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Lot 132

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ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG, Untitled from the Bleacher Se

Lot Passed

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.

PROVENANCE Galerie Baudoin Lebon, Paris
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_

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