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Estimate: $ 1,500 - $ 2,500
ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG Horse Silt.
Offset lithograph, 1993. 720x505 mm; 28 3/8x20 inches, full margins. Signed, dated and numbered 30/100 in pencil, lower margin. From Night Sights. A very good impression.
Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) adopted so many different aesthetics during his prolific career, that attempting to pigeon-hole his output into one movement is nearly impossible. As an up-and-coming young New York artist in the early 1950s, it appears in retrospect that he was doing everything he could to avoid being drawn into Abstract Expressionism. He famously erased--using 15 erasers--a pencil drawing that had been given to him by De Kooning, displaying it in 1953 as Erased De Kooning Drawing, a completed work of art. The dozens of now famous combines, assemblages of found and painted objects he made during the 1950s went further beyond anything imagined by the Abstract Expressionists.
"Everything Abstract Expressionism was, Rauschenberg and Co. weren't. Ab-Ex was big, lofty, abstract and made by older straight men. This neo-Dada, proto-Pop and Pop art was smaller, cooler, figurative, vernacular and often made by younger gay men. As Rauschenberg professed, 'I could never make the language of Abstract Expressionism work for me--words like 'tortured,' 'struggle' and 'pain,' I could never see those qualities in paint. How can red be 'passion?' Red is red. Jasper [Johns] and I used to start each day by having to move out from Abstract Expressionism" (Saltz, Our Picasso, 2006).
Despie his avoidance of Abstract Expressionism during this fertile early period, Rauschenberg nevertheless adopted the style at times throughout his career, notably in his printed work, whether seen in the gestural burshstrokes of his 1960s ULAE lithographs or the rather abstract assemblage of reproduced illustrations in this later print.
