Robert Rauschenberg, Why You Can Tell #2, 1979

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This artwork titled "Why You Can Tell #2" from the suite "Nine Prints" is an original serigraph with offset lithograph … Read more This artwork titled "Why You Can Tell #2" from the suite "Nine Prints" is an original serigraph with offset lithograph and collage on Wove paper by American artist Robert Rauschenberg, 1925-2008. It is hand signed and numbered 36/100 in pencil by the artist. Published by Multiples, New York and Printed by Styria Studio, New York. With the blind stamp of the printer at lower left corner. The sheet size is 22.75 x 30 inches, framed is 43 x 34.25 inches. This particular artwork is held in several museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York. It is beautifully framed in a wooden gold frame, with fabric matting and color bevel.

About the artist.

Born in Port Arthur, Texas in 1925, Robert Rauschenberg imagined himself first as a minister and later as a pharmacist. It wasn't until 1947, while in the U.S. Marines, that he discovered his aptitude for drawing and his interest in the artistic representation of everyday objects and people. After leaving the Marines, he studied art in Paris on the G.I. Bill, but quickly became disenchanted with the European art scene.

Rauschenberg's enthusiasm for popular culture and his rejection of the angst and seriousness of the Abstract Expressionists led him to search for a new way of painting. He found his signature mode by embracing materials traditionally outside of the artist's reach. He would cover a canvas with house paint, or ink the wheel of a car and run it over paper to create a drawing, while demonstrating rigor and concern for formal painting. By 1958, at the time of his first solo exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery, his work had moved from abstract painting to drawings like "Erased De Kooning" (1953) (which was exactly as it sounds) to what he termed "combines." These combines (meant to express both the finding and forming of combinations in three-dimensional collage) cemented his place in art history.

As Pop Art emerged in the 1960s, Rauschenberg turned away from three-dimensional combines and began to work in two dimensions, using magazine photographs of current events to create silk-screen graphic prints. Rauschenberg transferred prints of familiar images, such as JFK or baseball games, to canvases and overlapped them with painted brushstrokes. They looked like abstractions from a distance, but up close the images related to each other, as if in conversation. These collages were a way of bringing together the inventiveness of his combines with his love for painting. Using this new method he found he could make a commentary on contemporary society using the very images that helped to create that society.

From the mid sixties through the seventies he continued the experimentation in printmaking by printing onto aluminum, moving plexiglass disks, clothes, and other surfaces. He challenged the view of the artist as auteur by assembling engineers to help in the production of pieces technologically designed to incorporate the viewer as an active participant in the work. He also created performance pieces centered around chance. To watch dancers on roller-skates (Pelican, 1963) or to hear the sound of a gong every time a tennis ball was hit (Open Score, 1966), was to witness an art that exchanged lofty ambitions for a sense of excitement and playfulness while still retaining meaning.

Throughout the '80s and '90s Rauschenberg continued his experimentation, concentrating primarily on collage and new ways to transfer photographs. In 1998 The Guggenheim Museum put on its largest exhibition ever with four hundred works by Rauschenberg, showcasing the breadth and beauty of his work, and its influence over the second half of the century.
Rauschenberg died in May 2008, of heart failure, at his home on Captiva Island, FL at the age of 82. The work of Robert Rauschenberg is held in major collections and museums worldwide.

Selected Museums:
Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC
Guggenheim Museum, NYC
Museum of Modern Art, NYC
Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, NYC
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
Houston Museum of Fine Arts, TX
Long Beach Museum of Art, CA
Norton Simon Museum, CA
Museum of Modern Art Los Angeles, CA
Guggenheim Berlin, Germany
Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain
Tate Gallery, London See less