blurs the frame and clarity of the purloined image, and threatens to breakdown a photograph into an abstraction, enhancing the sense of disorder amongst order and the handmade within the mechanical in Star Grass.

Above the urban image, with its deep perspective, bright lights, and swooping elevated highway, the upper register bears a patterned image redolent of striped fabrics that Rauschenberg had applied to some of the Combine Paintings, but here re-emphasizes the flat picture plane.  Once again, Rauschenberg disrupted his own equilibrium by countering this decorative flatness with an abstract image which bears stylistic resemblance to the open canopy of a parachuting astronaut that appears in many of the Silkscreen Paintings. The title of Star Grass alludes to space, transportation, and travel, one of Rauschenberg’s strongest motifs that threads throughout the series, and in her essay for the catalogue of the Whitney Museum of American Art exhibition celebrating these works, Roni Feinstein made an explicit connection between the striped fabric of the astronaut’s parachute and the umbrella fabrics in the multi-paneled Die Hard, one of the most extensive treatments of the theme of space in the series. Feinstein also referenced the abstract circular form that highlights both Star Grass and Die Hard as “a planetary body or celestial nebula” (Roni Feinstein, “The Silkscreen Paintings” in Exh. Cat., New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Robert Rauschenberg: The Silkscreen Paintings, 1962-1964, pp. 78-79) The ovoid form can also be considered a ghostly echo of the astronaut’s capsule as it descends to earth, a connection made more persuasive by the multiplicity of photos of Wally Schirra’s Sigma 7 capsule in Die Hard taken from a 1962 article in Life.

The varying oppositions of imagery, spatial depth and allusions redolent in Star Grass make this painting an exemplary addition to the symphonic cacophony of elements that is a hallmark of this important corpus of Rauschenberg’s oeuvre. As Calvin Tomkins observed : “[Rauschenberg] took images out of context and juxtaposed them with other, similarly displaced images in order to generate complex interlockings of meaning and form. The associative dialogue produced by these non-hierarchical clusters evokes a multiplicity of references. Rauschenberg’s work therefore is multi-directional and open-ended, poetic and evocative; meaning is inherent but impossible to pin down.” (Calvin Tomkins, “The Sistine on Broadway,” in Exh. Cat., New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Robert Rauschenberg: The Silkscreen Paintings, 1962-1964, pp. 28-29) It is in the randomness, multiplicity, and richness of the images and colors deployed throughout these paintings that connects Rauschenberg’s Silkscreen Paintings not only to Duchampian attitudes of the simultaneity of art and life, but to the modernist ideal of direct engagement between instigator and recipient, between Rauschenberg and us.