Rauschenberg, Robert

Paris Changing: Revisiting Eugene Atget's Paris

Between 1888 and 1927 Eugène Atget meticulously photographed Paris and its environments, capturing in thousands of photographs the city’s parks, streets, and buildings as well as its diverse inhabitants. Christopher Rauschenberg spent a year in the late 90s revisiting and re-photographing many of Atget’s locations. Paris Changing features seventy-four pairs of images beautifully reproduced in duotone. Each site is indicated on a map of the city, inviting readers to follow in the steps of Atget and Rauschenberg themselves. The book concludes with essays by Clark Worswick and Alison Nordstrom, an epilogue by Rosamond Bernier as well as a portfolio of other images of contemporary Paris by Rauschenberg.

Rauschenberg: Art and Life

Iconoclastic, generous, inventive, impulsive, sensitive, gregarious, prodigious: these are just some of the words to describe Robert Rauschenberg and the art he has been making now for 50 years. From the age of 38, when he received the grand prize at the Venice Biennale in 1964, Rauschenberg has been a pivotal figure in the art of our time. This revised edition of the classic biography of the artist, first published in 1994, adds 36 new pages to cover the significant moments in the last ten years of his career, including his monumental career retrospective at the Guggenheim in 1997.

With 230 illustrations, 112 in full color, Rauschenberg: Art and Life is a richly impressive and highly readable portrait of the artist. Showing the astonishing dexterity and range of Rauschenberg's art even as an emerging artist; the creation of his now famous combines; his eagerness to bridge art and technology; and the establishment of ROCI (Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange), this is a book, as one reviewer put it, "to grab from a burning house." AUTHOR BIO: Mary Lynn Kotz is the author of the best-selling Upstairs at the White House, Marvella, and A Passion for Equality (with Nick Kotz). She is a contributing editor to ARTnews and has written for many major magazines in her 20-year career as a journalist. She lives in Washington, D.C.

Off the Wall: A Portrait of Robert Rauschenberg

Robert Rauschenberg: Combines

Poetic and lush, Robert Rauschenberg's Combines present layers of complex and sometimes conflicting information. This approach, first explored by Rauschenberg in the early 1950s, proved prescient and has become increasingly relevant in the current age of cascading information, when even the most ground-breaking artists are referencing and sampling disparate elements to create new forms. The Combines suggest the fragility of definitions, the fluidity of materials, and the complexity of forms that are characteristic of Rauschenberg's works. The artist's handling of materials provides a precise physical evolutionary link between the painterly qualities of Abstract Expressionism and iconographical, subject-driven early Pop Art. This book focuses on the works created roughly between 1954 and 1964, the most important decade in the artist's 50-year career, and constitutes the most complete survey of the Combines ever presented, as well as the most rigorous analysis of their political, social, autobiographical, and aesthetic significance. An introductory essay by exhibition curator Paul Schimmel titled "Reading Rauschenberg" offers an iconographic analysis of the earlier Combines, based on in-depth conversations with the artist. Other texts help to contextualize the Combines, such as Thomas Crow's essay that calls them the major artistic statement of their time, and the one body of art that could simultaneously hold its own from De Kooning to Pop art.

Black Paintings: Robert Rauschenberg, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, Frank Stella

In the late 1940s, several prominent artists of the New York School--among them Robert Rauschenberg, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko and Frank Stella--were intently studying the color black. That work, interrelated but not collaborative, resulted in an astonishing number of almost monochromatic black paintings, which today are considered treasures of many major collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art's. For the first time, Black Paintings gathers all of the best of the title artist's black works together: textured black, striped black, blue-black, brown-black, black-black. In thorough illustration and thoughtful analysis, it sheds light on the differences between these postwar works as well as their commonalities. For Frank Stella and Robert Rauschenberg, black was a way to disappear into something new, a way to a new artistic vocabulary. For Mark Rothko, it stood for emptiness and nothingness; it asked the spectator to reflect back on it. For Ad Reinhardt, it offered denial and invisibility. Each artist's black portfolio reflects a breakthrough or transition in his own work, and, combined, they represent a larger moment of transition. The Black Paintings marked both a beginning and an end: the end of painting as illusion, as a window onto the world, and the beginning of painting as the mode for the creation of self-sufficient perceptual objects--a change that granted new roles to both artist and viewer.

Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-Avant-Garde (October Books)

Robert Rauschenberg is one of the most important visual artists of the second half of the twentieth century. In Random Order, Branden Joseph examines Rauschenberg's work in the context of the American neo-avant-garde. One of the foundations of his study is Rauschenberg's professional relationship with experimental composer John Cage. From the moment of their encounter at Black Mountain College in 1952, Joseph argues, Rauschenberg and Cage initiated a new avant-garde project, one that approached the idea of difference not in terms of negation but as a positive force. Claiming that Rauschenberg's work cannot be understood solely from the standpoint of the Frankfurt School--whose theories have dominated discussions of avant-garde and neo-avant-garde aesthetics--Joseph turns to the theoretical positions of Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida. Rauschenberg's neo-avant-garde was not a simple repetition of earlier avant-garde movements, Joseph shows, but a series of practices that opposed the rise of postwar spectacle, commodification, and mass conformity.

Beginning with the White Paintings, Joseph examines Rauschenberg?s artistic development from 1951 to 1971. He looks at the black paintings, Red Paintings, Elemental Paintings and Elemental Sculptures, Combines and Combine paintings, transfer drawings and silkscreens, performances, and explorations in art and technology. Joseph's study not only offers new interpretations of Rauschenberg's work, but also deepens our understanding of the entire neo-avant-garde project.

Robert Rauschenberg: Works, Writing, Interviews (Essentials Poligrafa)

Throughout his career, the American Pop artist Robert Rauschenberg has consistently challenged the prevailing ideologies and techniques of the art world, and can even be said to have changed the course of art history. In the 1950s, Rauschenberg redefined the very materials that art could be made of, rebelling against the predominant Abstract Expressionism of the time with the impeccable logic that, "I think a painting is more like the real world if it's made out of the real world." His boldness in pushing technical and aesthetic frontiers as well as his influential dissemination of photography, film, and television in his own work altered both painting and art at large. Rauschenberg's seminal works--from his Combines (urban trash on painted surfaces) to his silk screens--are reproduced here in full color; and more recent projects--including ROCI, Rauschenberg's own exhibition organization, which showcases artists from all over the world--are also highlighted by author Sam Hunter of Princeton University. This essential volume includes important interviews with the artist by Alain Sayag and Richard Kostelanetz, as well as a key selection of Rauschenberg's own writings.

Robert Rauschenberg: Cardboards and Related Pieces (Menil Collection)

RAUSCHENBERG

Cézanne/Pissarro, Johns/Rauschenberg: Comparative Studies on Intersubjectivity in Modern Art

This book presents a comparative study of two pairs of collaborative artists who worked closely with one another. The first pair, Cézanne and Pissarro, contributed to the emergence of modern art. The second pair, Johns and Rauschenberg, contributed to the demise of modern art. In each case, the two artists entered into a rich and challenging artistic exchange and reaped enormous benefits from this interaction. Joachim Pissarro's comparative study suggests that these interactive dialogues were of great significance for each artist as well.

This book presents a comparative study of two pairs of collaborative artists who worked closely with one another. The first pair, Cézanne and Pissarro, contributed to the emergence of modern art. The second pair, Johns and Rauschenberg, contributed to the demise of modern art. In each case, the two artists entered into a rich and challenging artistic exchange and reaped enormous benefits from this interaction. Joachim Pissarro's comparative study suggests that these interactive dialogues were of great significance for each artist.