Overture

Dating from 1980, Robert Rauschenberg’s Overture reflects the uncertainty of that turbulent era—the beginning of the Reagan-Thatcher years, a return to Cold War tensions after a period of détente, the Iran hostage crisis—through its use of powerful and juxtaposed imagery. Across the two large panels of this rare diptych, there are clear images such as a helicopter rescue of animals from Mt. St. Helens (repeated three times), whose volcanic eruption in May 1980 was the most dramatic in US history. All these images are juxtaposed with other fragmentary and more ambiguous imagery about American’s love of Baseball, Football, Boating, their pets and family life (signified by the meal). Although all-encompassing, the artist’s truncated forms and grid-like layout of appropriated images encourages the eye to shift from one to another, trying to decipher any associative links.
 
This work was made using a solvent to transfer commercial media imagery to handmade paper, a technique Rauschenberg initiated in the 1950s and which he revisited after his 1976 retrospective in honor of America’s bicentennial. By appropriating already-existing photographs of mass culture and employing repetition and fragments, Rauschenberg’s collages capture the ever changing, flickering imagery of TV and magazines and explore the idea of the world as an ever-changing, challenging, but fulfilling adventure; which is the way the artist lived his life.
 
Rauschenberg's work is currently the subject of a major retrospective organized by the Tate Modern in London and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His powerful and poignant use of appropriated imagery, a technique which changed the course of modern art, acts as a quintessential example of Rauschenberg’s rich and complex work.