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Lot Essay
Scrape is printed not on paper but on cloth. It is not intended to hang flat, for it has machine-stitched holes at the top so that it can billow like a curtain. What is perceived as the surface of the print consists, in fact, of three lengths of different fabrics (two of them translucent), to which Rauschenberg has transferred directly offset lithographs, silkscreened images, or newspaper and magazine images that he found rather than invented.
In these respects, Scrape violates the traditional canons of printmaking as decisively as the composer John Cage, a close friend of Rauschenberg, breaks with traditional music — using, for example, a piano prepared in advance to produce a new vocabulary of percussive sound. However, whereas Cage limited himself to only two of the components of music — the duration of sounds and silences between them — Rauschenberg, in contrast, used various components of printmaking — color, imagery, and surface — and, in this instance, added another element: the third dimension.
Each length of cloth has its own basic color and its own images, some of which are made ambiguous by being printed backwards, upside-down, or both, or through being partly obscured by the transparent fabric over them. Rauschenberg once defended the diversity of unrelated objects found in his "combine-paintings" by the assertion that they gave his canvases a reality equivalent to life. As in his "combine-paintings," the choice of images cannot be logically justified. Reading from the top to bottom, there are paper bags from which spill pink scallop shells; comic strips (Blondie, Beetle Bailey, and In the Days of King Arthur): a small plane printed in blue and greens; blue gulls; what seems to be an altar frieze printed upside-down in yellow-gray and green; a red, white, and green fried egg; and finally images of gulls, of beach grass, and of fishing.
Rauschenberg has defended the diversity of unrelated objects found in his ‘‘combine-paintings’’ by the assertion that he integrates the random objects of living into his canvases in order to give them a reality equivalent to life.
Elanor A. Sayre, The Modern Art of the Print: Selections from the Collection of Lois and Michael Torf, p. 96
In these respects, Scrape violates the traditional canons of printmaking as decisively as the composer John Cage, a close friend of Rauschenberg, breaks with traditional music — using, for example, a piano prepared in advance to produce a new vocabulary of percussive sound. However, whereas Cage limited himself to only two of the components of music — the duration of sounds and silences between them — Rauschenberg, in contrast, used various components of printmaking — color, imagery, and surface — and, in this instance, added another element: the third dimension.
Each length of cloth has its own basic color and its own images, some of which are made ambiguous by being printed backwards, upside-down, or both, or through being partly obscured by the transparent fabric over them. Rauschenberg once defended the diversity of unrelated objects found in his "combine-paintings" by the assertion that they gave his canvases a reality equivalent to life. As in his "combine-paintings," the choice of images cannot be logically justified. Reading from the top to bottom, there are paper bags from which spill pink scallop shells; comic strips (Blondie, Beetle Bailey, and In the Days of King Arthur): a small plane printed in blue and greens; blue gulls; what seems to be an altar frieze printed upside-down in yellow-gray and green; a red, white, and green fried egg; and finally images of gulls, of beach grass, and of fishing.
Rauschenberg has defended the diversity of unrelated objects found in his ‘‘combine-paintings’’ by the assertion that he integrates the random objects of living into his canvases in order to give them a reality equivalent to life.
Elanor A. Sayre, The Modern Art of the Print: Selections from the Collection of Lois and Michael Torf, p. 96