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Student Union Collection |
Robert
Rauschenberg
American, born 1925
Visitation
II, 1965
lithograph – printer’s proof
30” x 23 ¼”
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Since his days as an art student
at North Carolina’s Black Mountain College, Robert Rauschenberg
has been an iconoclast in his quest to blur the boundaries between
different artistic media. His teacher Joseph Albers disliked
both Rauschenberg’s casual demeanor and his artwork, but
Rauschenberg considered Albers “the most important teacher
I’ve ever had.” His use of found objects and innovative
materials, so important in his art, can be traced back to Alber’s
sending him out to scavenge for junk and Alber’s use of
cardboard, wire, and metal sheets in projects.
Rauschenberg constantly combines,
recombines, creates, recreates, forms, reforms, to create a mix
of overlapping forms. He
and Jasper Johns provided a bridge from the art of the Abstract
Expressionists to a more pop sensibility, but while Johns focused
on single images like flags or targets, Rauschenberg used multiple
ones, superimposing photos from a variety of sources, including
sports, art, entertainment, and news.
A similar sensibility can be seen in Visitation II, which combines
photographic images with the painterly qualities of lithography.
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