Exceptional Works: Robert Rauschenberg

The present collection of five “transfer drawings” was created by Robert Rauschenberg between 1958-1969. The artist produced the present drawings by transferring printed matter, magazine images, and text to paper, soaking them in solvent and hatching the backs with a dry ballpoint pen. These works strategically translate current, circulating imagery on paper in a pioneering process that ran parallel to Rauschenberg’s use of silkscreen—which he began to work with in 1962—as well as his groundbreaking “combines” (1954-1964), which blended painting and sculpture.

Pulling imagery from print media, Rauschenberg’s transfer drawings mine almost every aspect of American life, from politics to football. Unlike his contemporary Andy Warhol, he does not pick just one image to isolate; instead, as Lewis Kachur notes, in these works “there is often no dominant theme, but rather three or four thematic clusters ricocheting off one another.” (Lewis Kachur, Paraphrase: on Robert Rauschenberg’s transfer drawings of the 1960s)

Headline prominently incorporates material from the October 1962 issues of the New York Times and the New York Times Magazine; the fragmented text in the center and a photograph of John F. Kennedy at top right are surrounded by dozens of other images—an airplane, a large question mark, and a miniature reproduction of Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring—together forming a unique visual arrangement that intermingles public imagery with the artist’s personal interests.

Complete Relaxation, 1958 is a very early example of Rauschenberg’s "transfer drawings," a body of work he first developed in 1952. Rauschenberg frequently experimented with veiling in his transfer drawings; the striated pencil marks serve to mask and obscure his chosen images. As composer John Cage—a friend and collaborator of the artist—once remarked, the effect “seems like many television sets working simultaneously all tuned differently.”

Complete Relaxation, is filled with various textural passages, made both in pen and paint, and several figures: at center, two identical pairs of figures flank a suited diver or astronaut; at upper left, a woman exercises; and at lower left, a man in an “H” pinny runs. The repetition of figures and objects, several of them in motion, creates a sense of rhythm and energy that resounds throughout the composition.

Add, 1968, features a haphazard arrangement of numbers, words, and phrases. At the bottom, a portrait of Abraham Lincoln is surrounded by words—”tomorrow,” “This Page,” and “15 hours”—suggesting a sense of urgency. Together, the electrical objects at upper left and the scattered numbers recall high-speed computer processing, amplifying the work’s tension and speaking to the charged social atmosphere of the year 1968, when the work was made.

Political Folly maps out the principal players in the antiwar protests in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, which ended in violence against the demonstrators. Rauschenberg created this drawing for Response to Violence in Our Society, a one-day protest exhibition collectively organized by several Chicago galleries in 1968.

In Untitled, 1969 a lighthouse, part of a wheel, a golfer mid-swing, and other mechanical forms are clustered near the center of the composition. Splotches of yellow, ochre, and blue paint unify these objects into a single swirling shape resembling a billowing cloud of smoke or the exhaust of a spaceship just after liftoff.